- from the street to a house, from a house to the street
- inside/outside
- home vs house vs streets
- safety vs insecurity
- lonliness vs community
- transitions
- journey- beginning to end
- roads to where?
- buses, cars, traffic
I’ll explain this further….
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: bastardy, inspiration, research, review, watching
Yesterday I realised that I was completely lost with our project, well not completely lost, just completely uninspired because I could not see our documentary. I could not visualise it. When Liam was talking to us about our treatment I just thought how underwhelming it was, and how it lacked vision and I totally blame myself for this. And then something extraordinary happened- I watched Bastardy and then could see our documentary, could literally see how it would shape out. And then something else happened that was truly amazing I went to the film’s website to find out more and there was a detailed section discussing the making of the film in terms of structure and visual design, soundtrack and sound design and I realised that all my angst about our documentary had just vanished into a cloud of smoke far, far away from me. In other words I am completely inspired.
And why you ask? Here is why. What I’ve always wanted to do with our documentary was for it to be rough, verite style with lots of hand-held camera linked to more professional yet natural interviews and I got this from Bastardy. This is how the director describes this visual style:
A mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic story of one man’s life, BASTARDY is cyclical in structure – beginning and ending in vérité style with Jack roaming the streets of Melbourne in the present day. In this way he is seen as an almost anonymous character coming to the fore for the duration of the film and then remerging with the landscape again at the film’s conclusion.
There is this clear sense of justification in what Amiel has done how his visual style reflects the character. This is what I want our documentary to be in every way shape and form, the style needs to deeply carry the persona of the character. The style of Bastardy was a hand-full of archival footage and photos, a hand-full of natural interviews, a hand-full of observational footage and a hand-full of metaphoric images. It was a rollercoaster adventure which mimicked Jack’s life, the life of a homeless Aborigine that really was never still. In this sense the style of the film humanised the character, almost like the style was controlled by the character.
The same goes for the sound design of the film, where Amiel describes it as
…a very particular type of music to reflect Jack’s bowerbird-esque character
I’ve got to say it must have been easy for the director as Jack provided a lot of the soundtrack as he was a busker on the streets of Melbourne so yeah that’s pretty lucky. However, the music really resonated with me it was this perfect match between director and character and character and film. A perfectly tied together humanistic film.
A film that was not afraid to take risks. It is obvious throughout the film that the director and Jack (the homeless man) share this amazing relationship. There is this poignant moment in the film that springs to mind where you hear the director speak off-screen asking Jack if he has stolen a ring and laptop off a woman because she had asked the director. The director informs Jack that the woman has agreed that if he gives back the ring the woman will not press charges. It is the instance the Jack admits it to the director and camera that he has that you realise this extraordinary bond between the two men that totally destroy the common hierarchy of director above subject. It’s on very equal grounds, which I think says a lot about the film since both people live such very different lives. Amiel Courtin-Wilson as a quite successful filmmaker and this homeless heroin addict.
To me this says that when we look at homelessness we need to throw away all this misconceptions and start to realise that we’re all people functioning in the world and trying to get by, we all approach hurdles, except for homeless people these hurdles are larger than we could ever expect. And what really suprised me about the doco was that we never found out how Jack became homeless and to me it was irrelevant to the story, because Jack was a character that really lived in the present.
I will finish by saying that there were issues I did have with this film, especially how it seemed that the filmmaker was trying too much to change Jack’s life to protect him from certain realities. Even though I thought the sections in the film where we directly hear a conversation between filmmaker and subject were highly profound, I thought that the filmmaker maybe impeded too much, which was slightly distracting for me anyway.
In saying this I learnt so much and now have lots of fresh ideas for our own documentary in terms of capturing moments of poignancy and trying to capture that even though this woman is homeless doesn’t mean that we should approach her story carefully, well we obviously need to be ethical but we need to get the information, and be sure to get to the heart of the story and capture this sense of everyday people.
Reference:
Bastardy Documentary 2009, ‘Making the Film,’ Bastardy, viewed 18 August, 2010,
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: documentary, form, inspiration, pawel pawlikowski, reading
The Pawel Pawlikowski reading for week two emphasised the importance of form in documentary filmmaking. Pawlikowski suggests that documentary filmmakers need to concentrate on the film-making of their docos, and let that be their primary role rather than that of the role of a recorder. It is almost impossible to create an entirely new take on something in terms of recording, when in the media industry there is so much information, that a story you find interesting could be increasingly dull to someone who’s seen that strory done a million times before. Pawlikowski suggests that this why form is increasingly important, as it can set your documentary apart from the others, not in terms of content, but in terms of form. He therefore states that what is vitally important is the ‘personal vision of the director’ (pg. 389). It is about findng away of telling the story that is relevant to you as a filmmaker and expressing this through a form that is relevant to your take on the subject. Evidently this is hard because we are in a group situation and therefore hard to come to a point where your group members are equally interested or excited about doing something and all want to view the subject in a similar way. In group work there is always compromise, unless your all on the same wave length. What I learnt in True Lies was this need for an interesting take on the subject, a real think about the form of the doco, because a lot of the docos we watched were relying on a certain form in order to tell the story in the best and most convincing manner.
destruction of homes in John Smith's Blight
One of the most amazing docos we watched in True Lies was a short doco called ‘Blight’ (John Smith 1996), which was a performative documentary and totally threw apart what I viewed as a documentary. It didn’t show any subjects, but just repeated different people’s stories and poems in an abstract mess of voices over images of destruction; houses being knocked down, highways being built. It was a comment on the destruction of houses for the building of a new highway. This simple story of destruction and growth, highlighted by a montage of changing images accompanied by voice-over is a prime example of the importance of form in spinning a different view on a subject that’s relatively simple and done before.
It shows how documentaries can be suprising and beautiful, that force you to think not through ‘words or rhetoric’ (pg. 289) but through the form itself. It’s about extracting information from the form. You are not explicitly told something but asked to investigate in a poetic manner. Lastly Pawlikowski makes a point about documentary that makes me excited to make documentaries, being the freedom and fun that you can take from documentary filmmaking. You are not bounded in the rules of fiction filmmaking, but are given a freedom to explore in anyway that will best represent your subject. I actually cannot wait to get into the process and make something that plays with form, like ‘Tarnation’ or ‘Blight’ because I think they stretch what documentary can be and are really creative approaches that have taken risks and aren’t affraid at being different.
Reference:
Pawel Pawlikowski. In MacDonald, K & Cousins, M. Imagining reality, (p. 389-392). London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
