Unscripted Five directors discuss the trends and tribulations of documentary filmmaking. With Albert Maysles, Ross McElwee, Rory Kennedy, Frederick Marx, and Frederick Wiseman. America has become a confessional culture, one that gives lip service to the need for privacy while finding ever more public ways to reveal ourselves. Rather than the grand catharsis that was promised if we revealed all, there seems to have been only an escalation of the desire to confess. The twist is that the remove is gone.
Audiences can now watch such stories unfold before their eyes.
Instead of hearing, we can see, and this sense of access has proved much more compelling than the old style of revelations ever was. Since the beginning, HBO has been at the forefront of this new trend toward reality-based programming. The shows' names say it all. Taxicab Confessions uses a hidden camera and a sympathetic cabbie to explore just how much people will reveal in the course of one cab ride. Real Sex is just that, what people really do behind closed doors from swingers to dominatrixes.