Looking forward to seeing you all for our very last meeting on Tuesday! As a reminder – we’ll meet in our normal classroom on Tuesday December 19th at 2:30-4:30pm. Please note the meeting time which is earlier than our normal meeting time. Earlier in the semester, I incorrectly wrote 4:30 on the board for our finals meeting time. If you look at your schedule on CUNYFirst, you’ll see the correct time – 2:30.

We’ll have pizza, watch the short docs that some of you will have made, and have a general fun time. 🙂 Feel free to email me your film in advance (whether via a you tube link or attached to an email).

Please also be sure to upload your final paper (research paper or analytical essay about your film) to Blackboard before class. You can also bring / upload any late work for partial credit.

In his article, “Play it Again Sam,” Errol Morris describes different uses of re-enactment in documentary film. He uses The Thin Blue Line as an example as well as other films where the re-enactment is meant to look more “real,” where the filmmakers have tried to make the new footage look archival. He wants readers to think about where we draw the line for what kinds of re-enactments should be allowed – especially when considering prestigious awards like the Oscars. For this week’s blog assignment, please choose one of the three quotes from his essay below, and write up your reaction to it in a comment to this post. Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? How do we see these ideas in his film? You should include a reference to his movie or to others of the movies we’ve watched so far. If others from class have posted comments already, you may react to their points too.

1.“Is it appropriate to use re-enactment that the audience does not know is re-enactment?” (5)

2.“There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood … There is no … cinematic truth.” (6)

3.“Perception is endlessly colored by fantasy and belief …” (8)

For this week’s blogging, please choose one of the below quotations from Nichols’s Intro to Documentary to explain and discuss. Click on Comment below this post, copy and past the quote or part of the quote you choose, and then write your response. You may find it helpful to discuss one or more of the films we’ve watched in your response. Completing this will constitutes the blogging for this coming Tuesday. Some of you are still rather behind on blogging, so if that’s the case,feel free to comment more and/or write your own post on something else.

• “Observational documentary de-emphasizes persuasion to give us a sense of what it is like to be in a given situation but without a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be there, too. 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.” (181)
• “How do filmmaker and social actor respond to each other? Does a sense of respect, despite disagreement, emerge, or is there a feeling of deception, manipulation, distortion at work? How do they negotiate control and shared responsibility? How much can the filmmaker insist on testimony when it is painful to provide it? What responsibility does the filmmaker have for the emotional aftermath of putting others on-camera? What goals join filmmaker and subject and what needs divide them?” (182)
• “The interview stands as one of the most common forms of encounter between filmmaker and subject in participatory documentary. Interviews are a distinct form of social encounter. They differ from ordinary conversation and the more coercive process of interrogation … these forms all involve regulated forms of exchange, with an uneven distribution of power” (189-190)
• “Reflexive documentaries also tackle issues posed by realism as a style. Realism seems to provide unproblematic access to the world; it takes form as psychological, and emotional realism through techniques of evidentiary or continuity editing, characters development, and narrative structure. Reflexive documentaries challenge these techniques and conventions.” (195)

I watched tonight on HBO this short (40 min) documentary about Lanzmann and the making of Shoah. It’s fascinating! Lanzmann describes some of the processes of finding his subjects, getting them to talk, working with assistants, and editing the film. He talks about coming close to a near death experience while editing the film – after he’d shot some 100+ hours of footage. This happened in the ocean when he was going for a swim, and found himself unable to swim through a strong current between him and land. He was eventually rescued by someone who was swimming nearby and noticed him in need of help. Lanzmann says he was not happy to be rescued – hearing all of the testimony related to the holocaust for so many years and then faced with editing the footage into a film – had affected him so powerfully that he would have preferred to die – in that moment at least. If you can watch it on HBO in the next couple of days I recommend it.

Here below is the trailer, and it’s only streaming on HBO for a few more days.

Here are sections from your group responses from last night. Please feel free to add to what your group said in the comments and /or respond to what other groups have said. This would count for your blogging for next week!

Group 1 dealing with the portrayal of the miners wrote this: “The movie was more about social issues than personal issues between the men. Koppel is showing the miners’ determination to change the future.”

Group 2 dealing with the portrayal of women wrote this: “Some of the women were strong willed and brave. They pushed the men to keep striking when it seemed like they had given up. They pumped energy back into the men.”

Group 3 dealing with the film’s Rhetoric (logos, ethos, pathos) wrote this: Pathos: The folk music, the shooting scene, the funeral scene and the explosion. Logos: The doctor about black lung. Ethos: the mine workers themselves. The film used pathos more than the others.

Group 5 dealing with the film’s ethics wrote this: The director is letting the people speak for themselves; she isn’t speaking for them. She had informed consent and filmed them in their natural state. The funeral scene seemed questionable because of the emotional states.

Group 6 dealing with the role of the filmmaker wrote this: “She’s more of a participant than Frederick Wiseman but overall she’s more of an observer-participant”

 

Here are the two options we informally narrowed down to for the screening we’ll see on Saturday November 11th. Take a look at the links / previews and indicate in the comments to this post which one you prefer. Both look really good to me. The first is local about Queens (which I think would make it a bit easier to review given that we’re coming from Queens), and the second is an adaptation of the Truman Capote book, In Cold Blood. Note – these may sell out quickly – especially Cold Blooded since the filmmaker is pretty well known and will be at the screening. If I see soon that BOTH sell out, and it looks like a lot are selling out, I’ll simply purchase tickets to one not sold out and within our 4-7pm ish time frame.

1. Iron Triangle – IFC Center 4:30pm
2. Cold Blooded – Cinepolis Chelsea 6:45pm

So I did a bit of digging online, and I found that there is a site that had High School streaming right now in case any of you want to review a scene or two following last night’s screening in class. I also found a PBS hosted interview with Wiseman where he talks about what he was doing and aiming for in the film. It’s pretty interesting! I see that a few of you have already posted blog entries about this film following class yesterday. I hope more of you will continue to do this – and comment on each other’s existsing HS posts. We got a bit cut short by class ending last night while we were still discussing, so please feel free to use this platform to continue.

Link to High School streaming online

PBS Interview with Wiseman

I started watching this documentary series on Netflix this past week while we had some time off from school. It’s so good! I’m really interested in what this kind of documentary *is* in relation to feature documentary films and in relation to reality TV shows. As nonfiction filmaking and media becomes more and more popular, viewers seem to have a greater interest in these kinds of shows – both for their entertainment value but also for their educational / informational value. The directors here are definitely good at constructing stories out of the actual events of these football players / community college students’ lives, and I suspect the show appeals to fans of fiction shows like Friday Night Lights. So I wonder about a lot here: what are the ethical considerations related to this series? What do the creators want viewers to do with the information presented here? What can we take away?

For me, I fixated on a scene in the second episode where the athletic academic advisor was helping some of the players by telling them what the story was about that they should have read for an English class (!!!). I at once really like that she has a close relationship with these students (they really seem to need that), but then I wish she hadn’t given them what amounted to answers to the quiz they were about to take.

It might be interesting for us to watch a couple episodes of this show later in the semester.

This week in class, we watched all of Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film, Nanook of the North. In past semesters, I’ve shown clips from this film rather than the entire thing. The reason for this was twofold: I wanted to show parts of another very early documentary as well, and some sections in Nanook (as a couple of you noted in class) get a little bit slow. Do we really need to see them pull and pull and pull on that walrus for so long? Do we need to watch them build the *entire* igloo? Why not fast forward a bit? I did detect a bit of boredom at times in the classroom Tuesday night, but my sense is that watching the whole film (and skipping a second film) works better for Flaherty’s work. The slowness of the film seems to contribute to the sense of coldness and desolation of the climate his subjects lived in. Nanook’s waiting (for the fish, for the seal, for the down time after building) became our waiting, too.