History Through a Lens

Students in Syracuse University’s new Documentary Film and History master’s program are committed—as scholars and filmmakers—to the potential for video to capture the world’s great stories.

For many people, the phrase documentary film and history evokes the films of Ken Burns, whose epic documentaries on public television—most recently, The War—draw millions of viewers and often reshape popular perceptions of political, social, and cultural history. But for a group of aspiring filmmakers enrolled in the new Documentary Film and History master’s program, a collaboration of the Maxwell School and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, the field of historical documentaries stretches far beyond PBS.

“I’d like to try the Ken Burns approach to documentary history; it’s such a rich vein of filmmaking,” says Ben Bahl, who studied history at Milliken University before joining the new program. “But there are other filmmakers I admire: Michael Moore for his ability to bring issues to the forefront in a compelling, intelligent way; and Errol Morris, for his willingness to use more cinematic techniques.” Bahl is in­spired also by directors of fictional features such as the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch, and he hopes to build a career that allows him to bring “something compelling and thought-provoking to the screen, whatever the genre may be.”

The new master’s program in Documentary Film and History, co-directed by Maxwell historian Scott Strickland and Newhouse documentary filmmaker Richard Breyer, gives budding filmmakers like Bahl the tools and knowledge to bring their ideas to fruition and to the public. The 15-month program covers such areas as historical research methods, oral histories and personal narratives, screenwriting, television production, and communication law, as well as strategies for funding and distribution.

The first students intend to use the opportunity to explore a wide range of topics. Bahl is researching communalism in New York and the Oneida Settlement, while Dawson Grau, who studied history at Furman University, plans to investigate folk music and culture in Ireland and Appalachia. As an undergraduate at Spelman College, Alexa Harris gathered oral histories of traditional healers in Ghana and of elder black women raised in the South, and she sees documentary filmmaking as a powerful way “to capture the stories of people not well represented in the media.” She’s focusing now on the civil rights movement and other cases of social resistance, such as the anti-apartheid movement.

Rachel Ross plans to put her film studies to use right in the classroom. Ross taught social studies in Syracuse city schools before joining the M.A. program. “While I do want to pursue filmmaking for a while, I absolutely want to end up back in the classroom teaching at some point,” she says, “not only using films to teach about history, but also showing kids how they can use the media and technology.”

In the Internet era, of course, the possibilities for distributing audio-visual work are wide open. “If you have streaming feeds of your film on a YouTube-like site or extra scenes on your own website, as well as options for people to download to watch on their televisions, that creates a lot of opportunities to get your work out there,” says Stefanie Noble, who studied electronic media, arts, and communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and historical preservation planning at Cornell. “Just plug in and voilà! You’re showing your film.”

As the digital tools for shooting and editing have become extraordinarily powerful and accessible, too, Noble says she and her classmates feel a responsibility to use them wisely and well. “It’s become so much easier for people to put stuff out there,” she says. “It’s up to us to use the tools and resources we have here in this program to make something better.”