Week 9 • Visual Evidence

Devil's Playground

Take notes on the visual evidence in the documentary Devil's Playground. What scenes stand out for you?  How does the visual evidence help narrate the stories about the main subjects?

Devil's Playground

Barry Hampe's Making Documentary Films and Videos, 2007

Documentary filmmaking is a practice of finding visual proof—images that show rather than tell. The camera becomes a witness, not just a recorder.

1. What does Hampe mean by "visual evidence"? Find a passage where he defines it or tests it, and an example he uses to show it working or failing.
2. Hampe tells several stories where the footage didn't match what the filmmaker believed or intended. Pick one. What went wrong, and what does it teach us?
3. What are some things Hampe says you can't film? How does he suggest working around them?
4. How does Hampe distinguish B-roll from visual evidence? Find an example of each in the reading. What would it mean to treat the images as the main story and the voice as the supplement?
5. Where does Hampe say editing can distort the truth even when every shot is real? Find an example.
6. According to Hampe, what does an interview prove, and what doesn't it? Where does he show that behavior, or what goes unsaid, can tell us more than the words?

The Devil's Playground

1. What moment from the film stayed with you? Was it something someone said or something you saw?
2. How would you describe the way this film was shot? What does that approach make possible, and what does it limit?
3. Hampe mentions this film himself. Where in the film do you see images working as visual evidence rather than just illustration?
4. Where does what people do tell us something different from, or more than, what they say?
5. Were there scenes that felt staged or performed for the camera? Does that change how much you trust the rest of the film?
6. How does the film shape its story through the order of events and its ending? Does the ending feel earned by the footage or made in the edit?

Applying It to Your Interview Profile

1. Hampe suggests starting with "What will I show?" instead of "Who will I interview?" What will you show about your subject?
2. If your film had no sound at all, what would an audience understand about your subject? What would they miss?
3. Where could you film your subject so the location itself becomes part of the evidence? What could you film them doing?
4. What footage are you planning that might just be B-roll or visual wallpaper? How could you turn it into evidence?
5. During the interview, what behavior, setting, or silence might be as revealing as the answers? How will you make sure your camera catches it?
6. How will you make sure your edit stays honest to who your subject actually is?

Finding Visual Evidence... before shooting

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, lightweight 16mm cameras, portable sync-sound recorders like the Nagra, and faster film stocks that could shoot in available light let a crew of two follow real life as it happened, with no tripods, lights, or large crews. Two traditions emerged:

• Direct Cinema (U.S.): Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers, starting with Primary (1960). The camera is a "fly on the wall," with no narration, interviews, or intervention.
• Cinéma vérité (France): Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer (1961), named after Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda ("film truth"). The filmmaker participates and uses the camera to provoke revelation.

Both trust behavior as evidence. Both also raise the same question: how much does the camera change what it records?

Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976) is a landmark of American documentary filmmaking that immerses viewers in the 1973 Brookside coal miners’ strike in Kentucky. Blending cinéma vérité and interview.

Foundational Documentaries with strong Visual Evidence

• Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922) — Early ethnographic “evidence” complicated by staged scenes.
• Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) — Holocaust Testimony without archival footage as an ethical stance on proof. The film’s “visual evidence” comes from faces, voices, gestures, and landscapes.
• Salesman (Albert & David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin, 1969) — A landmark in Direct Cinema, observing Bible salesmen on the road as they navigate faith, persuasion, and the uneasy boundary between documentation and performance.
• The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) — Reenactments and interviews reframe legal “truth.”
• Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976) — Cinéma vérité as participatory evidence of labor struggle.

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