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News: Documentary Filmmaker David Sutherland Visits Calvin

David SutherlandFilmmaker David Sutherland, perhaps the leading television documentarian in North America, visited Calvin College March 10-12 as part of the Calvin Film Forum and sponsored by the Mellema Program and the CAS Department. He met with students and faculty during the day and discussed his award-winning public television program The Farmer’s Wife at evening screenings in the Bytwerk Theater at the DeVos Communication Center.

“This is a great school and a wonderful video theater,” he said. "I’m glad to be here.”

Professor Christopher Smit arranged
the visit with Sutherland and hosted the evening sessions. “Sutherland remains one of the brightest and most provocative documentary filmmakers of the last ten years. The fact that he has achieved this on primarily PBS broadcasts is astonishing and commendable,” said Smit. “In addition, his approach to filmmaking is the same as his approach to people—honest impressions from honest reactions. My students need to learn this, and that’s why the Calvin Film Forum and I wanted him to join us.”

After graduating from Tufts University in 1967 and attending the University of Southern California, Sutherland did not immediately begin his career in film. According to an interview with the Boston Globe, Sutherland worked in Denver selling tires over the phone to Montana farmers in the early 70’s. After several years of odd jobs, he settled down with his wife, Nancy, and daughter in Newton where he bought his father’s tire store. At this time he also produced a few films, which built a solid foundation for his future career. In 1984, disaster struck when Sutherland’s tired store burnt down. A financial crisis ensued, but Sutherland pulled out of it and devoted more time to his filming.

About half a dozen films that Sutherland produced have aired nationally on PBS. According to his website, http://www.davidsutherland.com/, Sutherland’s work can be characterized as “cinematic portraiture - a style that requires a great deal of intimacy between filmmaker and subject.” His intention is “is to make you feel that you're living in their skin.”

Sutherland’s three-part documentary tells the story of a Nebraska farm couple struggling to make it financially amidst growing marital conflicts. It became one of the most successful television documentaries of all time. Sutherland earned the right to be the only producer for the Frontline public show with full creative control over his projects. Moreover, the program became the biggest hit ever on Scandinavian television—much to Sutherland’s own surprise. “That show defied television programmers’ logic,” he said,” cutting across all demographics.”

But as Sutherland explained in an emotional discussion Friday evening after the screening of the final section of The Farmer’s Wife, “You can’t go in there and think you are not going to have an effect on the lives of the people you film.” He told the audience how the lives of the subjects in the film have changed since they became celebrities as a result of the program airing nationally. The couple in The Farmer’s Life was eventually divorced.
Sutherland also described the impact of his filmmaking on himself, his family, his future documentary efforts. After each new documentary airs he hears from hundreds and even thousands of viewers who are going through the kinds of conflicts and challenges described in the latest film. Yet he knows there is little that he can do personally for such people. Consequently, says Sutherland, he usually slips for a time into a kind of post-broadcast depression as he weighs his options for another film.

“I’m a portraiturist,” said Sutherland. “I depict the people in my films.”
Sutherland described the emotional difficulties of spending months at a time with the subjects in his films—usually living with them to get as close as possible to the reality of his subjects. “I’ve lived with 40 families,” he said, seemingly to his own amazement. “It’s a very tough life emotionally.”
He concluded the final evening discussion with a comment made by one of the subjects in The Farmer’s Wife. The subject told news media after the film aired, “Sometimes David chases his dreams so hard that it made me try harder.”

—Kaitlyn Bohlin and Quentin Schultze