Documentary Film Final

How Documentaries Have Complicated the Model of Indie v. Avant-Garde

But what documentaries have we seen this semester that have complicated this model? Doc-Experimental: Buffalo Juggalos, Tongues Untied, Man with a Movie Camera, Prison in Twelve Landscapes Doc-Indie: American Movie, The Thin Blue Line, Doc-Indie-Experimental: The Human Pyramid, The Body Beautiful • Recent scholarship and filmmaking explores these moments of intersection and celebrates these blurred boundaries • Ex: Scott MacDonald, Avant-Doc (2014) Essays and interviews with filmmakers • Ex: True/False Film Festival (2004--, Columbia, MO) An annual documentary film festival that has garnered a reputation for favoring films that tend to blur the lines between documentary and fiction, hence the name

Identity Politics in Performative Docs

Explicitly concerned with the relationships between the personal and the political •Emotional intensities and social subjectivity of the underrepresented or misrepresented, of women and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians "Social subjectivity" • Not just solipsistic, but connected to social and political engagement • Particularly apt for a time when master narratives are in disrepute; hooks into postmodernism

Genre Hybridity: Avant-Doc v. Indie

For many years, there was the sense that "avant-garde" and "documentary" designated entirely different approaches to the medium, and consequently... "Avant-garde" • short, non-narrative films more akin to painting, poetry, or music; explorations of film's materiality "Indie" Cinema • A feature film produced outside of the studio system, often, but not always, experimenting with form, providing "deeper" characterization, and/or exploring "non-mainstream subject matter"

Structure and Four Kinds

The organization of the film as a whole •Four different kinds of documentary structures: Narrative, Categorical, Rhetorical, Associational

Emphasis on the Body and Performance in Performative Docs

Prefer the local, concrete and evocative in dealing with overarching conceptual categories such as exile, racism, sexism and homophobia

Categorical Structure

Presents subjects of a topical nature • Representation is synchronic - of entities existing simultaneously, rather than diachronic - of entities as they unfold in time • Ex: Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (Les Blank)

What are some of the concepts that we can use to analyze the representation of reality in documentaries?Five Parameters of Documentary

Selection, Order, Emphasis, Voice and Structure

The Expository Mode Part I

• Addresses the viewer directly with titles or voices that advance an argument about the historical world (e.g. Voice-of-God commentary, news anchors) • Closest to the classic expository essay or report, a means of relaying information and persuasively making a case • Takes shape around commentary directed toward the viewer; images serve as illustration or counterpoint • Raises ethical issues of voice: how the text speaks objectivity or persuasively • Nonsynchronous sound prevail; the rhetoric of the commentator's argument serves as the textual dominant, moving the text forward in service of its persuasive needs

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (Brett Story, 2016) - Part II

The Bronx • Care package warehouse, arbitrary rules • Doesn't question the rules - just provides the service • Whole economy that exists outside the prison • Sent a box to brother, 15 percent was confiscated - process was so expensive, labor Los Angeles • Aestheticized shots of the playground • Sex Offender Registry housing problems - displaced b/c of many rules about where they cannot live • Building these parks to deliberately displace them St. Louis County • Footage of judge; discuss many counties, revenue from tickets, which multiplies Ferguson • Moved into ground zero of the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality • Expect she will tackle this head on - focus on incendiary moment • INSTEAD - story of woman and trash can lid • Sent to prison for failing to properly affix her trash can lid • Structural in way the prison system works • People lining up to pay their traffic violations • Giant revenue stream - predominantly African American group • Focuses on infrastructure that exists that impact African American lives on a daily basis • More mundane kind of harassment Detroit 1967 • Pivot 34th and 7th • Bus stop for family members going to meet their loved ones in prison • Conversation between two women - articulate thesis that this is a giant industry, extorting people in a certain kind of way Upstate New York • Bus in prologue headed towards the prison in Attica • Driving, end on the prison • Everything spirals outward from this one place - all roads leads back to the place we haven't been Structuring Absence • Thing that is absent is the thing that is structuring everything • All these segments aren't about failure of system - about how it trickles outward, touches so many aspects of American life • What is disturbing about what the movie is implying? • Web, so many things are able to exist b/c it is set up this way • Network, system of relationships - densely structured web that starts at prison and extends outward all across the country and extanciated in the landscapes

Characteristics of the Essay Film: Direct Address to a Singular Viewer

• Contradiction and digression males us fell as though the filmmaker is having a conversation with us rather than educating us about some topic • Filmmaker or his surrogate will address the spectator directly • Rhetoric is one of individuality, not collectively

Institutional Differences

• Drastic increase in number of homes with televisions from the 1950s to the 60s • Television news displaces the newsreel

Documentary Definition

"Documentary film speaks about situations and evens involving real people (or social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible proposal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a fictional narrative."

What was the state of the industry that made this Indie Explosion possible?

1. Digital Technology 2. Production Costs Low 3. Distribution and Advertising in the Early Internet Era Because of these changes, structure in place to produce and distribute docs without having to go through traditional institutional channels (TV, government grants, etc.)

Characteristics of the Essay Film

1. Emphasis on subjectivity, first person, autobiography 2. Reflection and critical interrogation 3. Digression, repetition, dispersion 4. Direct address to a singular viewer 5. Text, language, voice-over

Characteristics of Poetic Documentaries

1. PDs represent their subjects as aesthetic objects or events, emphasizing the sensual and formal qualities of their subjects as much as the dissemination of factual information • Ex: Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983) Macro and Micro rhythms that rule the universe 2. PDs appeal to "classical norms": aesthetic qualities of symmetry, rhythm, unity, and repetition and variation • Present the world through emphasis on order, clarity restraint, and harmony of form 3.PDs are about the nature of the world as an aesthetic object • Style often posits the world as one with harmony and unity and certain principles of form and structure 4.PDs often sacrifice conventions of continuity editing to explore associations and patterns that involve temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions. Ex: Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992) • Oblique way in which as PD makes its claims Why Poeticism? • Instead of information transfer, argumentation, or reasoned propositions, we get a mode that stresses mood, tone, and affect • This makes PDs particularly adept at opening up the possibility of alternate forms of knowledge

Formal Differences that Accompanied the TV Doc

1. TV had circumscribed lengths that docs had to fit and create good breaks for commercials 2 .TV docs can be ongoing because they can provide updates in later episodes and go in depth on a topic for multiple episodes 3. Narration becomes more intimate. Appeals to ethics • Tied to Griersonian ideas of documentaries as a form of social education and public good

The Short Film in France in the 1950's

1950's: a pre-New Wave flourishing of short filmmaking • Due to a new system of grants in 1955 that gave increase creative e freedom to young directors who were working on documentary shorts, "the liveliest fringe of French cinema" • Heavily influenced by Surrealism (Land Without Bread) • Many future New Wave directors (Marker, Resnais, Varda, Godard, Franju) making short documentaries in which the filmmaker's personal style and approach to reality were very different from the Griersonian doc "In France, documentary flourished within a continuum of short film production, and came to be regarded at its best as a mode of personal reflection on the world, more closely aligned to the authored literary essay than the social or legal document." Chris Marker (1921-2012) - Writer, photographer, film director, multimedia artist, essayist • Made Letter from Siberia • Popular essay film doc at the end of the 50s • Imagery supports language, uses verbal intelligence

Agit-Prop and Political Cinema

1960s: Cinema across the board became much more political (art cinema, documentary, Hollywood) • Movies starting to adopt a more critical stance toward international politics, spurred on by political assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War

The Move to "Originals"

2013-today: an aggressive move into original programming • With competition from HBO and Amazon, Netflix has been offering competitive deals to filmmakers, with representatives attending major festivals hoping to secure exclusive rights to docs and indies • While varied in subject matter, Netflix's "original" documentary acquisitions are very traditional in terms of film style and format • Often about social issues (environment, international conflict) or biographies of famous people that deploy behind the scenes/archival footage • More experimental, boundary-pushing docs are not the focus of its acquisitions or funding

What Is a Documentary?

A style-centric definition? But what features does a documentary require? • Actuality footage, has to be about real people - not that simple • All is this is leading to... Representation and Reality: How do documentary films represent actual events in the world? •Documentary is not a reproduction of reality, but a representation of reality. (The filmmaker intervenes.) •Such films are not documents as much as expressive representations. These documents have a privileged relationship from event, was generated from the event itself. •Docs stand for a particular view of the world. We judge these representations by the nature of the pleasures they offer, the value of the insights they provide, and the quality of the perspective they instill. •Within this framework, there is considerable room for ambiguity. Whose story is it that is being told and by whom? •What are the ethical obligations documentarians face when showing subjects in the real world?

Netflix and the "Second" Documentary Explosion

After this initial 15-year boom, there was another documentary boom, but, ironically, this boom would hearken the death knell (relatively speaking for theatrical documentary... Netflix and the "Second" Documentary Explosion • Early 2000's: the indie market tanked; decline of the mid-budget film. Today, the industry has been stratified: tentpole superhero movies or micro-budget indies, but very little in between. = the shuttering of many independent film distributors, which diminished the numbers of theatrical documentaries that were released

"Towards a Third Cinema"

An influential manifesto by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, active in left-wing cinema group called Cine Liberación The Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas/Getino, 1968) • A four-hour doc that blended direct cinema, staged scenes, and a very dense soundtrack designed to provoke argument and action • Bombards the spectator with a collage of images and sounds, always to agitational ends • "First Cinema": Hollywood, overwhelmed its viewer with spectacle, made each viewer a consumer of bourgeois ideology • "Second Cinema": auteur-centered European art cinema. A step forward, but its time had passed • "Third Cinema": for the collective struggle of the people. A weapon for liberation, making every participant a "film-guerilla," working on behalf of the oppressed • Transform the conditions of viewing through secret distribution circuits among insurgent groups, where reflection and discussion is fostered = DOCUMENTARY! •Vertovian clash of ideas, images and sounds that prompted reflection Ex: Now! (Santiago Alvarez, 1965) • Cuban filmmaker who spent some time in the U.S. (like this film), made most films in Cuba; Worked as a music archivist and heavily involved in Communist party • Member of film institute and directed weekly Latin American newsreel What is Vertovian about this? • Fast-paced, energetic • Montage to create comparisons, collision, dynamism • Can derive new meaning and give rise to new concepts through the juxtaposition of two images • Lincoln's ideals of emancipation were never realized; very confrontational through barrage of images - assault to make you take some action • Re-appropriated imagery from Life Magazine Literal collage making Culture jamming

Political Documentary at Home - Challenge for Change

Challenge for Change (Canada) • 1967: NFB project to provide citizens access to the media to create a dialogue with government agencies • Griersonian social improvement: rather using film to communicate to the people would make films with the people

The Netflix Effect - Netflix as Library

Conflicted lines of thinking on Netflix and documentary. Some commentators see this as a positive e development, while others are more skeptical • As a source of streaming documentary, Netflix has been celebrated because the popularly understood model for the service has been that of the library • Library: Netflix as a repository for the history of a cinematic genre that can serve the needs of an enormous subscriber base that transcend any one location or community

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (Brett Story, 2016) - Part I

Conventional View of Prison • Physical place, where people are incarcerated as punishment and keep society safe Conventions of Prison Reform • Failure of the system through the lens of a wrongful conviction, racial component (disproportionately African American males), economic implications (for profit prisons) Film does not take this traditional approach • Modular Structure Washington Square Park Man playing chess, hard skill left prison with - can make money off of this Discuss chess as a battlefield, upending our conventions about who goes to prison - conventional idea that you should keep this people off the streets, away from children; but these guys are on the street teaching children Show that it touches everything and everyone Eastern Kentucky • Prison as a source of employment • Traditional Appalachian mining song • Librarian tells story of prison escapee with whom he played basketball to see son • Uneven surfaces because of coal mining to build airport • Communities have depended upon this industry, though it is terrible for the environment and their health • Have watched industry crumble, perverse idea that to save the economy - need prison • Building one industry on top of each other - one you're extracting coal, one you're extracting bodies from their communities - new revenue stream • Economic - no operational prison, but landscape haunted by it Detroit • Fire department not cleaning up the burned home, people on the street • Quicken Loans • Gentrifying the city, Bruce's showmanship • Mortgage crisis, Corporate culture, Hire a massive police force • Strip club fire, Idea that buildings are burning in Detroit - Fire in Marin County, later riots in Detroit '67 • Gentrification by corporations, who have authority to better the city and in a way they are, which is not experienced by many in the city (like formerly incarcerated man on the street); Idea of corporate culture supplanting community culture • Actually, what happens - whole police force keeping everything in line Marin County • Group of female prisoners taken to fight the fires, discusses how hard the work is - cannot become a firefighter after because of her record • Felony record as following you • Aesthetically beautiful devastation

True Crime & the Social Effects of Documentary

Demonstrates how docs can influence public opinion on wrongful conviction • Cases have become inextricable from the films • Filmmakers make investigative contributions • People have gotten involved to fix a wrongful conviction after seeing a documentary

Third-Worldism, 1960-75

Developing countries in the "Third World" were trying to develop their independence after centuries of colonization • First (Western countries, capitalist economies and modes of production), Second (Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Third World (everyone else, "still developing") The Third World: newly independent countries struggling with development, often extremely poor and deindustrialized. • Africa, South America, and Latin America, plus India and Pakistan • Major conflicts in Cuba, Vietnam, and the Middle East, which became literal and ideological battlegrounds for the war between capitalism and communism • Cinema as a tool for political change and a weapon of political liberation

Characteristics of the Essay Film: Subjectivity, First Person, Autobiography

Emphasis on Subjectivity, First Person, Autobiography • A first-person, personal cinema, sometimes (but not always) autobiographical in nature • In some way or another, the filmmaker's personality, thoughts, reflections, subjectivity are foregrounded Subjectivity - Questions of truth and falsity less important than the fact that everything is filtered through the filmmaker's consciousness • Filmmaker displays an inquisitive attitude toward the subject matter, a desire to explore something, to know more

Associational Structure

Emphasizes likeness or relationships between entities • Can be based upon similarities of any sort, including contiguities of a single location, event, or institution • Ex: Zoo (Frederick Wiseman)

Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, 2016) - Part I

Her outtakes from various films where she was the cinematographer •Begins with title card, calls it her memoir, images that she ruminates upon; implies that each of these is personal, special to her now in little slices of memory •Her memories, memoir •Historical memory as well - so many of things she is present for are major historical events, newsworthy on a global scale •Felt like her distinct memories from her travels, seem tangential, but have stayed with her Difference between an autobiography and memoir? •Autobiography - compelled to be more objective reporter; life story, linear series of events •Memoir - subjective, from memory; feelings evoked from those memories (rather than the content itself) Fact of making the film feels like a process, exploratory •First image - in Bosnia, herdsman w/ sheep and then she frames shot of landscape, she moves the grass in front of it •Why start there? She is composing the image, crafting the composition - immediately foregrounds the nature of documentary filmmaking itself as constructed, composed, that there is a presence behind the camera Idea that you are catching life on the fly is immediately complicated with her manipulation of the landscape • Second - road in Missouri, lightning strikes and she sneezes Landscape composition w/ amazing event, sneeze tells us that there is someone behind the camera Sarajevo - filming shots of the town from above to get b-roll, talks about how the lighting was bad, haze that day and wanting to get footage of the mosques - discussion of how she will construct the documentary

Institutional Factors of a Documentary

How do documentaries get made and seen? • Distribution • Funding • Community of practitioners • Working process of filmmakers • Corpus of films

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)

How does the film articulate a sense of time? • Archival footage in primarily black and white, often static • Contemporary footage in color: Woven together, goes back and forth between '45 and '55 • Doesn't have editing-like, montage approach to make explicit comparisons between the two time periods • Instead, sense that the past isn't over, hovering above the contemporary moment Inter-weaving of past and present, past isn't ever really gone - just woven into the fabric of time and memory • Is the past really static? How does memory work in the film? • Black and white photographs - filled with people suffering • People are absent in contemporary footage Present-Day Camera Footage (Embodied and Exploratory) • Surveying of the camp, constantly moving at slow, fixed rate • Tracking shots that glide through the space - movement is embodied, creates sensation of being projected into the space, exploring the space • Allows you to look at all of these details - through camera, bearing witness to the place itself • Ghost-like with gliding through the space, no people - haunting, feels like there is a presence there • Present-day footage - tracking beautiful shots of the camps, makes you feel like it could be any space, any place - obsessive, compulsive return to a place, where, very recently, unspeakable tragedy occurred - how can you square that with this empty field The banality of evil - when we think of trauma, atrocity - overwhelmingly incomprehensible • But film is about small things that had to occur for this to happen • Talk about how people bid on contracts in the building of the camps, different architectural styles of look-out posts, the view of the camp as a microcosm (perversely made-up, camp as a town), chronology - logistical problem of shooting, gas chambers presented as solution to this bureaucratic problem - then someone designs the gas chamber • Emphasizes the intentionality of it all - all had to be built by people, especially with footage of those who said they were not responsible • Breaks all of this atrocity down into a series of fairly innocuous actions - logistical problems • Begins with rounding up and deportation, to enslavement, to indiscriminate killing - accumulates, implicates that if you're okay with one thing, easier to be okay with the next • Makes it seem entirely possible that this could happen again - totally possible • *Implication* - Human nature, what we are capable of, trauma and memory over the course of time, we feel like its behind us, still right here - woven into the contemporary moment Why is this an essay film as opposed to a historical film? • Has a thesis, voice-over tells us about how this is woven into our present; more subjective than giving you a list of historical facts • Emphasis on language, basically just this written text • Exploratory projection - projecting what this experience might have been like onto the footage itself, gives you imaginary timeline over the archival footage of a train (what you would've seen, you go in...)

Political Documentary at Home - Importance of Public Access and Influence of Video

Importance of Public Access • Public Access = important distribution medium for docs • 1970s: a low point for distribution of feature-length documentaries. Few theatrical audiences or successes Influence of Technology: Video • Video: lighter, easier to learn, no processing, required less light • Handled better in difficult locations, was less intrusive in observational situations, and could take longer continuous shots • Video much cheaper than film, but image quality. • A tradeoff: money/aesthetics (grainier images were OK for some political filmmakers)

Nichols and Ethics

In Bill Nichols' piece, "Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking?," the author identifies how and why, in creating a documentary, the filmmaker must address various ethical concerns. Nichols begins by detailing the three ways in which a "documentary engages with the world" through representation. First, documentaries "provide a basis for belief" in the aural and visual documentation of situations and events. Simply, the viewer is exposed to a representation of the world that they can experience and observe in real life. Nichols qualifies this claim by noting that images are a representation of reality, not a replica; Images can omit information about an event, be altered, and one cannot assume that even an authentic image verifies a broader claim of what it may represent. Next, Nichols notes that documentaries represent the views and interests of those depicted in the film, as well as the film's financial backers. Lastly, in representing the world and the interests of those inside it, documentaries offer ideas, make arguments, or present a particular view to influence or persuade the spectator.

Podcasting and Documentary Reportage

Information as Storytelling • Narrative driven Intimacy • Informal style of delivery, stripped down; solitary experience • Integrated into your daily, domestic routine - solitary, task-based, life maintenance type things • Designed to take up time, easy listening • Very carefully constructed to sound informal • Slow Immersion In the Dark Structure • Episode 1: Information about the case • Debunking the three main pillars of the prosecution's case • Episode 2: The Route • What is the responsibility of the police in evaluating, using, and intimidating eyewitness testimony, especially in a racially divided community? • Episode 3: The Gun • Episode 4: The Confessions • What are prosecutors allowed to do to solicit information from jailhouse snitches? What responsibility do they have to ensure that jailhouse snitches are telling the truth? • Odell Hallimon • Episode 5: Privilege • How does one function in prison, and how does the prison "black market" operate? • The DA •Episode 6:

Political Documentary at Home - Institutional Context

Institutional Context • The advent of film production programs in American colleges and Universities (political fermentation) • Documentary filmmaking evolved into an important medium through which antiwar and "youth movement" values were presented • Hundreds of 16mm films that criticized US military and social policies were made and shown Ex: The War at Home (Glenn Silber, 1979)

Political Documentary at Home - Institutions in North America

Institutions for Political Docs in North America • Could be financed by a political organization • Ex: Winter Soldier (1972), financed by Vietnam Veterans Against the War • Filmmaking Collectives: Militant filmmakers would and together and support projects with rental fees generated from student groups •Ex: The Newsreel • 1967: Students aligned with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) decided to make films that would counter the mainstream media's representation of protests against the Vietnam War • Specialized in overage of individual events, such as the occupation of a campus, a strike, a demonstration, etc. • Steering-committee system whereby every film was screened for the entire membership and was released only if the majority supported it • Started in New York then spread to other cities; made many short agitprop films running between 5-25 minutes • 1971: Name chance to Third World Newsreel and refocusing on empowering people of color Challenge for Change (Canada) • 1967: NFB project to provide citizens access to the media to create a dialogue with government agencies • Griersonian social improvement: rather using film to communicate to the people would make films with the people Public Access Television • 1972: federal legislation reserved public access channels in all new cable installations in the 100 top markets in the country • Independent doc videos on public access often intended to be alternatives to mainstream media • Power to illuminate critical social issues (a DIY, power-to-the-people imperative) • New York City: a center for early public access activity, along with later organizations like Paper Tiger Television (founded in 1981) • Ex: Herb Schiller Reads the NY Times (Herb Schiller, 1981)

The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) - Part I

Investigation of this murder trial, the frailties of human subjectivity, people's capacities for contradiction, the possibility of objectivity and truth • Reenactments, which change (not objective of what happened, correspond to the version of the story that we are getting from the interviewees) • Stand-in for an idea of what happened, identities that masked • Narrative film grammar - close-ups, artificial lighting Interviews • Mise-en-scene (staged in environments that stand in for the institutions they are associated with) • Symmetrical staging, very presentational, flat • Planimetric composition, clothesline staging • Carefully lit, studio set, artificial lighting • No camera movement Cutaways • B-Roll, elevated - documents that pertain to the case, highly aestheticized • Expressive, staged - swinging timepiece, popcorn • Animations • Excerpts from the television show - "Boston Blackie" and "Dillinger" Soundtrack • Repetition of the score, gears are tuning • Minimalist, expressive • Tape Recorder Plot 1. Murder of Officer Wood • Reenactment of murder • Event in Reality: 1 2. Adam's interrogation • Conflicting accounts b/ Adams and police • Event in Reality: 5 3. Murder of Officer Wood • Police describe murder • Event in Reality: 1 4. Search for the murderer • Police describe search for car • Event in Reality: 2 5. David Harris found in Vidor, TX • Harris brags to friends, changes story • Event in Reality: 3 6. Harris accuses Adams • Recounts what he told police, another reenactment • Event in Reality: 4, 1 7. Adams describes events • Adams account, another reenactment from drive-in • Event in Reality: 1 8. Adam's interrogation • After stenographer, statement that Adams signs • Event in Reality: 5

Jean Rouch and Direct v. Cinéma Vérité Redux

Jean Rouch: Three Overlapping Contexts • The relationship between cinéma vérité and direct cinema • Ethnography and ethics • The French New Wave Direct Cinema • Assumed the possibility of an objective observer • Filmmakers should not directly intervene in the actions taking place in front of the camera • A reticence on the part of the filmmakers to participate directly or intervene in the reality unfolding in front of them • Presence of the camera did not significantly alter the actions of those being filmed • Drew and Associates: CRISIS STRUCTURE - method works best if subjects are involved in an activity demanding full attention and prompting unalterable behavior (Cuban Missile Crisis, rock concert) Cinéma Vérité • A distinctly French variant of "observational documentary," far more invested in the filmmaker as a catalyst for the action

What Is Performative Documentary?

Knowledge, Subjectivity, Affect • At its most abstract, the performative doc raises questions of knowledge. • Epistemology: What do we know, and how do we know it? What counts as understanding or comprehension? • Is there something other than factual information that foes into our understanding of the world? • Is knowledge best described as abstract and disembodied (i.e. book facts)? • Or is knowledge better described as concrete and embodies, based on personal experience? • If we concede that knowledge is often concrete and embodies, then wouldn't each person's experience produce a distinctive knowledge, a certain quality of uniqueness that cannot be easily replicated? • Underscores the complexity of our knowledge by emphasizing its subjective and affective dimensions Knowledge about identity (alack and gay), knowledge about illness, knowledge about family is all produced through its subjective and affective dimensions - what the filmmaker knows firsthand and can evoke (even indirectly)

Politics, "The Historical Turn," and Mixed Mode

Late 1960s/Early 1970s: Three Developments • Agit prop and political documentary • The "historical turn" • Mixed Mode documentary

A More Militant Cinema

Late 1960s: Turn to a more militant documentary cinema. A number of international historical events made it seem likely that a Third World revolution was in the offing: • Seemed to point to a global mass resolution of oppressed people • Provided revolutionary fervor among filmmakers, who become more explicit and didactic about the role of documentary in furthering the cause • Refused the technical gloss identified with Hollywood. Lightweight cameras and informal lighting enabled them to make films cheaply and quickly • Rawness of the style was itself a political statement

Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson, 2016) - Part II

Message: Always someone behind the camera, she is always present •Leaves out the links b/w the footage, trying to figure out her own logic in putting these shots together - get a glimpse into her consciousness and because so much of this film deals with murky ethical information, about her conscience; What ethical conundrums this footage brings up • See her face once, but never forget that there is an organizing consciousness behind the camera Major Themes • War, loss • Trauma - personal, how it is inseparable from historical trauma • Space and bearing witness, accrues this meaning of what has occurred there • Haunted landscape • Motherhood • Repression of women • Survival • Ethics of documentary filmmaking • Intervene/Observe The ability of the camera to ... • Reveal - revelatory function - can reveal emotional reality • Engender empathy - can come to understand someone else's pain, reality, experience • Conceal Jasper, Texas case - not giving us context; Haunted objects, spaces • Allows for documentation and performance • Engenders fear Potential to be cathartic, but terrifying to reveal these traumatic memories • Camera as tool for remembrance - can preserve a record • Defeat/hope • Personal/historical • Subject as worthy of attention

Formal Characteristics of Performative Docs

Mix expressive techniques that vie texture and density to fiction filmmaking (POV shots, musical scores, renderings of subjective states of mind flashbacks, freeze frames) with rhetorical techniques for addressing social issues • Approaches to poetic domain of experimental film but fives less emphasis to self-contained formal rhythms. Expressive dimension refers us back to the historical world for its ultimate meaning • We recognize familiar people and places and the testimony of others, but ? with evocative tones and expressive shadings

Mixed Mode Doc

Mixed Mode • A plurality of techniques: direct cinema, archival footage, non-diegetic music, voice-overs, interviews (with offscreen questioning) • Possible to mix and match different approaches in the same film • Lent itself to political documentary because filmmakers oriented towards social criticism can mix archival footage with interviews, using individual testimony to challenge accepted positions or prejudices • Less of a theoretical heft in their relationship to the medium

Netflix Criticism - Newsstand Rather Than Library

Newsstand: A more appropriate metaphor? • Docs available within a limited time frame with content constantly changing based on availability and the ostensible desires of consumers. • An effort to push certain texts on consumers rather than letting us pull what we want • Created a space for alternative streaming services (Mubi, Fandor, Sundance Doc Club, Filmstruck) that provide a more critical offering of documentary titles, incl. classics and more experimental forms Problems: • Assumes that the service has some larger interest beyond commercial needs • Access to films provided on the basis that it will improve profits for the company • Mandate of the service is not to make everything available to preserve the genre

Speed of Delivery

No lag time between production and distribution (ie creating live content) • Better equipped to deal with topical issues

Podcast Realm

Not a rival to radio • Pattern of steady growth for niche, on-demand content • It's an uncontrolled space where amateurs can compete with traditional media • Great variance in podcast quality • Democratized access and made content independent of a schedule • Organization storytelling structure over a longer narrative

The Times of Harvey Milk (Rob Epstein, 1984)

Not formalistically daring, mixed-mode • Archival footage of Milk and of San Francisco -Network television broadcast news • Interviews - Produce ideas • Sound • Music - non-diegetic • Narrator, voice-over - Expository - claims knowledge of the world • Audio recordings of Milk Observational footage • Embedded within the archival footage • Claims an objective viewpoint, but is it Griersonian? • Personally rooted, with testimonies - emotional tone • Even the identity of the narrator is in keeping with what the film is about Interviews • Produce the ideas of the film, or at least seem like they do • Integrated within the narrative whole, but the interviewees generate the ideas • What is retribution? What is justice? Explanation of right-wing fears? • Testimony, not there to be questioned • How can the interview be participatory - Interventionalist Learned about San Francisco, Gay Rights Movement in the 1970's • San Fran as a "divided city" • 1960's - Counter-culture, anti-war, epicenter of gay rights activism • 1970's - Harvey Milk, Castro district people as an extension of this; Dan White as the other side - stands for traditional family, "small town" values • Couldn't run for office, ballot proposal to ban gay people from being teachers in public schools • Cut off from civic life, to exercise basic rights and have their input in policy decisions

City Symphonies

One of the earliest forms of the poetic documentary • Focus on the interaction between people and the modern structures that surround them, often without main characters or traditional narratives • Ex: Manhatta (Charles Sheeler/Raul Strand, 1921) • Is it a mode (implies rationale, ordered set of prohibitions)? Voice? Strategy?

The Essay Film - Original Meaning

Originally arose in relation to unorthodox "new doc' hybrids that crossed boundaries between fiction and nonfiction • "Essay" = a personal investigation involving the passion and the intellect of the author • Very non-commercial and combined documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses • Adventurously combing subjectivity and personal history with social history = source for intellectual and artistic innovation

Foucault: Hierarchies of social power and domination

Our conceptions of what is true or normal are constructs consisting of shifting relations of power • Basic Ideas: knowledge is a form of power. What counts as knowledge differs across societies and across time. The idea of progress is illusory: knowledge does not make one free. • Each society has its own "truth discourse" (e.g. religion, science, etc.) which presupposes some social power relationships. What we think of as Western "progress" is really just another form of domination and control. We replace one experience of reality with another. • Anti-totalization of human nature. No "Man," fundamental essences, no "human nature." This denigrates disadvantaged groups. • Identity Politics: Emphasis on differences, distinctions. Identity is socially constructed, contingent rather than absolute. The concept of the individual as stable, coherent subject exploded • Rejection of the Cartesian subject: "I" capable of intention. • Unmediated action in the world is an illusion; we can't ever really "know ourselves." We are patchworks of fragments, disparate influences, products, and images. • Turn towards radical skepticism of truth, reality, universal experience

How Do Performative Docs Relate to Previous Modes?

Performance docs tend to have elements of all the major modes we have studied: expository, observational, participatory, essay • Previous docs have had performative qualities, but they were usually subordinate to an overarching representation or rhetorical logic - affective was not the dominant • Further blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction

Explosion Possible Through - Low Production Costs

Production Costs Low • Documentaries cheap to produce, especially for major studios • Ex: Bowling for Columbine: $58 million gross, budget: $4 million (14-fols return); The Lord of the Rings: $870 million gross, budget:143 million + marketing costs (6-fold return) • This rate of return also fueled the reality TV boom. Reality TV costs almost nothing to make: no huge salaries, production values, etc.

Political Documentary at Home - Public Access Television

Public Access Television • 1972: federal legislation reserved public access channels in all new cable installations in the 100 top markets in the country • Independent doc videos on public access often intended to be alternatives to mainstream media • Power to illuminate critical social issues (a DIY, power-to-the-people imperative) • New York City: a center for early public access activity, along with later organizations like Paper Tiger Television (founded in 1981) • Ex: Herb Schiller Reads the NY Times (Herb Schiller, 1981)

Narrative Structure

Recounts a chronology of events often involving the representation of historical events in the order in which they occurred in time • Classical formal qualities: unity, coherence, emphasis, harmony, restraint • Will often raise a set of questions that the film will then gradually "answer" • Ex: Hoop Dreams

The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) - Part II

Reenactments • Milkshake represents subjectivity, conflicting narratives about what the partner was doing • Symbol for entire messy narrative - doubt, was the partner in or out of the car • Popcorn - clock actually changes in the reenactment as Harris claims he is unsure of the timeline - hazy representation of what happens at the movie theater Voice • Open - network of answers that cannot be contextualized or understood; at the same time, there is something formal about this too - trying to figure out what happened and there is an answer - has to be one of two guys - but everything around it is completely fuzzy or open Emphasis on Human Subjectivity • Harris discusses bad upbringing - brother died, dad took it out on him - is immediately an unreliable narration with self-justification, deluding himself about the nature of the people he hurt - the way that he sees the world shapes what he believes about himself • Judge - gives the film its title - metaphor for police separating anarchy from order - tells story about John Dillinger and the Lady in Red- ironic digression that reveals how little details that were wrong or fuzzy - these are important in trying to parse out the truth - seems unaware that his respect for law enforcement colors the way he understands how the police investigated the case - the way he sees the world informs how he filters information - don't we all do that? Do our ingrained beliefs render us incapable or unable of seeming certain details? • Unreliable female witness - Boston Blackie - plays an integral role in getting Adams convicted - but clear she is motivated by her own desire to be a detective Postmodern in terms of Thin Blue Line • Skepticism towards truth in general • Critical of the criminal justice system itself • People as a patchwork of influences, some of which are media derived • Irony - that Morris is willing to undercut the interviewees - playfulness, juxtaposition of high and low Tape Recorder • Is truth relative - really? - Harris did do it • Speaks in euphemisms, talked about it, says he's the one that knows • Tape recorder stands in for the image - don't get to see him say it

Characteristics of the Essay Film: Reflection and Critical Investigation

Reflection: Filmmaker not just reporting on a problem but is actually thinking his or her way through that problem. •Film tries to capture a thought process •Godard: Cinema is a form that thinks and thought that forms. As a critic, I thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still think of myself as a critic. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. Ex: Historie(s) du cinema ( Godard, 1989-98) •Often get skeptical evaluation of the subject matter and even the filmmaker's own conclusions •Preserves the process of thinking, which can be "wrong," self-contradictory, or skeptical of its own conclusions •Again leads to a distrust of authority or comprehensive knowledge, even on the part of the filmmaker •This self-reflective, self-critical, even neurotic expression of subjectivity expresses ______

Characteristics of the Essay Film: Subjectivity, First Person, Autobiography - Reflexivity and Reflection

Reflexivity - filmmaker interrogating their own subjective responses to some portion of the world "out there." "An inward gaze." • Ex: The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000) • Critical set of reflections on the world, but originates from a single authorial voice and displays a blatantly self-searching authorial presence • Does not address its subject matter as a factual report, but as a reflection on a set of issues • Ex: An Acquired Taste (Ralph Arlyck, 1981) Looking back at his life, foregrounding his own relationship to the concept of success - personal reflection • A radical questioning of the idea of objectivity: questioning "grand narratives" • Because of their emphasis on the first person, essay films are very apt to express oppositional positions, and are often used by women directors and artists of color • Essay film becomes a radical form: the personal is political, radical expression, commanding the authority to "speak your truth"

Narrative Complexity of Podcasts

Rejects the idea that every episode needs to have closure at the end • Foregrounds ongoing stories with micro and macro level organization (viewing as a single episode, season, series) • Underlying assumption that a series is a cumulative narrative that builds over time

History of Radio

Serialized radio documentary was common in the 40s and 50s but fell to radio news • Radio news was short-form and an aural equivalent to nightly news on TV • The term podcast was invented in 2004 and highlighted the idea of independent audio content on the Internet

How Do Performative Docs do this?

Shift emphasis away from a realist representation of the world and toward poetic liberties, more unconventional narrative structures, and more subjective forms of representation • Downplays the referential quality of documentary: the indexical relationship between camera and subject, • Downplays development of strategies for persuasive argumentation about the historical world • Instead, has an expressive quality that affirms the highly situated, embodies, and personal perspective of specific subjects

Direct Cinema or Cinema Verité?

Sometimes used interchangeable - we're going to use them more specifically Cinema Verite • Started in France • More active participation on the part of the filmmakers in the situations they were filming • Filmmakers appeared in their own films, showed their movies to their subjects before finishing them (more reflexive) Direct Cinema • Tried to stay out of their film, be a fly on the wall • Filmmakers try not to interfere with the action, provoke a situation, or become participants in the films So how are they related? • Both depend on observational methods; • DC: Might be an event, a person or an institution • CV: Might be societal attitudes or an individual's psychology - things that are harder to capture without the filmmaker becoming involved

Poetic Voice

Style-centered discourse; Less concerned with interpreting some information in the world and more concerned with issues of film form • Often aim to invoke the sensual, aesthetic qualities of their subject • Ex: Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005)

Proponents of Netflix

Supporters of Netflix claim that streaming has drastically changed the landscape for documentary films, providing a widely accessible platform for docs to be seen by audiences who would not have gone to the theater • For the "specialty films" on Netflix, their very existence on the platform, including highlighting by Netflix's algorithms, results in more visibility not replicable in other exhibition outlets

The Poetic Documentary - Formal, Open, and Poetic Voice

The Formal and Open Voices • What do they have in common? • More rhetorical purpose to persuade, didactic approach v. direct cinema BUT • They both provide information through explanation, observation, or exploration. All are trying to convey a set of facts, assumptions, or observations about the world to the viewer The Poetic Voice • Foregrounds aesthetic concerns over teaching, privileges formal or stylistic qualities more than rhetoric or representation • Tension between representation and composition; the informational value of subordinate to formal or stylistic values • Not mutually exclusive, about the balance that the film affords to the formal side of the equation • Often intersect with avant-garde cinema, non-narrative films that emphasize poeticism, structure, and form Ex: Jaaji Approx. (Sky Hopinka, 2015) • The role in traditional culture in contemporary moment • Retracing his father's steps? • Traveling/ Landscapes/ The "Road" • Audio: His father, traditional songs about journeys, returning • Jaaji - address to a father • Approx. - have shared culture, but don't share a lot in terms of personal connection • Not a direct address to his father, set of ruminations about shared idea of culture - not a conversation with his father • Road footage taken on a road trip, starts in the West (SF - Texas) and ends in Wisconsin (Milwaukee) • Represents a visit to dad and a "return" • Inversion of the landscape • Pouring over tapes w/ father in hopes of connecting with his father

Selection

The ways in which the film controls the amount and nature of the information that it gives us about the world •What is selected, what is omitted, and how does selecting these particular aspects shape the film's structure, argument or intent? •In Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman, 1989) • Aim to profile and humanize victims of the AIDS crisis; Selected 5 from group of 500 - to shatter stereotypes of the kinds of people who are affected by the epidemic - deserves our passion and commitment to fight disease

Contemporary Developments

Theatrical Documentary and the Indie Explosion • 1990's and 2000's: An explosion of theatrical documentary. Although few made tremendous amounts of money (with some exceptions), each year brought must-see theatrical docs. • Ex: The Thin Blue Line and Roger and Me • Connected to the independent film boom of the 1990s. Distributors (Miramax, Fine Line) began producing indies with established actors; for the first time, narrative American independent cinema was a box-office draw and contender for Academy Awards • Mid-budget pedigree • Documentaries released by many of the same distributors and playing in many of the same art house venues • Early 2000's: the advent of digital cinema made documentaries even easier and more attractive to produce, distribute, and exhibit • 2001 Theatrical revenue: $5 million • 2004 Theatrical revenue: $55 million (not including Fahrenheit 9/11) • Sales of docs on DVD tripled between 2001 and 2004

Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989)

Themes • Gay culture, racism, cultural expression, bigotry Collage aesthetic, spoken word narration, testimonials seem like written poems and are performed, demonstrations of snap culture, emphasis on bodies, dance, barbershop quartet who sing •Not lecture about what it is like to be black and gay in the world, fragmented collage of expressive performances Unconventional Techniques for Documentary Talking about his childhoods and bigotry, cut together expressively • Lips shouting racial slurs or homophobic epithets • Embodies the experience, as if it is happening to viewer as Riggs relives it • Becomes a kind of chorus • intersectional idea that he cannot be in any space at any time without being subjected to discrimination over various parts of his identity • Feels more personal - extreme and increasing close-ups Phone sex scene • Shots of the apartment, dials the phone and details the options for the phone - "press 1 for..." • Chooses which variety of man to talk two - picks the politically engaged revolutionary activist who wants to topple institutions of oppression, but be really hot • Puts together the personal and the political Performance • Snap demonstration Like its own language, situation, embodied, an important part of gay culture Performing identity •Lynchpin Losing friends to AIDS Performing identities as the gay ball

The Body Beautiful (Ngozi Onwurah, 1991)

Themes • Gender, body image and cultural expectations, motherhood, growing up and maturity, sexuality, race, illness • Really about her relationship with her mother Unconventional Techniques for Documentary Narrative Film Grammar • Flashbacks • Reenactments • Smooth tracking shots • Music • Shot reverse shot • Scenes that develop characters Sauna scene, gets glimpse of how others see her mother's body - how culture views illness, body, sexuality •Sex scene Featuring with her own mother with an actor Huge age discrepancy, race discrepancy Interracial sex scene that has the actor put his mouth on his amputated breast, so her mother's disfigurement is the focal point of the sex scene • Not a scenario that happens in real life Totally projective, something the filmmaker is thinking about Says that the man reminds him of her dad She starts yelling "stop," overcome, implication that he is abusing or exploiting her in some way Performance • Job as a model, preforming femininity • Her mother is unable to perform in the same way that she can - suggests that her mother is lacking a certain type of womanhood in society Missing symmetry, has a physical defect Ending • Mother and daughter are naked, climb into bed together • Even though my body is considered beautiful, will always be my mother's daughter • Comes to a revelation about her mother's body, how society treats it Uncomfortable realization about herself - that she would think negatively about her mother's body too • Says that society sees her as from her father's image - she is always black Says "I am my mother's daughter." Affinity between them is based upon their shared experience of societal marginalization Treated as "other" PERSONAL AGAINST THE POLITICAL

Caméra-Stylo

Theory by Alexandre Astruc • Camera-pen: directors should wield their cameras like writers use their pens • Expresses thought in a subtle and efficient manner, like literature • Brought about by technological change • With the advent of the 16mm camera and the television, it was believed that people would be able to get movies like they would books on any topic • An artists can express his thoughts even abstract like a novel • Cinematic form will become as flexible and subtle as written language • Scriptwriter and filmmaker merge

Direct Cinema

This particular variant of documentary practice has come to stand in for "documentary" writ large. But this is a historically situated phenomenon. What is the concept for the development of this kind of immediate, fly-on-the-wall style of filmmaking?

Rhetorical Structure

Uses reason and persuasion to call for some course of action or simply to persuade the spectator about some issue • Ex: The Lift and Times of Rosie the Riveter

Characteristics of the Essay Film: (Text, Language,) Voice-Over

Voice-over • Anti-Griersonian voice-over: authoritarian discourse that superimposes a reading on the pure truthfulness of images. Inevitably and inherently didactic • In essay films, however, the voice-over is stripped of its authoritarian or didactic slant, and can operate within a variety of registers: contrapuntal, ironic, polemical (the primary location of the author's subjectivity) Ex: Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun, Farocki, 1989)

Postmodernism and Documentary Skepticism

What is Postmodernism? • A Major intellectual trend of the 1980's and 1990's (and perhaps beyond!), used to describe everything, from theory to economics to aesthetics to architecture • Associated with a group of intellectuals and theorists who rose to prominence on the 1970's and 1980's: Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Frederic Jameson Postmodernism and Documentary • Many direct cinema directors made ambitious claims about their films and capturing reality • Robert Drew: "Most documentary films [before direct cinema] were in fact lectures. They were, then, and most remain today, lectures with picture illustrations." • "My theoretical view developed that we...could capture real people, real stores, in real life, edit them in such a way that the stories would tell themselves without the aid of a lot of narration, and we would have a new form of drama on one band, because it would be real instead of fictional...

Explosion Possible Through - Distribution and Advertising in the Early Internet Era

• 1999: The Blair Witch Project demonstrated how word of mouth could be generated through clever online marketing (cheaper than TV spots and newspaper ads) • Political docs tied into popular web organizations. Ex: The Center for American Progress + MoveOn.org + Robert Greenwald. These organizations already had a built-in constituency with a long e-mail list.

Recycling, pastiche and the dissolution of high v. low

• A rejection of "high Modernism." • Modernist art: anti-representational; interested in paint, language, form; art exists in a separate realm from commercialism or mass culture • Insists upon a division between mass culture and art • Stood for constant novelty and experimentation; placed a premium on originality and individualism • Postmodernism: All art is a rearrangement of old ideas. When innovation is dead, we can only borrow and reiterate. • Recycling without meaning: "Speech in a dead language but with no communicative urge." • Irony: saying the opposite of what you mean • A dissolution of the wall between high art and low art

Globalization, Hybridization, decontextualization

• All objects, products, and experiences are global rather than local, and traditional y impermeable borders are breaking down due to late capitalism and international commerce • Experience lacks continuity and a sense of historical profession; no real past, only oddly mixed and matched things • A present tense parade of novel, decontextualized activities, moment, and events

Netflix Criticism - Challenging the "Discourse of Sobriety"

• Another criticism of Netflix is for its challenge to documentary's "discourse of sobriety" • The vogue for reality television and infotainment (TMZ) created a paradigm in which non-fiction film can be seen as "entertaining" • Many Netflix docs seem to be glorified reality TV shows. Contra Grierson or Wiseman, documentary can be an evening's entertainment - you don't have to learn anything from it • "as documentary becomes more popular and accessible..." (ADD FROM SLIDES)

Radical Skepticism

• Anti-essentialist, anti-generalist, anti-foundationalist, suspicious of fixed, generalizable truth • No stable meaning or set of reliable truth claims in ethics, language history or identity. Anti-Enlightenment position: no reason, logical, progress of truth • Language's failure to communicate • Work doesn't cohere. A tissue of textuality, a mosaic of citations and utterances, a complex intertextuality, "heteroglossia." • So, what replaces progress or unity...? • Idea that here is a grand narrative or moving from one epoch to another no longer exists

Hyperrealism and Simulacra

• Boundaries between the real and its simulation no longer exist. In our media saturated environment, no real or essential difference between reality and its representation • Images do not represent reality, but only point to other images. We no longer know the world, only media • Hyperreality: an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies • "A Society of the Spectacle": everything is reproduced, filmed, and broadcast. The image proliferates, but there's nothing behind it - images everywhere, no meaning. Culture = an emptied-out term

Open Voice

• Central function is not to provide answers to questions, but simply to pose questions that are sometimes left unanswered • Shows, provokes, explores • More hesitant in its epistemological position and sometimes opposes the dissemination of knowledge within a clear-cut conventional framework • Ex: Salesmen (Albert and David Maysles, 1969)

Formal Voice

• Central function is to explain some aspect of the world to the viewer. Takes a position of epistemic authority • Explains, teaches, and directs • Poses a clear question or coherent set of questions and then answers every salient question that it poses • Usually by voice-over narration, narrator comes from position of authority • Ex: The Battle of San Pietro

Wiseman and POV

• Claims films have orchestrated point of view, that having his camera in the room does not affect behavior of the participants Does Wiseman have a point of view and if so, how do we know what it is? • Has a tremendous amount of empathy for workers and welfare clients - scenes that include both sides of humanity • Critical of the system - some level of function, very few successful cases - party emerges happy • Definitely in the open voice - clear that it lets the viewer draw a conclusion • Structure - emphasis, starts w/ stereotype that some people may have of welfare system; ends with mad philosopher (waiting for Godot, cycle of welfare - problems embedded within problems, praying) surrounded by lady in waiting, janitor (another piece of ecosystem that we haven't seen) • Adamant that his camera does not affect the way people behave

The Expository Mode Part II

• Emphasizes the impression of objectivity and of well-substantiated judgment. Supports the impulse towards generalization since the voice over commentary can readily extrapolate from the particular instances offered on the image track • The claims often don't seem reckless, seem like they are the claims of someone who had done research and believes there is some sort of objective truth that it can impart Transpersonal certainty in compliance with the dominant ideology of common sense and a discourse of sobriety • Traffics in the idea that we can be fairly certain about a state of affairs outside of individuals subjectivities • Addressed within a frame of reference that need not be that need not be questioned or established but simply taken for granted • Exposition accommodates elements of interviews but these tend to be subordinated to an argument offered by the film itself • Viewers typically expects the expository text to take shape around the solution to a problem or puzzles; presenting the news of the day, exploring the workings of the universe, addressing the consequences of pollution, tracing the history of an event of biography of a person

Theoretical Problems: Major Questions

• How can you make a film record of a culture that does not exploit or harm the subjects? • How do you maintain ethical relations with subjects? • What are the ethical issues in filming and displaying the lives of pre-industrialized cultures to industrialized cultures? • When you enter/occupy a village to make a movie you are, in a sense, replicating the colonial model? • You are putting under-developed people/communities at the service of developed people • The ethnographer is a product of European and American industrial society and the racial and social prejudices that those societies harbor are a part of the culture of the filmmaker What are the usages of documentary as an ethnographic tool? • There are limits to technology's contributions to ethnographic research • The filmmaker always has to find a way to use language to explain or describe the subject (Fraught with peril!) Film is good for... • Public events (dances, rituals, ceremonies) Film is not so good for... • Things that are not on public display (kinship relations, sexual mores, religious beliefs) What are the consequences of a filmmaker's presence in a culture? • The outside is a foreign presence in a traditional cultural milieu and runs the risk of changing that culture by his or her very presence in the culture

Grierson in Conclusion

• Idea of documentary as public service • Documentaries should make social statements about the historical, modern world; not about preserving the traditions of long ago or exploring personal subjectivities - should directly address world external to us • Synthesis of Lippman's diagnosis of the problem and Dewey's solution Use the tool for good, educate the populace • Can operate within institutions of Capitalist/Democratic System of Government, tied up in bureaucracy - all essential components of a democratic system EMB, GPO, NFB • Expository Mode

The Interrotron

• Invented by Errol Morris, postmodernist filmmaker • By shooting through a simple two-way mirror with a video monitor mounted under the camera lens, Morris can film his subject and make eye contact with him/her from the exact same angle. Also, provides interviewee with continuous eye contact with Morris.

Characteristics of the Essay Film: Text, Language (Voice-Over)

• Language plays an important role in essay films • Essay films usually have a lot of words, in the forms of a text - spoken, subtitled, intertitled. (Language does more work in terms of making meaning Ex: Night and Fog

Explosion Possible Through - Digital Technology

• Made broadcast quality images affordable. Digital editing platforms like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere allowed filmmakers to make sophisticated docs with little money • Changed structure of finding: Before digital, filmmakers needed capital for production, so secured distribution in advance through traditional venues (PBS, HBO, pay cable) • With digital, filmmakers could afford to shoot first and figure out distribution later

Frederick Wiseman

• Not part of Drew & Associates • First film: Titicut Follies (1967), a study of the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Bridgewater, a mental institution for criminally insane, "defective delinquents," alcoholics, narcotics addicts, sexual deviates, and juvenile offenders • After the film was released, it became the subject of litigation and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts banned its showing for 25 years The Wiseman Project: • Mission to document the bureaucracies and social realities of various American institutions • Provide panoramic portrait of American life Welfare: Not interested in giving viewer a tutorial in how the system works exactly, enter each scene in the midst of each problem • Modular structure drops you in, each section becomes a little problem for you to solve • Do not adopt the standpoint of the Welfare caseworker - instead, wonder how each case will be solved • Despite the variance in each case, underlining baseline that the system is formulaic - need more paperwork, need another appointment, problem is urgent Even if you don't learn about system, learn experience of a bureaucracy, waiting, more important to get things done the first time - very hard to fix the problem • Part of why the system doesn't work - by definition, if you need to be on welfare, other social problems too (multiplication of problems) • Complicated portrait of humanity • Welfare system as a cross-section of humanity • The race conversation

Social Documentary and the Expository Mode & John Grierson, "The Father of Documentary" (coined the term, formalizes the concept)

• Only directed one film during his entire career, Drifters (1929) • Importance to film history has more to do with his theoretical writings about film and his administrative work than his filmmaking skills • Before Grierson, few conceived of documentary as a form of public education, as a public service; after Grierson, this conception of documentary became the norm • Documentary films = social statements designed to inform people about the world they live in • Major influence on = WWII films; contemporary docs about social problems; the evening news • One of the first to link documentary with the functioning of the capitalist and democratic state, and to develop a coherent theory of documentary practice that filmmakers could read and learn from

Characteristics of the Essay Film: Digression, Repetition, Dispersion

• Tendency toward digression, fragmentation, repetition, and complication rather than an elegant sense of composition • Just as in real life, thought can abandon its theme, forget where it's going, stop to follow different tangents, question its own inner workings, wonder about sources of knowledge, or exploit incidental possibilities Ex: Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1989)

Voice and Three Types

• The film's point of view towards the material •Is the film making a particular argument or advocating a particular perspective? What seems to be the film's "take" or "position" on the events that it depicts? •Three kinds of voice, based on the degree of narrational authority assumed by the film (How much editorializing, or telling you what to think, does the film do?): Formal, Open, Poetic

"Performance"

• The tradition of acting as a way to bring heightened emotional investment to a situation or a role • Try to make sense of what a certain situation or experience feels like. Want us to feel on a visceral level more than understand on a conceptual level • Rely less heavily on argument than suggestion or implication. Ideas are not described as much as evoked

Emphasis

• The ways in which the film assigns weight and importance to particular elements •Emphasis can come through the ordering of events or stylistic devices, like framing, focus, lightning, color, etc. • The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston, 1945) Though the Americans won the battle, does not say it was a glorious victory. Instead, speech about how there will be 1,000 more battles like this one, how precious the lives were that were lost - emphasizes the gravity of the situation as opposed to a more propagandistic view

Order

• The ways in which the film orders real-world events to formulate a structure of information (A, B, C....or C, B, A) •Depending on the order, the film can establish different relationships between the events (causal, chronological, categorical) Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989) • Though the events didn't occur chronologically, Moore tried to link Flint's half-hearted measures to address unemployment and his attempts to hold the GM CEO accountable

Defining Postmodernism?

Defining "postmodernism" is something of a dubious notion or fool's errand - some people insist it doesn't even exist- but... 1. Hyperrealism and Simulacra 2. Globalization, Hybridization, decontextualization 3. Recycling, pastiche and the dissolution of high v. low 4. Radical Skepticism

Documentary as a sliding scale

Different ways of thinking about the world Observational Cinema • For many, what they think of as documentary • Welfare • A scientific perspective on reality - what is real is what we can observe Participatory • You experience reality not be observing it, but participating in it • Engagement with reality Performative • For some filmmakers, reality is situational, the only way you can speak to certain issues is in a very subjective, embodied, personal way - embodied knowledge that is very different from book facts Expository • Historical real - things we can point to, there is a state of affairs that exists in the world and we can actively communicate this information to people • Can point to causal factors to certain things Poetic • Oblique approach - where its about experience and formal rigor or aestheticism People just prioritize them "Truth claims" Relativist - there is no "Truth" - there is my truth, your truth • Conflicting notions of truth - constantly looking for bias • Good - opens you up to different perspectives, especially in regard to identity • Bad - "fake news", we're all constantly in paly, nothing to hold on to and a anything goes Didactic Approach • I know the world, I will tell you about it, there is a historical real out there • Bad - excludes certain subject positions, Universalizes truth • Good - maybe there are some important historical facts that we can point to and galvanize us into action There can be something in the middle

The Historical Turn

Documentarians increasingly turned to history for their subjects to link the past with the present in a meaningful way • By understanding historical circumstances, we could better understand the politics of the present • Down with Purity~ Wiseman's style, for instance • Pick an institution, two-man crew, no voice-over, no non-diegetic music, presence of filmmaker unacknowledged, etc.

Automatic Audience

Documentaries have a guaranteed audience since people do not need to leave their home or pay admission

The Sensory Ethnography Lab

In 2006, Lucien Castiang-Taylor established Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), a collaboration between the Departments of Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies • A PhD program in Visual Anthropology where you also need to produce audiovisual art work for your degree • Filmmaker/scholars have nurtured a cadre of adventurous filmmakers interested in using cinema to provide sensory experiences of cultural practices in the process of transformation which tends to mean more radical experimental techniques • How work is physically embodied, not a human centric worldview

Financial Support

News divisions were subsidized by entertainment programming • Documentary production had guaranteed support • FCC required broadcasters to have a certain amount of public affairs/education programming

13th (Ava Duvernay, 2016)

Thesis • Systematic racial discrimination has always existed, changed over time • 13th amendment - abolishes slavery, but except as a punishment for crime • Criminality is baked into slavery - through this loophole, you can shift the parameters of racial discrimination, system of control to keep white power structures in place and African Americans disenfranchised Streamlined, complex mode of argumentation • Relentless pace, argument seems to escalate and build strongly on each part • Interviewees always make a point - fast track behind it; staging of interviews - loves head room, in vast warehouse space - streamlined economy of argumentation, rapid-fire statements from these smart people - exhilaration of knowledge • Moves through a lot of history Structure • Begins chronologically, becomes categorical after Clinton's presidency • Chronological Starts with slavery in the 19th century, Birth of a Nation, Jim Crow, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton • Categorical ALEC, for-profit prisons, police brutality and Black Lives Matter, the decimation of Black leadership • Feeling of momentum, everything is connected, planting seeds that play out later What is wrong with documentary as a teaching tool? • Criticism - doesn't push the language of documentary formally into a new place • But, goes back to its original Grierson-ian moment - this is a public service

Documentaries have an ethical dimension

When you engage with the historical world, you are bound up in the issues of ethics • Privileged - documentary form is tied up in ethics • In narrative film, decisions to use formal techniques to convey narrative • In documentary, these forms are so bound up in the politics of representation • These decisions matter in terms of the argument you are trying to make and the case you are trying to present Ultimately, yes these things are about documentary, a kind of filmmaking, they are ways of being in the world and understanding knowledge, what is real and not, what is true and not, and how to evaluate what people are saying about the world