Documentary ethics 2

The filmmaker's responsibility towards subjects
Mohamed Said Mahfouz

Ethics in documentary are mostly discussed when talking about the relation between the filmmaker and his subjects, which became more amorphous, as Pryluck (2005) believes, with the development of lightweight equipment (Pryluck, 2005, p. 194) that enabled the filmmakers, in Rosenthal's (2005) view, to use and expose people’s lives. This exploitation, Rosenthal elaborates, is 'often done for the best of motives, but it occasionally brings unforeseen and dire consequences into the lives of filmed subjects. So the basic question is; what is the duty of care, or responsibility, owed by filmmakers to those they film?'
Above all, being citizens like any other, documentary subjects have civil rights they are permitted to practice. Apparently, there is no specific code of ethics for documentarists. However, except for common law, they utterly adhere to journalistic code of ethics (Jolliffe & Zinnes ‏ , 2006, p. 58) that is originally derived from the international legislations, since the documentary field has not yet articulated ethical principles specific to documentary makers, and because documentary, like journalism, deals with reality (Bakker, 2005) . Examples of the international legislations that refer to civil rights in this vein include:

• The European Convention on Human Rights (article 8) as well as the Council of Europe’s Resolution on the ethics of journalism (article 23) refer to 'the right to respect for private and family life'.
• The Television Without Frontiers (TVWF) Directive of the European Union provides for the ‘right of reply’ (Article 22): '…any natural or legal person, regardless of nationality, whose legitimate interests, in particular reputation and good name, have been damaged by an assertion of incorrect facts in a television program [which includes documentary] must have a right of reply or equivalent remedies'.

Nonetheless, documentary theorists have added a new set of ethics for documentarists to observe, of which the foremost is being aware that the representation of subjects in a documentary film could have consequences, negative or positive, on their daily life. The documentary maker holds an ethical responsibility to notify his subjects of how they will be represented in the documentary, and how this might influence them when the documentary is broadcast. When the subjects agree to be depicted in such way, after informing them of the potential outcomes of the film, their agreement is then called 'informed consent'. The documentary maker, though, is not permitted to have this consent by intimidation, or coercion, or from someone who is physically or mentally not capable to give consent, and the consent would be flawed if obtained by the omission of any fact that might influence the giving or withholding of this consent. Ethics also dictates that documentary makers represent their subjects as realistically as possible and not use that footage or comments to support other ideas out of context (Ethics and Documentary, 2010) .
In theory, this is quite simple, but in practice it is not always that easy, Kees Bakker claims (Jolliffe & Zinnes ‏ , 2006, p. 56) . Not necessarily, he elucidates, because the subject does not want to, but because it depends very much on the moment and situation during the shooting. Bakker believes that informed consent depends on the honesty of the filmmaker, but we have to be aware that the filmmaker cannot foresee all possible interpretation and effects of his film on the private life of the subjects (Jolliffe & Zinnes ‏ , 2006, p. 56) .
Such moral dilemmas are usually left unresolved due to economic, personal, practical, or temporal considerations (Aibel, 1991, p. 118) . The filmmaker, first of all, is not always in a communicative situation with his subjects. Second, it can be unfeasible at times to inform the subject of the detailed vision and potential effects of the documentary, and to predict every possible interpretation of it. In addition, the filmmaker is not always able to reveal the final cut of his / her film to the subjects; in most cases this ethical practice involves financial considerations. Finally, the film could hold dissimilar meanings when shown in other places of different cultures, as the impact on the audience and the subjects, as well as the interpretation of the film can be quite different.