Readings:
Topics:
Sausure
Pierce
sign
sign
signifier
(representatment)
signified
(object)
(interpretent)
Documentary History/Theory-- Bill Nichols
Examples: Nanook of the North
(Robert Flaherty, 1922), High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968),
An important project of film theorists has been to understand narrative films as more than mere fictions ("real" in their effects). The challenges in considering non-fiction films have been somewhat distinct. Those who write about documentary have tended to consider the limits of cinema's ability to represent truth or reality. Documentary theorists investigate how the truth claims of a film are related to formal and rhetorical approaches. It is important to note from the outset that the truth claims of all documentary styles can be challenged. Pure objectivity is at best a conceptual model, but nothing that can be performed by filmmakers or experienced viewers.
In Introduction
to Documentary , Bill Nichols
defines the following
six modes of documentary
These roughly
correspond to developmental phases in the genre,
when new generations of documentary makers have challenged the forms
and
conventions that have gone before, and re-invented what documentary
means for
them.
Several ideas
about what a documentary is recur in its various
definitions. Here is brief summary of some key ones. Keep in mind that
not all
of these ideas are applicable to all documentaries.
Most definitions
delineate documentary as a nonfiction work.
Instead of filmmakers conceiving the filmÕs subject in their
imaginations, they
find the basis of their works in real life and real events.
Narrative is an
organizational tool for a variety of cultural
texts, and it is found predominantly in fiction films. While a
documentary may
incorporate narrative elements, it generally uses other methods (such
as
rhetorical argument) for its primary organizational system.
A documentary
strives to be more than escapist entertainment,
though this is not to say that documentaries cannot and do not
entertain.
Instead of providing an outlet from the everyday world, documentary
seeks to
address our world and to educate us about it.
Documentary
subjects come from life, not from the imagination. The
subjects chosen tend to possess some kind of cultural relevance, be it
historical, social, or scientific.
Most documentary
filmmakers shoot events where they actually
occur.
A documentary
film depicts real people, not actors portraying
other people.
------
History
The French used
the term to refer to any non-fiction including
travelogues and instructional videos. The earliest "moving pictures"
were by definition documentary. They were single shots, moments
captured on
film, whether of a train entering a station, a boat docking, or a
factory of
people getting off work. Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the
novelty of
showing an event. These short films were called actuality films. Very
little
storytelling took place before the turn of the century, due mostly to
technological limitations: cameras could hold only very small amounts
of film;
many of the first films are a minute or less in length.
With Robert J.
Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary
film embraced romanticism; Flaherty went on to film a number of heavily
staged
romantic films, usually showing how his subjects would have lived 100
years
earlier and not how they lived right then (for instance, in Nanook of
the North
Flaherty does not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby
shotgun,
but has them use a harpoon instead, putting themselves in considerable
danger).
Some of
Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloo for
interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the
time.
The newsreel
tradition is an important tradition in documentary
film; newsreels were also sometimes staged but were usually
reenactments of
events that had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they
were in
the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footage from
the
early 20th century was staged -- the cameramen would usually arrive on
site
after a major battle and reenact scenes to film them. Dziga Vertov was
involved
with the Russian Kino-Pravda newsreel series ("Kino-Pravda" means
literally, "film-truth," a term that was later translated literally
into the French cinŽma vŽritŽ). Frank Capra's Why We Fight series was a
newsreel series in the United States, commissioned by the government to
convince the U.S. public that it was time to go to war.
The continental,
or realist, tradition focused on man within
man-made environments, and included the so-called "city symphony"
films such as Berlin, Symphony of a City, Rien que les Heures, and Man
with the
Movie Camera. These films tended to feature people as products of their
environment, and leaned towards the impersonal or avant-garde.
The propagandist
tradition consisted of films made with the
explicit purpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the most
notorious propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the
Will. Why
We Fight was explicitly contracted as a propaganda newsreel series in
response
to this, covering different aspects of World War II, and had the
daunting task
of persuading the US public to go to war. The series has been selected
for
preservation in the United States' National Film Registry. In Britain,
Humphrey
Jennings succeeded in blending propaganda with a poetic approach to
documentary.
In the 1930s,
documentarian and film critic John Grierson argued
in his essay First Principles of Documentary that Robert Flaherty's
film Moana
had "documentary value," and put forward a number of principles of
documentary. These principles were that cinema's potential for
observing life
could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and
"original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to
interpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from the
raw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard,
Grierson's
views align with Dziga Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as
"bourgeois
excess," though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition
of
documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained some
acceptance, though it presents philosophical questions about
documentaries
containing stagings and reenactments.
In his essays,
Vertov argued for presenting "life as it
is" (that is, life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught
unawares" (life provoked or surprised by the camera). Cinema verite
borrows from both Italian neorealism's penchant for shooting non-actors
on location,
and the French New Wave's use of largely unscripted action and
improvised
dialogue; the filmmakers took advantage of advances in technology
allowing
smaller, handheld cameras and synchronized sound to film events on
location as
they unfold.
The films Harlan
County, USA (directed by Barbara Kopple), Dont
Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker), Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman
Kroitor) and
Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch) are all considered cinŽma vŽritŽ.
Although
sometimes used interchangeably, there are important differences between
cinŽma
vŽritŽ (Jean Rouch) and the North American "Direct Cinema",
pioneered among others by French Canadian Michel Brault, Pierre
Perrault,
Richard Leacock, Frederick Wiseman and Albert and David Maysles. The
directors
of the movement take different viewpoints on their degree of
involvement,
Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choosing non-involvement, and
Rouch,
Koenig, and Kroitor favoring direct involvement or even provocation
when they
deem it necessary. The fundamentals of the style include following a
person
during a crisis with a moving camera (not a tripod) to capture more
personal
reactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio
(the amount
of film shot to the finished product) is very high, often reaching
80:1. From
there, editors find and sculpt the work into a film. The editors of the
movement, Charlotte Zwerin, Muffie Myers, Susan Froemke, and Ellen
Hovde are
often overlooked, but their input to the film so vital that they were
often
given co-director credits. Famous cinŽma vŽritŽ/direct cinema films
include
Showman, Salesman, The Children Were Watching, Primary, Behind a
Presidential
Crisis, and Grey Gardens.
In the 1960s and
1970s documentary film was often conceived as a
political weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general,
especially
in Latin America, but also in the then turbulent Quebec society. La
Hora de los
hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, from 1968), directed by Octavio
Getino and
Fernando E. Solanas, influenced a whole generation of filmmakers.
The creation of
compilation films is not a recent development in
the field of documentary. It was pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with
The Fall
of the Romanov Dynasty. More recent examples include Point of Order
(1964),directed by Emile de Antonio about the McCarthy hearings and The
Atomic
Cafe which is made entirely out of found footage which various agencies
of the
U.S. government made about the safety of nuclear radiation (e.g.,
telling
troops at one point that it's safe to be irradiated as long as they
keep their
eyes and mouths shut). Meanwhile The Last Cigarette combines the
testimony of
various tobacco company executives before the U.S. Congress with
archival
propaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.
Non-fiction film can
also be used
to produce the more subjective reflective attitude characteristic of
essays.
Important essay film makers include Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Raoul
Peck and
Harun Farocki.
Dogma 95, Lars von Trier says, it would be as a search for genuineness/sincerity (Danish: Ô¾gthedÕ)[3]. The technical restrictions presented in The Vow of Chastity are the means to achieve a kind of authenticity.
Dogme 95: The
Vow of Chastity (abridged):
I swear to the
following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by
Dogme 95:
1. Shooting
must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in.
2. The sound
must never be produced apart from the image or vice-versa.
3. The camera
must be handheld. Any movement or mobility attainable in the hand is
permitted.
4. The film
must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable.
5. Optical
work and filters are forbidden.
6. The film must not contain superficial action.
7. Temporal and
geographical alienation are forbidden.
8. Genre
movies are not acceptable.
9. The film
format must be Academy 35mm.
10. The director
must not be credited.
Furthermore I
swear as a director to refrain from personal taste.
I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a 'work', as
I
regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is
to
force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by
all the
means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic
considerations.
------
The
Thin Blue Line is a 1988 documentary film concerning the murder of a
Texas
police officer who had stopped a car for a routine traffic citation.
Spectatorship
Theory/ Feminist Film and Psychoanalitic Theory
o
drew
on psychoanalytical theory
o
interpellation:
we are hailed by ideologies as their authors and become the subject
that we are
addressed as.
o
Subject
is a relational term
o
Subjects
act
o
Subjects
are ruled
o
considers
mediation of psychic and political subjectivity
o
identity
as a process
o
Identification
with the apparatus of cinema
o
Freud
o
Lacan
¤
the
mirror phase
¤
woman
as other
¤
identity
as split: the position of the surveyer and the surveyed
¤
the
gaze is omnipresent
¤
the
gaze: more than the act of looking, it is the viewing relationship
characteristic of a particular set of social circumstances.
o
Laura
Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
¤
Mulvey
is making an argument for alternative film practice. she notes an
opening that
has resulted from access to technology and is paring this with the
activism of
the period and in particular feminist activism.
¤
She
engages the discourse of psychoanalysis toward a political ends. Note
the
paradox of Phalocentrism being based on the perpetuation of
á
memory
of maternal plentitude and memory of lack
á
castration
fantasy
á
¤
The
spectator in the darkened room (p307)
¤
She
distinguishes three different looks associated with cinema (p314)
á
that
of the camera as it records the profilmic event
á
that
of the audience as it watches the final product
á
thet
of the characters within the narrative as they look at one another (the
conventions of narrative film are structured so as to deny the first
two and
subordinate them to this third one)
¤
She
is arguing against essentially sadistic/fetishistic pleasurable form of
classical cinema.
¤
the
gaze: pleasure in looking
¤
voyeurism/sadistic
looking and fetishistic looking (scopophelia)
¤
being
seen
¤
active
role of men / passive role of women (bearer of meaning rather than
maker of
meaning)
¤
ÒThe
male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration
anxiety:
preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma(
investigating the
woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation,
punishment, or saving of the devalued object (avenue typified by the
concerns
of film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the
substitution of
a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish
so that
it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the
cult of
the female star).Ó (p.311)
¤
¤
o
Tania
Modeleski (critiquing Mulvey)
¤
women
as occupying active role in Hitchcock examples: mobility, freedom and
power
¤
male
in cinema as fixated at infantile level of sexual development
¤
Òmuch
narrative cinema negates the sexual difference that
nevertheless sustains itÉÓ (p 84)
¤
Òwhile
men sleep and dream their dreams of omnipotence over a safely reduced
world,
women are not always what they appear to be, locked into the male
ÒviewsÓ of
them, imprisoned in their masterÕs dollhouse.Ó (p. 85)
o
cinematic
examples:
¤
Alfred
Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958) with
James Stuart and Kim Novak and Rear Window (1954)
¤
Howard
Hawks, Gentlemen Prefer Blonds(1953) with
Marylin Monroe and Jane Russell
¤
Joseph
Mankiewicz, A Letter to Three Wives(1949) and
William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
o
Mary
Ann Doane. The mellowdrama and the womenÕs film as counter
examples.
"Political
Mimesis" by Jain Gaynes
Week 9 Notes: Hybrid Forms: Compositing and Digital Effects
Examples: Trip to the Moon (George Melies, 1902), Terminator II (James Cameron, 1991), Forest Gump ( Robert Zemeckis, 1995), Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1997), The Titanic, Fight Club (David Fincher, 2000), Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1999), TX Transform,
CD-ROM Examples: Beyond (Zoe Beloff'), Mongrel's National Heritage: Reporting the Experience (Graham Harwood et al, London)
Animation
and pre-cinematic toys-- see Zoe Beloff's website http://www.turbulence.org/Works/illusions/
Some terms:
"What
is digital Cinema?" by Lev Manovich
Manovich argues that narrative is not essential to all cinema. Therefore, to look for the effects of the digital in terms of viewer interaction within the story is limiting.
Moving beyond lens-based cinematography, digital cinema facilitates new possibilities for the creation of imagery that does not pass through a camera.
Pre-cinematic toys and persistence of vision: prior to the consolidation of motion picture recording and projection technology in the late 19th century, there were a variety of toys and entertainment machines that demonstrated some of the principles which would allow for the recording and representation of motion. Many of these devices were mechanisms that demonstrated the principle of "persistence of vision." A theory suggesting that the eye retains an image of what is before it for a brief moment. As a result a sequence of still images can simulate motion.
Manovich notes several qualities of these precinematic forms that become repressed in cinema:
Animation vs Indexical Cinema: within the moving image arts of the 20th century there developed an opposition between cinema proper and animation (the realm to which the pre-cinematic was relegated).
Manovich argues that the return of 19th century moving image forms accompanies the introduction of digital technologies.
Principles of digital filmmaking:
Based on these principals Manovich suggests that "Digital cinema is a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements."
Manovich suggest that cinematography can now be understood as a subset of special effects rather than the reverse.
In the digital age, cinema is transformed into something closer to a form of painting. Ironically the introduction of digital processing fosters the reintroduction of hand painting of frames--moving away from the mechanistic aspects of camera-recorded images.
In spite of the radically new possibilities afforded by digital manipulation and control of images, mainstream film and media has tended to obliterate all traces of the computer--using digital processing to arrive at images that appear photographic, and to incorporate them within the realist conventions of narrative.
There are, however, forms that indicate the use of digital image production outside of the narrative form.