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.