“Longinotto has said ‘I don’t think of films as documents or records of things. I try to make them as like the experience of watching a fiction film as possible, though, of course, nothing is ever set up.’ Her work is about finding characters that the audience will identify with — ‘you can make this jump into someone else’s experience’. Unlike Moore and Broomfield, Longinotto is invisible, with very little use of voice-over, formal interviews, captions or incidental music. As the ‘eyes’ of her audience, she doesn’t like to zoom or pan. She says she doesn’t want her films to have conclusions but to raise questions.”
Kim’s style:
Kim Longinotto is known for strictly adhering to an observatory style of filmmaking. This involves keeping herself outside the events of the film as much as possible, and documenting people from an objective stance that seeks to inform an audience on a particular topic, rather than influence their opinion. In the case of Kim Longinotto, she shows areas of life in foreign countries that are usually unknown to Western audiences, but sticks to overarching themes, such as divorce, as seen in Divorce Iranian Style(Kim Longinotto, 1998). Her films follow people, mostly women, belonging to cultures that have left them victim of some sort of discrimination or patriarchal system, as seen in Sisters In Law(Kim Longinotto, 2005), which focuses on a pair of women who have challenged and overcome a system that favours the men, a theme that Kim focuses on quite often in her films.
Kim’s techniques:
Longinotto’s main approach is to make the people in the film feel like it’s their film, and have complete control over her stories. This is a method of getting people to forget that a camera is recording them, which, as an observatory filmmaker, is necessary for documenting what people are actually like off camera. Kim is completely separated from events, just recording them so that she can get a full image of the subject matter. Her films follow people that she considers inspirational,”Rebellious people”, to celebrate them, but keeps an the film at objective stance on the subject matter so that the audience can come to their own opinions. She does, however, like for people to acknowledge her as the filmmaker because it allows for them to speak directly to the audience, and to not feel like speaking to the filmmaker is unnatural or uncomfortable. “for me that makes you feel like the filmmaker is a kind of non-feeling, non-present person who’s just observing in a cold way, there’s no other way to interpret that. And I think that a lot of early observational films people took that very much to heart, and so if people spoke to them they would get embarrassed, they wouldn’t meet people’s eyes and there was all of that kind of weird thing”.She chose to make films in an observatory way because, she claims, it creates a more naturalistic feel in the production process that captures the more real aspects of life, since the documented people and the filmmaker are separate.
So, she wishes for the people she documents to know that they are being filmed, but also keeps the filmmakers and them separate so as to not interfere in the subject matter at all. Her films are not edited in a way that influences the audiences opinion in any way, but does display the cruelties and inequalities of some legal systems or traditions towards women in some countries. She avoids edits, such as hard cuts, as much as possible to keep the audience immersed in the film and environment, which links into how she attempts to create a connection between the audience and characters so that their story’s are more impactful and meaningful. She makes people in foreign places and situations feel human and relatable by documenting many personal aspects of their lives, which she does through following them in observatory mode. She has said “I wouldn’t call it narration in the way its not telling you what to think. It’s giving you layers, so that everybody gives you their own layer, in a way”. She wishes to get a fully fleshed out and authentic depiction of a subject matter, and avoids filmmaker intervention to keep the events real and uninterrupted, but chooses stories that have impacts on the audience, and educate them on a relatively unknown subject.
Kim’s aims:
Kim Longinotto aims to change the mentality of Western cultures that see her films, and would like for their to be a change in mentality in the cultures she documents, clearly to reduce the inequalities and injustices that exist there. She does not seek to change the laws or traditions, but the mindset that causes such cruelty and injustice in some cultures and/or legal systems. She has said “I don’t like films where I’m told what to think” and “I try to make a film that I would like to watch”, which explains her objective and purely documentation approach to documentary filmmaking in observatory mode. Kim also believes that documentaries are not there to instruct us, but rather to teach us. She also says the job of a documentary filmmaker is to bring out our empathy for the characters, even if they are in an unfamiliar situation.
Finley Cairns A-Level Film Studies Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.