The Cove

            Dolphin echolocation is a sound perhaps like no other. Its series of whistles, pops, buzzes and clicks is as diverse as they are unfamiliar. This is perhaps because we have no suitable human equivalent. Our world is highly visual, and it is visually saturated. Even shocking or sensational pictures eventually fade away as others take their places. Dolphin sonar, however, has no corollary and is notably persistent.

           

            Echolocation is used in The Cove as a means of grounding viewers in the participatory narrative. It’s strangely easy to dismiss the shocking footage of The Cove as something that occurs in some sort alternate reality.  Sound, then, is a way of locating that reality within our own.

Says Nichols, “The sense of bodily presence, rather than absence, that arises from sync sound exchanges between filmmaker and subject locates the filmmaker ‘on the scene.” It is a way of showing the filmmaker’s participation in actual life and engaging the viewer vicariously. Nichols continues, “ [in the participatory mode] we expect that what we will learn will hinge on the nature and quality of the encounter between filmmaker and subject. We may see as well as hear the filmmaker act and respond on the spot, in the same historical arena as the film’s subjects.” Viewers progress and learn alongside the filmmakers, and realize the filmmakers’ and therefore their own understanding is contingent on the participation of those making the film. The film is an exploration of a real-world problem unfolded gradually comparable to investigations of rape culture in Half the Sky.

The purpose of the film—true to its participatory roots—is to encourage its viewers to participate. The film seeks to keep them engaged through relevant pop culture references—Flipper, Sea World—and then by adding echolocation to the mix blends realities and demands active engagement instead of dispassionate observation. Whether this ploy succeeds is a matter of individual choice.

The Thin Blue Line

            The Thin Blue Line is an interesting case of a documentary that expresses various modes. Its heavy use of  “talking head” interviews borrows from the expository and is reminiscent of maker Errol Morris’s later films like The Fog of War. It has a number of re-enacted scenes that evoke the performative mode, played and replayed again and again from different stories and perspectives. It is poetic as is pairs shots of the Dallas skyline with  Randall Adams’s assertions that Dallas is like “hell on earth.” It is perhaps the participatory mode, however, that The Thin Blue Line most closely follows.

Blue Line does differ from other examples of participatory documentary. He is not featured prominently in the film as Michael Moore is in his, he doesn’t seek sensational or publicity-seeking tactics (another signature Moore trait.)  Instead, he sits behind the camera and is for the most part neither seen nor heard.  Nor does Morris visibly engage with authorities trying to break a strike as does Barbara Kopple in Harlan County, USA. Nevertheless, he is invisibly poking and prying at something he is struggling to understand and strongly despises: the lifelong imprisonment of an innocent man for a murder he did not commit.

            Here, we watch him not just observe the situation and tell us what occurred. Instead, Morris is constantly grilling different interviewees about their alleged stories, asking them again, then exposing inconsistencies in all accounts by matching stories of the “same” events together. He isn’t just listening, but urging viewers to become aware of what he perceives as a staggering injustice.  Says Nichols, “Participatory documentary gives us a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result.” We suspect Morris’s involvement runs deep but we don’t really get the aforementioned sense in The Thin Blue Line until the film’s last chilling sequence when we hear Morris on tape interviewing David Harris. Morris asks a question, receives a vague response, asks a clarifying question, receives a clearer, more troubling response, probes, gets what is nearly a confession, and so forth.  We can feel the tenseness of the encounter, and are left to draw our own conclusions about which of all the versions of truth presented is the most true.

           

            The participatory nature of Blue Line is perhaps clearest when its distribution and exhibition are taken into account. Less than a year after the film was first shown, Randall Adams was freed from a life in prison. Viewers had not only seen but acted, and the world was a different place—if only for one man—as a consequence.

Overheard

http://neiljreed.wix.com/overheard

Dissonance (Doc Project 3)

The idea behind this project was to provide a way of exploring some of the orphaned footage I have been collecting opportunistically and lazily over the past couple of months. As I had no hand in the creation of the footage itself, deciding how I wanted to relate to it was an interesting prospect.

The essayistic mode seemed quite adequate for this exploration. There is a tangential, forgiving quality to the essayistic which lends to it spending more time than it ought in places, and that's OK. Don't know the answer to your question? That's OK. Don't know what your question is? That's OK, too.

I had a number of ideas--about lost and found things, about the illusion of digital privacy, collecting, foraging, hoarding--while I enjoyed these ideas, it wasn't practical to explore them in the scope of this project. Dissonance, however--dissonance I could deal with.

The idea of how to invoke dissonance came out of not knowing what music was being played as my unwitting subject danced. A safe bet was pairing him with music that was culturally and stylistically different. To my delight and surprise, the juxtaposition with a blind Ecuadorian accordionist created an altogether different effect than I'd intended. (Sad note: She'll never see this film, and he'll never hear it. Whether this is a tragedy or a mercy remains unresolved by the world's top scientists.)

By employing the essayistic mode as Ross McElwee did in Sherman's March, I hoped to gain some sort of insight into an abstract idea. I also hoped to gain some sort of insight into myself, though besides the revelation I dance even worse than I'd supposed I still don't know what that might be.

One difficulty I have observed in employing the essayistic mode is knowing when to digress and when to shut up and cut. I feel this film needs to be tighter, but am not sure how. Maybe I'll make a film about it.

Online Response 8: The Essayistic Mode

When it comes to blending a variety of styles together into a cohesive narrative, there is no documentary form that surpasses the essayistic in breadth or flexibility of approaches. When I initially heard of the essayistic mode, it sounded as if it referred to a single, extended reflection on an idea or concept. As I have become more familiar with the form, I have realized it is as much about the process of discovering new and unexpected angles and approaches to an idea as it is about the idea itself. Says Fox, “This mode is an active one, in which a proposed idea or question is tested by a range of means and intersecting lines of argument.”In Sherman’s March, we watch Ross McElwee struggle through a variety of tactic, techniques—and people—as he tries to find his theme. Different people offer suggestions and ideas, some of which seem to be effective for a time, others which are charming, but flawed.

                There is an inherent reflexivity in McElwee’s work. Notes Fox again, “This ability for reflexive mirroring and constant reassessments is a longstanding tradition of the essayistic form.” The film has the potential to become almost as much about the creation of the film itself as it does about the original theme. These tangents and deviations within a film usually add to it. The essayistic mode is highly personal, and is in many senses a kind of journey. This journey may take on various physical or mental aspects as the filmmaker travels through space, time and rhetoric.

                In Stories We Tell, we watch Sarah struggle to make sense of her life through the complex interweavings of others’ lives. In Nobody’s Business, there is a similar sort of effort to sort through mismatched pieces of stories to (hopefully) find some kind of larger picture.

Essayistic Docs benefit from this personal journey and touch, but Fox notes that the best kind of essayistic documentaries shy of becoming self-absorbed and indulgent. “The art of a great written or documentary essay hinges upon integrating personal experience, history, and social critique with taut, kinetic progression toward a synthesizing claim.” The essayistic mode may digress, but it finds its greatest power when its final form shows careful thought and deliberate craft.

Online Response 7

Documentaries have been used since their inception as a means of calling awareness to different social issues and as a tool to effect social and political change.  It should be noted, however, that because this is the case does not mean necessarily that documentary seeks to represent underprivileged groups, or individuals and ideas whose aims and purpose fall outside the norm of the society they live in, though this also can be the case.
                The skewed power relationship between filmmaker and subject is a tricky thing to navigate. Nichols pointed out the early case of 1935’s Housing Problems, where it seemed that impoverished workers had been given their chance to speak out for what they wanted—to be moved out of the slums. This may have been what some of them wanted, but it was certainly what the Gas Light and Coke company wanted, whose goal of selling more gas dovetailed conveniently with the aims of the documentary and “desires” of its subjects.

                In an ideal screening world, each documentary would be able to be shown with the background of its creator and the social and political context of the subjects it depicts evident.  As documentaries often engage in bringing first-time awareness to a subject or problem—such as in Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line—this is rarely an option. What can be said in terms of representing a community/group of people is that while these social arrangements are often viewed as being the only view within the community, out of necessity they always eschew some social deviant, whether it be a person, group of people, practice, or idea. This is important to remember. Nichols notes, “We seldom pause to give careful consideration to such questions as: Who do we choose to emulate or identify with, and why? Who do we choose as objects of sexual desire, or love, and why? Who do we choose to join with as members of a community, and why? The Need for role models, loved ones, and social belonging seems profoundly human. These forms of interdependence ‘just happen’, or so it seems.”

                Perhaps this is why the issue of representation has always remained a hot issue,  and why filmmakers such as Ivens, Vertov, and Grierson have questioned the role sponsorship (alternately,  censorship) plays in the creation or depiction of actuality. In light of these difficult issues, perhaps this is why initiatives such as the StoryCorps and Center for Digital Storytelling play such a vital role in documentary—that of self-representation by subjects.

                

                

Hammocks

The participatory mode is one in which the role of the director/producer is not obscured; they are visible, audible, and are identifiable. Of the three modes available for this particular piece, this one seemed the best fit. Nichols notes of the participatory mode, ”the image is not just an indexical representation of some part of the historical world but also an indexical record of the actual encounter between filmmaker and subject"(Nichols, 157.) I had met the subject of the film briefly a day before making this piece, but I didn’t plan what we would speak about. I had some general ideas, but this was a conversation of discovery as much as it was an interview.

“The sense of bodily presence, rather than absence, that arises from sync sound exchanges between filmmaker and subject locates the filmmaker ‘on the scene’ (Nichols, 184). Here again I made sure that I was recognizable as the one behind the camera. I was visually present for the first portion of the clip and audibly present for the rest of it.  This brings to mind a concept of cinema verite,  ‘cinema truth.’ Rather than concealing  the presence of filmmaker and camera, pretending they have no impact on the scene unfolding, cinema verite seeks to uncover how the subject and filmmaker together actually react in the presence of a camera.

An interesting feature of this style of documentary is the altered power balance between filmmaker and subject. In the making of my last poetic documentary, it was easy to make a film of the appropriate length because I was the one framing and controlling each shot. Dialogue was unnecessary, and therefore the piece was brief. In this circumstance, it was requisite to ask questions in a conversational way and let Mike talk in the way he wanted, for however long he wanted. I had to yield some control of the way Hammocks turned out because I was dealing with a subject who knew I was filming and so could phrase things in such a way to influence the final outcome. Paired with the viewer's understanding of my presence, this affords the opportunity to identify the differences between these two perspectives and make a more informed decision--their own--about the film.

Online Response 6

Blast it. I made the mistake of assuming there could not be an Online Response due on Tuesday through my faulty reasoning that it was not a Monday or a Wednesday, so We Were Good to Go.

This was my prevailing line of thought until I actually cracked open my syllabus early Wednesday and discovered to my chagrin I was gravely mistaken. So while this is clearly late, I have elected to persist in posting this by the imaginary time on Wednesday, if only as a means of synthesizing some of what I think about the Reflexive Mode and Stories We Tell.

To me, the reflexive mode embodies less a concrete style and more a pointed self-awareness. It is acknowledging the abstract that we mix with our realities without a second thought.  This illogic, this abstract I think we also think of as the word humanity. We prefer to think that as Rational Human Beings our lives are informed by deliberate choices which proceed out of reason—after all, we are Right and We Are Not Crazy, that’s a job for the other guy. To acknowledge that our position is as tenuous as our neighbors is to admit defeat.

In Stories We Tell, what seems at first a simple straightforward narrative—the life of Diane Polley—rapidly reaches proportions expanding in every direction. We are forced to attempt to unite firsthand accounts that do not always harmonize with each other; in fact, the accounts directly contradict each other at times.  This lack of resolution is something the reflexive mode does not avoid, but rejoices in. We like our lives to make a nice linear narrative, but Stories We Tell finds and emphasizes the human in the middle of the stories created to hide our sometimes sloppy selves.

Discussing why documentaries can be so engaging and persuasive, Nichols suggests “the concepts and issues we say documentaries are about are almost always abstract and invisible.” It is interesting, then, that documentaries often find themselves in pursuit of perhaps one of the most abstract concepts of all, that of truth. I personally believe in truth, but I do not believe truth is always simple, straightforward or uncomplicated.  And if we, like Sarah Polley, find ourselves scraping to make something cut-and-dried, it’s OK.  It is acceptable, even admirable, to recognize the looping, often self-referential processes of emotion and thought and decision and feeling and emotion and thought and decision and doubt and feeling that make what seemed straightforward into what is quickly coming to resemble M.C. Escher’s Waterfall.

Because that's OK, too.

Online Response 5

If the observational mode seeks to conceal the presence of the documentarian from its viewers, the goal of the reflexive mode of documentary is not only remind the audience of the filmmaker’s presence but force them to evaluate the transfer of cinematic power between subject, filmmaker, and audience.

According to Barnouw, Dziga Vertov’s The Man With the Movie Camera is a prime example of this technique. Shots of a filmmaker (Vertov, perhaps?) are juxtaposed and interspersed with the film itself.  As the clips shown vary from camera POV to subject gazing back into the camera to third-party observer watching the transaction take place, the audience is invited repeatedly the role of film in documenting reality. Though highly stylized, The Man With the Movie Camera is in many respects the artistic extension of Vertov’s established beliefs and practices that “the task of Soviet films…was to document socialist reality (p. 54.)

In Harlan County, USA Barbara Kopple engages in filmmaking that could be described as participatory, but also as reflexive. Kopple’s unwavering willingness to immerse herself in situations leads to consequences that remind us of the film’s perspective. During one morning battle at the picket line when gunfire breaks out, Kopple’s camera is attacked by one bystander frustrated at its presence.
This footage would have been supremely easy to omit, but here it is deliberately left to remind us that Kopple is in fact filming, portraying, and influencing events.

In another instance, Kopple is interviewing the Brookside Mining Co. managers who burst through the picket line each morning. She has a tense conversation with the swarthy Basil Collins where she claims to be from the press before revealing she is actually just freelancing admitting she “must have lost [her] press card.”  It favored the film’s perspective to include this interview in its entirety, but it would have been simple to portray it in a way that obscured Kopple’s presence, or even to leave it out of the final cut completely.


Kopple’s acknowledgement of the reflexivity of film urges the audience to reach their own conclusions about the people portrayed in the film, to examine their role in watching it and to the real-life circumstances to which they are now privy. To create a reflexive doc is to demand action from the audience and instill a sense of responsibility.   

Empty

With Empty, I wanted to play with the idea of presence and absence. Each of the places shown appears to be uninhabited—rooms, hallways, sidewalks—but are they so vacant after all?

Empty is a piece that most closely adheres to the observational style of documentary. 

In the observational mode, the narrator plays an apparently passive role. They are rarely if ever heard or seen, and as such are easy to forget. As a viewer is drawn into the media, they begin to inhabit the camera’s point of view. They may even forget they are watching a film, feeling they are just watching quietly. Well, at least if the film’s not boring. I don’t claim Empty is particularly engaging, but some people might like it. Ghosts, for example.

Back to the vacant rooms. It’s easy to think there’s no one there—but in each one I am behind the camera, its slight handheld wobble giving me away. Making this has helped me remember behind each camera is someone (or someones) who is operating it, watching, editing, determining what we as viewers see. 

I chose shots mainly with deep depth of field to convey the vastness of the locations I chose, and to reinforce the sense of desolation. A late time on campus added to the feeling of isolation. I ran into few people as I filmed, so I was surprised and delighted to get the shot of the random crowd of people that came across a shot. I included this because I want to share this surprise with the viewer, as well as further my conviction that many of the best things found in documentary are things you don't plan or expect, but things you just happen to already be filming and catch. Furthermore, the appearance of a crowd of people on an “empty” campus toys with the idea of anything being empty at all.