Filed under: tv2 | Tags: documentary, observational documentary, shot exercise, watching
A simple observational photograph shows how people are constantly aware of cameras, whilst some are not
Last week was all about observational documentary. Therefore this blog post is going to be on last weeks tute. In terms of that short doco we watched, which I thought was really great and our own shot at being observational, which I learnt a lot from.
We watched this German documentary, but I have no idea what it was called, which basically showed a cheering crowd at a soccer game. What was great about this documentary was the cameras ability to capture these fantastic facial expressions from the leader of the crowd. We analysed this little section in class and realised how attuned the camera operator must have been. We established that the camera must have been positioned at a distance to the man screaming through his microphone, and therefore would have been zoomed in. Therefore, it was amazing how the camera carefully and smoothly moved to mimic the subtle head movements of this screaming spectator to capture every thrilling moment. It reminded me about how difficult it is to maneuver a camera and adjust it to little movements that will ultimately make your documentary better. In this instance if these little movements weren’t made it would miss the intensity because the framing would be off. What I also liked about this documentary was that you could feel what was happening in the game without having to see it and without even wanting to see it. In the end I was just amazed by the complete enthusiasm of these diehard fans that seeing the game would have been completely redundant, because it doesn’t matter. I got the sense that coming to the game was more about being with other diehard fans than watching the game itself.
After we watched this we went and did our own personal observational shoot. What it made me realise was how completely unlikely Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967) was and how impossible it is to capture reality by just looking, without people realising you are there. In True Lies last semester we studied observational documentary as a form and now I can see how much editing must go into these projects. We filmed in a really busy corridor in RMIT because we wanted to capture a sense of frantic-ness. We set up the camera in the corner and set up ourselves in an unobtrusive place. I was boom operator. What I found was that when you’re in filming mode how much you study people, and how everything is fascinating from three girls studying a poster with no realisation of the camera, to the people that shuffle past the camera trying to hide from it to all the people that blatantly wave at the camera, looked confused by the camera, etc. Yet, there is this obvious awareness that it was there. To me it makes me realise that something like Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back where all of the people seem to not notice the camera is even there, must have a lot edited out of it, because to me in our exercise where the camera was placed quite a distance away I would say a majority of people realised the camera was there, which made the people that didn’t even more fascinating.
When I think about editing this piece I would like to capture this sort of juxtaposition between people that are obliviously unaware to people that scream through their movements to the camera. It makes me think of the impossibility of capturing something where nobody looks at the camera, and therefore emphasises how much these observational documentary filmmakers relied on their editing skills. I loved this exercise and can’t wait to see the footage that Sarah and Meenal shot.
References:
D.A Pennebaker, Dont Look Back, 1967
Photo source:
Hunter-Desportes, Silver Meteor Observation Lounge, flickr, CC-Attribution, http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdport/3402550460/in/photostream/
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: Colossal Youth, Pedro Costa, research, site research, watching
So I’ve disappeared from the blogging world temporarly due to a rather strange loss of internet connection, when someone else moved into my house. It’s been a very stressful few days. Anywho I’m back with some more research from something I watched.
Colossal Youth is a film by a Portugese director named Pedro Costa, and a selected scene commentary is found on a DVD package called Letters from Fontaihas: Supplements, which is a Criterion Collection DVD, which is nice as it has a little book of essays that accompany it.
This will probably lead into a string of blog posts surrounding these films, because what I found is this rather strange mix between documentary and fiction. Colossal Youth is not a documentary, it is a feature film with real people, and real stories. Yet, not considered a documentary. I was really glad I watched this rather small scene analysis with commentary, as I don’t have time to watch a 170 minute film at the moment.
What I learnt from this is ways of making everything look spectacular and still retain this level of humanism, of true human stories embedded under a veneer of surrealism. For instance, there is one scene that is analysed, which shows the protagonist next to all these paintings of higher society in an art gallery. Followed by this is the protagonist sitting on an eleaborate day lounge that mimics the paintings that previously he sat ajar to. These shots of him on this lounge are extraordinary, high contrast cinematography, where the lighting sits above the subject only highlighting him on the couch and nothing else. As the voice commentary says this scene is making a large comment on different class structures, where this man who has lost everything is now placed in this unknown situation and remarkably looks like he fits in even though he looks uncomfortably.
Even though this film is not a documentary it draws on a lot of the things that Robin has been mentioning in his cinematography lectures, questions regarding aesthetics in documentary. There is no reason why a documentary cannot look spectacular and still have a large degree of truth and humanism embedded in it.
This film made me think about how we approach our doco and reminded me to really listen to what the woman has to say and think of ways to metaphorically embed this into our film. As I’ve learnt through various research this idea of homeless women is this rather invisible and hidden part of our society, and I would love to have this as a dominant theme throughout our documentary. I was talking to the case manager (who happens to be my mum) at the house and she told me that there are many places for homeless men and very few for homeless women, and how much of an injustice this is. She also told me to always focus on what their predicament is, which gave me a lot to draw from and to always think about how this has happened to them.
Through watching I gain this overwhelming sense of inspiration of things to look for. It also made me want to have our documentary filled with light and colour, rather than being dark and moody, because these women are so used to be a hidden entity and I think it would be worthwhile to show them in full shining colour. Show that this is an issue that shouldn’t be hidden any longer.
Colossal Youth taught me to look for the political and look for all these themes, and show them rather than tell them. Maybe, it’s a good idea to change places, to have the women in somewhere unknown, or to have cutaways to things that link to what the woman is saying on a subtly metaphoric level.
In the blurb on the digital dossier disc, it explains how this documentary series shows an excellent example of what Paul Kriwaczek describes as the only documentary worth making: the conflict between intention and obstruction. From what I saw from the snippet in the digital dossier is that it is epitomic of this idea, you can already see this lining up. Through the voice over this is achieved, we meet two different homeless men and the voice over gives a brief outline of their issues. For example, the first man selling the BIG ISSUE is described as being addicted to drugs and alcohol and served time for manslaughter, whilst the second man’s predicament is that he relies on the support of the state and has for all his adult life. It is obvious that these two men struggle, and with struggle comes this sense of intention for a better life, yet riddled with the constant drawbacks of their own addictions and problems, which resulted from their homelessness that forms into this sense obstruction. Therefore, what I would say is that there is two levels of intention/obstruction in this film one that forms around the participants and the choir and the intention of forming a choir with the homeless and the inevitable obstruction that comes from certain facets of being homeless and having to commit to something. On a second level is the personal intentions and obstuctions of the homeless men and women themselves. This multi-layered format ensures depth within the documentary and forces it to be the epitome of Paul Kriwaczek’s documentary.
In the blurb prior to the film on the digi doss was to think about the voice over and asks two questions: Is it necessary? In your view does it add or subtract from the emotional power of the work? In my opinion I think that the voice over is mis-used and wrong within the documentary. I feel like it puts this rather strange hierarchy of power within the work that is unfitting to the content of the documentary. The voice is extremely formal and feels to me rather pretentious, which is completely bizaar, it talks about the different issues of the men and women with no emotion, which I feel draws away from the human side of the documentary. I also thought that what the voice over said didn’t really need to be said, or could be said differently. For instance, I don’t think it is necessary for the voice over to say this man suffers from alcoholism and drug addiction. For me this is unnecessary and again puts the voice over above the people in the hierarchy of knowledge. Also I want to feel this information not as a fact, but as representative of this person’s predicament. The issue is not that this person is an alcoholic and addicted to drugs but how we got here in the first place, why has this person turned to these measures, that’s the issue. For me the snippet that I saw was too factual and I felt it was completely detached from the homeless people, maybe this is what it was going for, but I didn’t feel close enough to feel sympathy or to feel what these people are going through and I think this was largely due to the voice over.
In terms of our documentary I think it will be completely unnecessary to have a voice over, because I feel nothing is fact and nothing should be told as a fact by us whoreally are no ‘experts’ on the issue. These women will know a hell of a lot more about being homeless than we ever will. We want to leave the story with them and do our best to compliment their story with images that correlate imaginatively to create a dynamically beautiful, humanistic, political story about this hidden aspect of homeless women. However, in terms of what Paul Kriwaczek claims as this conflict between intention and obstruction is inevitable, I think we will get this without even looking for it because over the few weeks that I’ve been there you see how these women rise and fall on a daily basis, so I’m sure their lives will be filled with more dramatic moments of these.
References:
Paul Kriwaczek, Documentary for the Small Screen, Oxford: Focus Press, 2007.
Jason Stephens, Fremantle Media Australia, Choir of Hard Knocks, Made for RMIT University.
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,
Interview Exercise from Hannah Brasier on Vimeo.
My reflections on this exercise can be found here.
The Lumiere’s brothers first film, which was a documentary was shot more than once. This was due to aesthetic reasons, rather than for the sake of content. The people leaving the factory were dressed purposely in a certain way and told not to look at the camera. People actually care what things look like.
We need to look for certain aesthetic things to capture. Things that metaphorically capture something that you can use in your documentary.
French documentary 1930: Jean Vigo
Expressive techniques: patterns
Critical of tourism
Documentary portrait view
No film is too personal. An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.
Observational Documentary:
Salesman (1968)
dir. David Maysles
About the church and religion. Uses subtitles to express who people are, what their role is.
They refused to influence their subjects, remained detached.
Example of direct cinema
Wrong to think that they mainly looked and listened. It is obviously manipulated.
Intention: Narrative structure around the great American novel, seeing American culture through Maysles’s eyes. Achieved through editing.
What is a documentary aesthetic? How do you shoot something ‘doco style’?
Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971)
From the East (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
She wanted to shoot everything, leave nothing out. This was her approach, she wanted to show what was the same about these group of countries. Recording the sounds of the land.
Aesthetic: a moving panorama, sound cutting in and out, following the people, captivating.
What is a sound aesthetic?
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006)
Films a soccer game. Amazing loud captivating sound. Cutting in and out between the on the pitch sounds and audience. Running footsteps, ball richocheting off foot and heads. Booming sound. Exciting! Music kicks in accompanied by the sounds on the pitch only, the puffing of players, ball movement, etc. Very particular audio aesthetic. Shows the possibilities of how to use sound.
Not something you necessarily pre-determine, but you need to have a lot of options open. Think about themes and motifs that you can follow. Be constantly aware of patterns. They don’t have to have interviews, but they can.
Interview:
Unexpected interview content. Find stuff along the way.
Provocative conclusion. The interviewee comes to a conclusion as he is being interviewed.
Filed under: tv2 | Tags: documentary, man on wire, rabiger, reading, watching
Last semester in True Lies we covered documentary in so much depth that I feel like I have a massive head start coming into this course, well along with every other person that studies cinema as their major. However, what I did learn from our first reading ‘A Search for the Feeling of Being There’ is switching my brain from the study of documentary to the making of documentary. Two rather seperate things, well it’s putting what have learnt into practice. Richard Leacock goes through the challenges in making a documentary, often correlating to the problem with just informing rather than involving the audience. Stronger documentaries involve the audience, make them feel like they are part of something bigger. It’s the feeling of “being there” as Leacock puts it. One documentary that I watched recently really engaged me and drew me into it, the film was called Man on Wire (James March 2008), which followed Philippe Petit’s tipewalk adventure between the two towers. The absurdidity and daring qualities of Petit drew me straight into the film and drew on notions of documentary that are pointed out in the second reading ‘The Director’s Role’ where the documentary is about the human spirit done in an exciting and lyrical way that correlates with the tipewalking itself.
Even though the film shows the facts, through archival footage and the basics of the exploration it delves into Petit’s soul and brings the excitement straight from him into the audience from the interviews, where he is prancing around in reenactment to the visual reenactments of them breaking into the twin towers, where you fear what they fear. It is truly a film where the common person ‘shakes up society’ (pg. 3, The Director’s Role).
To step back a bit into making our own documentaries there were some fantastic tips, especially in Leacock’s reading, concerning what a documentary maker looks for and how to treat your subjects. As a documentary filmmaker we have to be aware that ‘everything you do is liable to destroy’ spontaneity, and that to capture spontanaeity the actuality of what your capturing has to exist. Everytime the camera is present, you are present, someone from your crew is present you are playing with actuality, whether you are trying to create your own, or trying to capture spontaneity.
The point about your subject is getting to know your subject and gaining some type of ‘mutual respect.’ I think this is vitally important, however can be undone quite quickly, if you want to get the most out of your subject they have to trust you to some degree, unless you purposely don’t want them to. It really depends what type of documentary you are making in terms of how to treat your subjects, however we always need to think of ethics and the power relations present. The camera ‘gives you power’ (pg. 3, The Director’s Role) and I’m imagining that people can get very caught up in it, where the subjects become second to what your own aim is.
In terms, of week one’s readings I’ve managed to grasp with how difficult it is to involve your audience rather than simply inform them and this will definitely come some form of motto in terms of the style and approach I take to making my own documentary.
References:
Rabiger, M. The Director’s Role : Directing the documentary, (p. 3-7). 4th ed. Burlington: Focal Press, 2004.
Tobias, M. (ed.). The search for reality : the art of documentary filmmaking, (p. 43-50). CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1998.
