Hampe

Hampe brings up an important question to ask yourself when you are conducting an interview. What's the motivation for this scene?  By asking yourself this question, you are able to determine the usefulness of the interview to your documentary.  Hampe argues that a unnecessary interview should not be used and should only be used if it provides visual evidence of your point.  It should show and not tell us the main points of your documentary.  I recently watched a documentary called Waltz with Bashir.  I believe that this documentary is what Hampe would like to see more of.  It is entirely animated with the interviewer's stories providing the context of the animation.

It does utilize a lot of interviews, but we never see a shot of the interviewees.  Instead, their stories are animated and we see the visual evidence of their tales of horror during a Lebanese conflict.  This kind of documentary film making solves the problem that Hampe encountered in his Making Analogs of Reality paper.  Here,  Hampe had trouble with his many interviews that he conducted with veterans.  While these stories were interesting, it was just "talking heads" and was visually boring.  In Waltz with Bashir, these issues are completely resolved.  The stories that are told are beautifully animated and serve to increase the impact of these stories.  Although, it is possible that Hampe would absolutely loath this documentary.  It does not use real-world visual evidence.  Instead, it is all done with animations.  Hampe may see this as lying and cheating.  Hampe has stated that he likes to take tons of footage in order to provide his visual evidence.  He may say this is like taking a shortcut.