ethics

1. What (if any) are the ethical dilemmas faced by both filmmakers when shooting these documentaries?

*Do these people know how they are being portrayed? In Grey Gardens the women did not see that they way they lived was different from anyone else.

* In the titicut follies is there anyway for these men to really give their consent? The men shown had many kinds of mental illnesses. There is no way they would know what was going on. In both films the filmmaker probably struggled with weather or not their subjects knew what was fully going on.

2. Should they have used all of the footage or only some of it? How should that be determined?

*When doing a documentary everything is fair game. If the subject is doing something in front of the camera then it can be used.

3. What would you do as a journalist or documentary storyteller?

* In both of these films there was a very interesting yet sometimes disturbing story. As a journalist or documentary story teller, I think that a story should be told, but because documentaries are seen as art they can sometimes go further than a journalist can. As a journalist I would do feature stories, but because of a money and time factor the whole story may be hard to discover. A documentary storyteller has more time to learn about their subject.