Documentary: Summer Camp!

The month is May the year is 2010. After returning from a hectic semester at the University of Minnesota, I arrived back at home to a very slow and almost boring pace back at my home in Wisconsin. With only weeks and days before shipping out to New York for another summer working at Campus Kids, I began to devour anything relating to camps: summer or otherwise. Thusly, I searched every website and scoured every video site and came upon a few things. One thing that stuck with me was a documentary aptly called "Summercamp!"

"Summercamp!" tells the story of a summer at Swift Nature Camp in the Northern part of Wisconsin. It is presented in documentary form complete with appropriate background music and otherwise. Not unlike many other documentaries, it shows us all the aspects of the event (this one being summer camp) but does so through a handful of lenses: a general observational documentary-like lens, the camper's perspective, and an insite from the counselors/ staff. Being a science based camp, I found some of the procedures and activities fascinating and rather quaint in other ways (saying to myself "Oh ho, we could never do that!").

Having a perspective of insider into the industry allowed me to have a critical viewing of the story rather than simply observational. The way some kids were left unsupervised was troublesome and the strict disciplinary actions the counselors engaged was not effective and they seemed to not notice it. Most concerning to me was that at one point near the end of the documentary the staff supposedly allowed one camper to run away from camp by canoe with the camera crew in tow to observe "passively". No self respecting camp would ever let a child go like that. Thusly, I understand this stunt to be engaged exclusively for the camera. A shame really due to the misrepresentation of reality in the documentary.

As for the documentary itself, there were some opinions and bias that the documentary subtlety engaged. For example, they went out of their way to make the kids seem next to normal (they go as far to have their parents say so), but made that state of being feel okay in respect to the environment. However, this articulation of the kids being outside the normal only served to establish the kind of kid the audience would end up watching. The documentary did show us the perspective of the camp counselor and did show us the reality of the wear down that takes place in the staff member. From the setting of the "talking heads", it is clear that the interview of the counselor happened after the wear down had occurred. I would have really appreciated the different attitudes the counselor has throughout the summer.

Link to the documentary:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/93541/summercamp