As a Jewish kid in Nazi
Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale
(I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer left), had to lie in
order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to
get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He
wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized
that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what
he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay,
he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always
working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation
of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he
added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before
they’re not.
The full essay is at "Dying."
