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.

Online Response 4

"Documentaries...offer aural and visual likenesses or representations of some part of the historical world. They stand for or represent the views of individuals, groups, and institutions...setting out to persuade us to accept their views."

Nichols notes the maker of a documentary is often in a skewed power relationship compared to their subjects. Because of film’s inherent ability to represent things as they seem to be, presenting a sense of reality before the camera,   depictions watched by an audience may be perceived as reality. Hopefully, a doc filmmaker has made an effort to portray their subjects fairly, but what if their subject ends up feeling exploited or that they weren’t portrayed fairly?

Most documentarians obtain consent forms from their subjects which grant final (and in most cases total) power to use their footage and depict them in a way that serves the film best. People might feel at ease with how they have been depicted in a film, but they might also feel conflicted with their portrayal, as with the Siegels, the central characters in Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles. They sued Greenfield unsuccessfully, claiming she had slandered them and depicted them as crazy, greedy, and obsessed with consumerist wealth.  Greenfield prevailed in this case, the judge ruling she had not participated in any defamatory conduct.

Perhaps why they complained was not that they felt they had really been misrepresented, but that they hadn’t been represented as better than they were. In photography,  portraiture, and other visual arts, we laud the works that exceed our standard of reality, that portray things as better than they actually are, because that is how we would like to perceive them and ourselves.

In At Berkeley, Wiseman sidesteps some of these issues of representation by representing people for so long. With scenes of things like budget meetings that might last more than half an hour, it is incredibly compelling to perceive what Wiseman has put forth as the truth, perhaps because there is so much of it. What strengthens At Berkeley most, in my opinion, is his depiction of many of these people in different situations, giving us a chance to decide who they are for ourselves.

Online Response 3: The Expository Mode and The Fog of War

When Robert McNamara is shown in The Fog of War, his footage is used to interesting effect: he is shown generally at the time of his tenure as the Secretary of Defense and then later as a narrator for his own life, a clarifying force to impose some kind of order on a past that was anything but coherent, ordinary.

Fog of War doesn’t utilize much of what Barnouw describes as the voice of the “promoter,” that is, if we are to consider the promoter as the sponsor of the film. In this case, McNamara seems to be pleading a case for human decency and allowance for human folly, claiming his mistakes were the only ways for him to learn. To further his argument, he lays out the “eleven rules of war” as if he were the discoverer of each of these principles.

Inherent in Fog of War, though, is the use of the voice of the “Promoter,” as Barnouw puts it, where the director of the documentary’s voice is evident in the expository tone of the film. The director of the film is seldom heard in interview sessions, but his influence is undeniable in the way the film cuts between explanations of the past from McNamara’s perspective juxtaposed with, say, archival B-roll footage of a converted howitzer firing a nuclear shell.

The director in this film may not say much directly, but through the process of interviewing, then editing and re-cutting this footage his quiet voice is the one that shapes the entire film, and to a large degree how we perceive it.

I don’t really know if the expository mode is less “objective” than the observational mode. It seems to me while observational films might seem more objective, the camera is more concealed—not from the subjects in a film, but from the audience.  The effect on a situation being filmed might be the same, but audiences might perceive the expository being less “honest” because the camera and director are simply more evident.