Documentary: How the Myth Was Deconstructed

George Stoney’s How The Myth Was Made (1979) points up some of the differences between the old and new documentaries. The film was motivated, Stoney relates, by his observation, while teaching at NYU, “that most of my students -all children of the sixties and cinéma vérité -are so dominated by that genre of filmmaking that they find it hard to open their minds to any other approach.” As a result, “they miss the power and the poetry of the earlier films while they fret about the veracity of details.” Jerry Youdelman (1982)