Intro to Documentary Yukun Liu

This reading made clear points of documentary. The author talked about the six modes of representation that function something like sub-genres of the documentary film genre itself: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, performative. Something interesting about this reading is that it’s kind of old. Now we have more different documentaries which may contain more than one genre that the author concluded. For example, Top Gear, a British television series about motor vehicles, primarily cars, and is the most widely watched factual television program in the world. It’s hard to conclude what kind of genre it is. What I prefer to say is that it’s a multiple genre documentary. It’s participatory, observational and performative. It’s participatory because it’s a film that people participate in the film a lot but not just find a spot and observe. It’s observational because the filmmaker gathered the necessary raw materials and then fashioned a meditation, perspective, or argument from them. And it’s performative because it raises question about what is knowledge, it shows things like what besides factual information goes into our understanding of the world. The evolution of films never stops. We may have more than six modes of representation now. I like the statement that the author made in the end; we can summarize this general sketch of the six modes of documentary representation in the following table. Documentary, like the avant-garde, begins in response to fiction. The table shows the documentary modes weren’t appear at the same time. Start with Hollywood fiction in 1910s, we have poetic documentary and expository documentary in 1920s, observational documentary and participatory documentary in 1960s, reflexive documentary and performative documentary in 1980s. This reflects the point I made earlier, the evolution of films never stops. And these days we definitely have developed new modes of documentary representation.

This is a video of modern documentary:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL_eIZjiLUk

Catherine Sbeglia--performance piece

Here is my performance piece:

dropless

Karina Banda

https://vimeo.com/123178090

Performance piece-Anna L.

https://vimeo.com/123172362

Danielle Rennalls

https://vimeo.com/123182013

XR Sun Performance Piece

https://vimeo.com/123159920

Projects 2 and 3 - Christian Cieri

Here's the Performance Piece:

https://vimeo.com/123169174

And here's the second project that never uploaded to Vimeo apparently...

https://vimeo.com/123169356

onnolee performance piece

here we go!

Performance Yukun Liu

https://vimeo.com/123359000
psd:god830

Performance Piece - Sean Strelow

Empty

https://vimeo.com/123162352

Jack Scardino - Performance Piece "Words"

https://vimeo.com/123155113

Performance Piece (Lauren): Direction

https://vimeo.com/123111970

Intro to Documentary - Jack Scardino

This article is very comprehensive in explaining the different forms of documentary.  I think documentaries in any mode can be equally manipulative (as well as informative), but some are more conspicuous than others.  For instance, a Michael Moore film, which is produced in the participatory mode, takes a fairly obvious stance on the subject of discussion.  I recently watched Citizenfour (Laura Poitras) which is about Edward Snowden, information and privacy, and NSA spying within the US, and while it often appears objective, it also creates a very focused view of the world for the sake of the audience.  The filmmaker’s point of view was clear, and it was very effective in getting me on her side.  A “voice-of-God” approach can be assertive too, because the unseen narrator (especially if it’s Morgan Freeman) sounds authoritative and absolute.

I’d say some of our performance pieces are mini-documentaries.  Those that showcase a “task” for instance, might call attention to a particular social concern but are essentially a record of real events occurring.  They would probably fall within the realm of the poetic mode, as they are usually very composed or symbolic.  In Professor Middleton’s FMS 132 class –someone help me, I can’t remember it- we were shown a great documentary that satirized commerce and food production.  Essentially every part of the chain was described as through the viewer was from another planet.  By the end it was shown that some of the poorest people get their food from the piles of scraps rejected as food for animals, but the tone of the film was exquisitely ironic and matter-of-fact.

Aha!  Isle of Flowers, here dubbed in English (part 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3AyWcptRx0

Intro to Documentary-Anna L.

I enjoyed reading today’s prompt from, “Introduction to Documentary.” Just after the six different voices of documentary film were introduced, I thought that surely any given film is a combination of multiple voices, and then the author confirmed this idea; “A film identified with a given mode need not be so entirely. A reflexive documentary can contain sizable portions of observational or participatory footage; an expository documentary can include poetic or performative segments.” (100) This reminded me of when I studied the rhetorical triangle and the three different kinds of appeals –ethos, pathos, and logos. Similarly, one can take any work and analyze how the argument may use one primary form of appeal, but it is enriched by drawing from the others as well.

Another aspect of this reading that interested me that I felt one could take the characteristics of documentary film, in my mind a very specific genre, and apply it more broadly to any lens-based media. Photography was perhaps first to establish an ethos of truthfulness-that it is a pure index similar to the question addressed of the observational voice “What if the filmmaker were simply to observe what happens in front of the camera without overt intervention?” (109) My study over the past year has emphasized themes that the representation of truth is always skewed. The mere act of framing inn film/photography means selective exclusion. This is further complicated by questions of subject behavior is changed with the presence of the camera. Recently on vacations I have become interested in taking candid photographs of families interacting on the beach- because wielding a camera means wielding power, the ethical boundary of consent is fuzzy. However, it is also universally understood that posing for a camera not only makes subjects self-conscious, it is inherently staged and thus may feel less genuine. This issue, of how much or how little control and its correlation to representing “truth” is difficult, as stated by the author, “That such debate is by its very nature undecidable continues to fuel a sense of mystery, or disquiet, about observational cinema.” (115)

The documentary that I chose to include as an example is The Story of the Weeping Camel.  It is a slow-paced, but beautiful and mesmerizing docudrama about a nomadic Mongolian family who lives in the Gobi Desert. When a white camel is born and rejected by its mother, the family tries unsuccessfully to reconcile the two and then resorts to enlisting the help of a musician to perform a healing ceremony. With the exception of an introduction (which I’ll address later) I would argue that this documentary is primarily observational. Initially we are introduced to the members of the family by seeing their daily routine from a distance. Throughout the film the only speech is the family’s occasional dialogue, the camera movement places us in the scene without drawing attention to itself, and the overall effect is a convincing portrayal of snippets of the family’s daily life. Events depicted such as the birth of one of the camels, inherently cannot be staged, and in reality would be so crucial to the family's livelihood that their focus would be on the animals, not the camera.

The only portion of this film that I see breaking this mode of observation is a brief introduction. The grandfatherly figure is seen at first from a distance as he gathers firewood, and then he directly addresses the audience (via direct eye contact with the camera) as if they were children listening to his passing on of the legend of the birth of the camel.  In addition, while I don’ t think that this film would fit the characteristics of the poetic mode specifically, there is certainly a simple but moving beauty to the film created by editing choices that makes it a work of art that goes beyond dry, “unbiased” observation.  

Here's a link for anyone who might get a chance to watch part of this film: https://archive.org/details/TheStoryOfTheWeepingCamel