Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker's Guide to Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music

CHAPTER 10

Ethical Considerations: A Roundtable Discussion

With Claire Aguilar, Jon Else, Stanley Nelson, Bill Nichols, and Rick Prelinger

Are there more and less ethical ways to use archival material, particularly in documentaries? Are there practices that might reasonably be viewed as deceptive or dishonest? Are audiences (including educators who use films in class) as aware as perhaps they should be about ways in which some uses of archival material may distort or misrepresent the past and even the present?

In October 2007 we convened a panel of experts to discuss these issues with us and with students from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. The panel included:

Claire Aguilar, Vice President of Programming at ...