After Gina did the voice-over and we put it into the cut originally I thought it would be alright, however when I got home I realised that it totally killed the mood of our entire documentary turning way too current affairsy. Luckily over night I had another idea to creatively use text to get the message across even stronger.
When Gina and I looked through the footage yesterday we realised there were so manygreat shots of Maggie’s emotion when she doesn’t speak, that convey a lot of raw emotion and make Maggie more three dimensional. I thought, with some inspiration from Tarnation that we could intermingle text with footage of Maggie’s interview. One of the things that Liam pointed out was that there was not a lot of movement from Maggie and I think in a way this gives Maggie more movement as we show her outside, standing up and looking directly at the camera. We also added some overlays later on that shows her curiously looking around the room as we set up. I think these add little moments of reflexivity and help make our documentary more sophisticated.
Today, I also found a really great track to put to the text sequence that Sarah and I worked to cut the sequence with the music to make it stronger. I was really glad Sarah came in and gave this idea as it makes the opening section of our documentary much stronger. We have also used the text quite dynamically by allowing it to cut in over the image and then the image to go away and have the text on black. Using text in this way makes it more than just text, but makes it a visual component as well, which I think is really important. It also makes a more substantial beginning to our documentary and gives it more life.
Yesterday, we got some feedback from a few co-media students who said that we need to break it up. We need to have a break from her talking and we need it to linger longer. Gina and I thought that perhaps we were too keen to cut Maggie’s running monologues down and making them precise. However, now after we got this feedback I realised that perhaps we need to have more space, allow for space, especially since Maggies speaks very quickly and therefore give the audience time to catch up and think, yet also linger with Maggie.
After I’d done the beginning section we really are on our finishing touches, which include colour correction and audio mix. Sarah and Meenal were set to finish the colour correction today and Gina and everyone that is there on Monday will do the audio mix. I do really think that it’s coming together really nicely. A huge leap has been taken since our rough cut.
A few weeks ago we watched a snippet of this documentary in a lecture and I was really captivated by the different materials and textures used and was interested in the concept that he had edited the whole film in iMovie and was about him filming himself, since he was eleven. In watching the film I was really cpativated about the different moods that was conveyed through the film and therefore his approach on genre, which I couldn’t even begin to describe because it really was a rollercoaster ride of vision, sound, emotions… I really felt that the movie was just Jonathan’s creative vision and life encapsulated in film. What really impressed me was the way sound was used to create different moods, for instance in a photo montage of Jonathan’s early years the music is a light and vibrant pop song carry a light connotation, which starkly contrasts to the tension building horror like shrieking music, which is heard as a transition into a rougher or shocking part of Jonathan’s life. I really enjoyed this aspect of the film, which contextualised the next scene and allowed you to feel the different feelings that Jonathan has experienced through his life according the the sonic shifts.
I also liked the textual qualities to the film. In terms of the literal text that carried the story forward, usually with the accompaniment of photographs. It showed that just because you don’t have literal footage of that moment doesn’t mean leave it out as you may have other ways to express these parts of the story without dragging them out. I also thought that these inserts served a nice transitional function, in terms of breaking up the extremely rough footage with something a little more polished. These montages of text also allowed the story to reaccuringly flow forwards.
However, there is something else that I would like to bring up. As I was sitting watching this film with a few friends I realised how much they didn’t understand the film because they did not understand the metaphorical connections Jonathan was making through inserting rather random footage, which suggests to me that to truly understand this film you need a wide grasp of cinema. One of these instances that really stood out quite powerfully for me was the footage from Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the scene in which the neighbours are doing a devil worship ritual. This makes such an extremely harsh comment on Jonathan’s grandparent’s Rosemary (see the connection) and Adolph who are highly religious. This simple juxtaposition makes such as profound comment upon religion being evil, where worshipping God is equivalent to Devil worship. It presents the same outcomes, with Renee being the victim rather than Rosemary in Rosemary’s baby. These connections are present throughout the film that profoundly comment on the realities of Jonathan’s life.
As much as I loved this film I was constantly aware that we were seeing Jonathan’s world through the eye’s of Jonathan, which lead to an extremely potent amount of subjectivity. Even though there were facts given, which represented certain factual realities such as Renee’s shock-treatments insisted by her parents and her lithium overdose it becomes patently clear that Renee is a somewhat unreliable narrator due to her mental position. Jonathan is highly biased painting Rosemary and Adolph as the antagonists and Renee as the victim of so many levels of abuse. Even though I do not doubt for a second that there was a high amount of misjustice done to Renee it is hard to know how much, since Rosemary and Adolph are painted so negatively, especially in that almost grotesque close-up interview where Jonathan confronts Adolph on the issues of Renee’s abuse. The reflexivity aids in helping Jonathan’s cause, yet we are highly aware that Jonathan is on his mother’s side, and always will be.
And one last thing to say. The ending was something I was really impressed by as it showed how Jonathan’s life will never be a closed-up resolution because he feels he cannot escape his mother. The ending is happy as the images show them dancing along the beach, but it is stripped back from the resoluted conclusion through this comment by Jonathan, that he can’t escape his mother’s illness. This links really nicely with lots of things Liam has been stating on trying to avoid resolving problems, as some if not all problems will always linger.
The thing that I most learnt with this doco is the endless possibilities of what you can do and to not be afraid to do them. There is so much you can achieve in the editing suite, even if you are only using iMovie. Even though I think Jonathan went slightly overboard with the visual insanity for his story it worked as it reflected the chaos that absorbed his life, and made you as an audience feel like you were part of it.
Film reference:
Caouette, J 2003. Tarnation.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: domination, lecture, review, tarnation, the gleaners and i
In this week’s lecture we went through the creative process behind documentary filmmaking, and ways to go beyond simply informing by inserting the idea of ‘the self’ into documentary filmmaking. We watched two documentary snippets and one of last year’s documentaries ‘Domination.’ I want to do a quick little analysis/review thing of the snippets I saw and relate them to some things brought up in the lecture.
The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
We watched this documentary last year in Introduction to Cinema Studies and apart from not particularly liking the film nor the subject matter. I think there are some really interesting things going on in this film that weren’t shown in the snippet in the lecture. In the lecture the snippet shown was the very beginning of the film, where Vardas begins to interview older people on the tradition notion of gleaning. However, there are moments left in that would normally be ‘cut’ out, such as when one of the older women walks out of the frame claiming she is embarrassed. The documentary is not afraid to mix different genres and to experiment from the French hip hop song at the end of the snippet to the very personal moments where Varda reflexively comments on age through looking at the wrinkles on her hands and plays with her cat. This is how Varda places herself within the context of the film, and the film becomes as much about her as it does about the gleaners. In watching this snippet I have a new appreciation of the film and what Varda was trying to achieve in terms of relating gleaning to the art of documentary making and also making it highly personal.
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2004)
This film really amazed me and as soon as I can get a copy from the library I will watch this doco. The snippet we saw in class showed how much can be done with the documentary and how little you have to apply filmic rules in terms of quality. The first snippet was a slide show of images with subtitles over the top explaining Jonathan’s life, which shows how dynamically you can use still images with the simple addition of a few words to accompany the fleeing images. However, the next snippet also showed how intrinsically personal a documentary can be, where Jonathan places himself at the heart of the film. As the camera shakily captures images framed poorly, sometimes with his or his mum’s heads chopped off it doesn’t detract, in fact I would argue that it adds to the emotional weight of the film. It reminds us of how young Jonathan as a filmmaker is and therefore keeps the interaction highly personal and emotionally captures the true relationship between son and mother as it doesn’t worry about how things are composed but keeps it natural. This snippet showed to me how sometimes it is better to let the technical perfection of a doco slide in order to capture something truly ‘real.’ It’s about thinking how you can aesthetically capture a moment to highlight the moment as ‘truthfully’ you can.
Domination
I can definitely see where Christine came from when she was suggesting that this film just doesn’t hit the mark as it sticks to the very surface of this character without even trying to go that little bit deeper. It doesn’t try at all. In fact I found this film highly uninventive, it felt very restrained, which seemes odd to me since their subject was so unrestrained, and seemed fairly free to talk about her job, yet they just didn’t ask the right questions they didn’t try to uncover anything. I also thought the singular shot, with the occasional cross-over extremely distracting and I felt like the scene was very set up and unnatural. I wanted to see this woman in a natural environment away from all the sex toys. We didn’t get any other side to her. I felt like we were constantly waiting to see something different. Something to not only mix up the visuals but something else. The problem is there was no risk about it, all we got was a performance and we knew it was a performance.
What I learnt from all these films is the difficulties is making a good doco. Making it about you as a filmmaker, but also taking risks. You can’t make a good doco, without going above and beyond and searching for something that could make your doco amazingly interesting, but without making it too fake or contrived. I think there is a fine line between all these things and that it’s extremely difficult to create a great documentary because there are so many things to be constantly thinking about.
