"What makes most documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They confine themselves to depicting fragmented social functions and their isolated products. In contrast, imagine the full complexity of a moment that is not resolved into a work, a moment whose development contains interrelated facts and values and whose meaning is not yet apparent. This confused totality could be the subject matter of such a documentary." Guy Debord
Guy Debord was concerned with the easiness with which the masses conformed to conventions-political, cultural, economic, etc. His film "On the Passage of a Few Persons through a rather brief moment of time" is one of his most recognizable films. In the documentary, he assumes the God-like voice and describes the objectives of his small group of friends: the breaking of conventional models imposed by the ruling elites in all aspects of society. One of these conventions concerns film and in particular, documentaries. His views are loosely supported with other anonymous voices that come up now and then with a white screen.
Dubord is dissatisfied with the current state of film (in the 1950s and 60s). An advocator of experience over materialism and sponainety over spectacle, Dubord dreamed of a documentary style that would capture the full complexity and details of a single moment or experience. He concludes that it is impossible. What is becomes past in the camera. The camera takes away from the moment. In his view, the best you can do is break the mold just as he does in his films: there is no fixed ending, no conclusions. If anything, he leaves the viewer more troubled and with more questions at the end. Pieces within the documentary that seem out of place are not explained. The whole film is a transmission of thoughts, critiques and wishes.
"Just as there was no profound reason to begin this formless message, so there is none to conclude it. I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don't intend to play the game."
With this fnal statement in "Critique de la Separation" Dubord gives a concrete final comment that is ironically, abstract and iconoclastic.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Documentary Article Respnose
Poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive,
performative.
I can see how there can be subgroups of documentary film, as
the article says, but I’d argue that there is no documentary that is not (at
least slightly) all of these things. Mostly, many documentaries (at least the
ones I have seen) are largely expository and observational. However, I suppose
these categories can be formed to fit documentaries that are dominant in one
trait over the others.
This got me thinking about all the documentaries I’ve seen,
and just which category they might be in. To share, here are a few that are my
favorite documentaries.
Poetic: No one does it better than National Geographic; they
created a documentary called One Day On Earth which is essentially a beautiful
series of stories that capture the lives of people from all over the globe. The
most intense part of this documentary is the aesthetics; basically we get to
see every beautiful place and every touching story on earth (for one day). It
is a beautiful film with no greater purpose than to show us beauty. It cant get
more poetic than that.
As for expository, I have 2 insane ones, that are VERY
graphic, but also my favorite (perhaps because they are so shocking).
The first is a BBC documentary called Bulgaria’s Abandoned
Children. This is very dark and depressing, among other things. The journalist
Kate Blewett Travels to Mogilino, an orphanage in rural Bulgaria that
specializes in mentally/developmentally handicapped children. What she uncovers
when she goes there shocked the world. The children are left in very poor
conditions, and, since they are expected to be institutionalized until they
grow old and die (if they get to grow old, even children whose only disability
is blindness, they are given no child care at all. That is, the nurses and care
takers are shown to be giving them the basic needs for survival, but they are
completely devoid of any nurturing at all. Often, children are left in bed for
days, left on their toilet so diapers don’t need to be changed, and even some
injuries are left untreated. Aside from rampant neglect, some children suffer
abuse at the hands of other children and even caretakers. I would suggest
watching this, but only with warning that it is very dark.
The second expository film is again a literal exposition,
and it is completely horrifying. It is called Earthings, and it depicts the
terrific, systematic injustices that humans commit against animals. Of course
none of think that slaughter houses or tanneries are nice places, but even
expecting the worst I was still completely shocked. I don’t know how else to
describe it. They have inside footage of several slaughter houses (mostly in
the USA), as well as leather tanning practices, skinning of animals, breeding
and neglect of animals, and footage of animal experimentation. All of these
practices are excessively cruel and expose the lies about “humane” treatment
and/or slaughter of animals. Severe content warning, but it is something I
think everyone should see.
…more later…
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Performative Documentary
One of the modes of documentary talked about in the article was the performative mode. This is a style of documentary where the focus is more on the performance and the message that needs to get across than getting actual footage of actual events happening. While this can be a strong way to convey a message, it must be clear that there are some fallacies, or fictions, happening within the documentary. Otherwise, it may be taken by some, if not most, as complete truth since it is a documentary. The article talks about method of this mode, such as recreating events with a style meant to induce emotions in the viewers. An example of this is a documentary that recreated scenes from World War II in the concentration camps, showing the prisoners there. Obviously, we cannot go back in time and take films of the people there, so making this false reality can help show an audience the filmmaker’s account of what happened there. All the people in the documentary, though, will be actors, unless of course some alive survivors tell their stories as well. This is a performance, and using the word “documentary” for it seems a bit of a stretch, even if it has the proper documentary style. Although, what I believe to be most vital about performative documentaries is that viewers are aware that those in the documentary are not real people living these lives that are seen on the screen. Many people are quite gullible and if the word documentary is labeled on a video, they will take it as truth. This can be problematic when these types of documentaries are propaganda, and people are believing every word. This could be the case for any type of documentary, I suppose.
An example of a performative documentary, that is mentioned in the article, is Tongues Untied. This segment shows a very stylized version of the men being filmed. Even though it is a documentary style, it looks (purposefully) staged and pre-written. This is fine, and it works well for this video, but it is still important to make people aware of the performance so that no one is ignorant to the agenda of the film.
A Note on Mockumentaries
When I think about the types of documentaries that catch
my eye, I tend to be more attracted to the reflexive documentary that is
centered around observational or participatory footage. Some of my favorite
documentaries include We Were Here and Whores’ Glory – both on Netflix and both
have a combination of interviews and observatory filming. I always enjoy
documentaries because, if done well, they are an excellent way to deliver a
message and use multiple forms of media from audio, photography, to film. I am
very interested in the way that television has adopted the documentary format
to have many, many successful television shows. The idea of the mockumentary
really kicked off with The Office.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW5kB906mh8
- The Office compilation
What is interesting about The Office is how they go back
and forth acknowledging the cameramen. One of the leading male characters, Jim,
is consistently making faces at the camera, while almost every character has a
1:1 talking to the camera. The difference is that there is no cameraman and the
people behind the scenes do not tend to interact with the people in front of
the camera until the very end of the series. The camera follows the actors and
responds to supposedly unexpected reactions by the characters even though the
entire show is scripted. The major difference between The Office mockumentary
television show and real documentaries is that there is no diegetic sound,
which, at times, can greatly impact the message. At times, it almost seems like
the cameraman is sneaking peeks at the characters making the audience feel like
they are really getting something out of the show besides entertainment.
Following The Office came Parks and Recreation, which
adheres to the same mockumentary style but happens to look more polished and
less “raw” because of its higher quality video. Of course, once The Office grew
up into the age of high definition, it looked more professional, as well.
In high school I discovered a mockumentary Internet
series called Dorm Life that one could argue is the evolved version of a
mockumentary television series and a true form of intermedia. Like The Office
and Parks and Recreation, Dorm Life is also scripted. What is interesting to me
is how people assume that documentaries are not scripted and unedited and that
is what makes it so truthful and raw.
As the reading talked about, in order to get somebody’s
moving message as they walked down the streets of their childhood town, the
documentarians needed to practice with the subject beforehand not to mention
get all of their equipment in order. I am simply fascinated by how society
comes up with stereotypes and superficialities for forms of media and once
these preconceived notions are obliterated, it opens up the possibility of
comparing and contrasting media as well as using them together.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Documentary Reading Response - Ekin Erkan
The Modernism movement, born out of the senselessness and decay following World War I, bore the transpiration of a poetic relation of representational coherence and loose associational values in the documentary style of film. Thus, surrealist art works digging deeply into the subconscious manifested, with less value on concrete imagery's definitional meaning and more emphasis on aesthetic conception. Nichols, in speaking of the poetic mode of documentary, mentions Bunuel's and Dali's surrealist works such as L'age D'or surrounding post-war repression flourishing in the human psyche, containing documentary qualities and impressions. These are early examples of the power of impressionable aesthetics, which have evolved to contain the poetry of documentary, thus distinguishing the medium from other means of informational dissemination.
Contemporary avant-garde photographer Roger Ballen's recent film Roger Ballen's Asylum of the Birds contains the "documentary fiction" notion of conceptualizing a fact in the romance of darkly poetic aesthetics. The eerie imagery, ambient noise, and ink-like shadows of Roger Ballen's work render corporeal information via emotion in a post-modernist fashion that a conventionally information-based work accentuates to a lesser degree. This is entirely relevant to the post-modern wave of art in deconstructional style where information is conveyed emotionally via aesthetics in a neo-romantic style, emphasizing harmony in the self-nature relationship devoid of societal constructions (all of which Walter Truett Anderson elaborately describes in The Future of the Self: Inventing the Post-Modern Person). The streaks of insanity in decrepit shambles besmirched by variegated lunacy corrupt an audience member's mind more so than any informational relay possibly could. In this way, Ballen's piece most beautifully and effectively conveys fragments of permeant and fluid space-time's history in informational packaging.
As Nichols mentions in his passage, John Ivens's film The Spanish Earth uses Ernest Hemingway (as opposed to the initial narrator Orson Welles, whose voice was too refined) to recount the documentary in attempt of visceral engagement. Hemingway's voice portrays a certain natural and soft quality essential in Ivens's vision of poetry in his documentation. Aesthetics are entirely powerful (most powerful of all, arguably) for they are the sole looking-glass of humanity's perception(s). Consider patriotic, pro-war documentary films such as Frank Capra's Why We Fight or Warner Bros.'s infamous Winning Your Wings, which galvanized a generation to enter the Second World War. Thus, by manipulating aesthetics into the realm of poetry the documentary (and all art facets of all art forms) communicates particular information.
Contemporary avant-garde photographer Roger Ballen's recent film Roger Ballen's Asylum of the Birds contains the "documentary fiction" notion of conceptualizing a fact in the romance of darkly poetic aesthetics. The eerie imagery, ambient noise, and ink-like shadows of Roger Ballen's work render corporeal information via emotion in a post-modernist fashion that a conventionally information-based work accentuates to a lesser degree. This is entirely relevant to the post-modern wave of art in deconstructional style where information is conveyed emotionally via aesthetics in a neo-romantic style, emphasizing harmony in the self-nature relationship devoid of societal constructions (all of which Walter Truett Anderson elaborately describes in The Future of the Self: Inventing the Post-Modern Person). The streaks of insanity in decrepit shambles besmirched by variegated lunacy corrupt an audience member's mind more so than any informational relay possibly could. In this way, Ballen's piece most beautifully and effectively conveys fragments of permeant and fluid space-time's history in informational packaging.
As Nichols mentions in his passage, John Ivens's film The Spanish Earth uses Ernest Hemingway (as opposed to the initial narrator Orson Welles, whose voice was too refined) to recount the documentary in attempt of visceral engagement. Hemingway's voice portrays a certain natural and soft quality essential in Ivens's vision of poetry in his documentation. Aesthetics are entirely powerful (most powerful of all, arguably) for they are the sole looking-glass of humanity's perception(s). Consider patriotic, pro-war documentary films such as Frank Capra's Why We Fight or Warner Bros.'s infamous Winning Your Wings, which galvanized a generation to enter the Second World War. Thus, by manipulating aesthetics into the realm of poetry the documentary (and all art facets of all art forms) communicates particular information.
The Johnny Cash Project
Here's the link to the music video I showed in class - check it out!
http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#
http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#
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