Abstract
Documentary can express a sense of common humanity, based on empathy with characters from different cultural and social contexts. Eliciting empathy with screen characters is therefore one of the foremost challenges that documentary filmmakers face. Although filmmakers often display a well-meaning intent to create empathy, they just as often fail to do so. This chapter highlights the gap between authorial intentions and potential audience impact by analyzing two case studies. The South African documentaries, Miners Shot Down (Rehad Desai 2014) and I, Afrikaner (Annalet Steenkamp 2013) both claim to pursue empathy for social and activist reasons. The chapter makes use of models of high-level empathy to explore how and why these films do not fully reach their potential, and what can be learned from their shortcomings within an academic and a film-practice context.
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Notes
- 1.
This outcome was the “Documentary and Diversity” exchange programme, funded by the North South South Exchange (NSSE). This scheme, devised by the Finnish Foreign Ministry, aims to enhance cultural understanding and build academic networks linking Africa and Europe.
- 2.
This approach to narrative echoes that of Sergei Eisenstein (1969), who chose to use specific categorical “types” to represent entire social classes or interests in his films, which feature class struggles.
- 3.
Cyril Ramaphosa was elected president of the African National Congress (ANC) in December 2017 and president of South Africa in February 2018.
- 4.
The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.
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Nåls, J. (2018). The Difficulty of Eliciting Empathy in Documentary. In: Brylla, C., Kramer, M. (eds) Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90332-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90332-3_8
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