Forever Convinced

I apologize for the low quality of this blog, but I am tired. Both movies were similar in that they used informal unscripted interviews, with different levels of intrusion by the filmmaker throughout. Does this add to the viewer’s perception of the reality of the film? I don’t know; maybe. I guess that I personally don’t care how “real” something is, so it is hard to empathize with a viewer who would.

The determination of the extent of truth in an event seems like a waste of time. Maybe it’s my cynical nature taking over, but truth is something I have yet to be convinced of. I find a sitcom just as real as reality television. So to me it doesn’t matter how it is filmed because if truth does exist then everything seems to take a place somewhere in the spectrum between the true and the false, reality and fantasy, right and wrong, and unfortunately I lack the ability and the desire to know where on this spectrum either of these movies would be.

I watch the films and come away with a feeling of enjoyment, possibly the goal of the movies. I cannot say that I credit this to any formalized techniques, such as the absence or presence of the filmmaker. Neither can I draw conclusions about the effectiveness of each in portraying reality. Lacking is the discipline needed to uncover the reasons for the success of the films. I can just say what I feel and leave analytical deductions for another time when I am awake.

Behind the Curtain

Both Chronicle of A Summer and Forever take a psychological stance behind the social mask and give us a look at the raw nature of the human condition that is so often overlooked in this age of anti-intellectualism. The depth of the content presented by Rouch and Morin and Heddy Honigmann, reintroduces the viewer to the part of themselves where love and death, beauty and suffering, sit intimately, side by side, not eliminating each other, but rather reflecting the rich human drama. I got a real sense of the intellectual and artistic nature of French culture from both films. They showed an openness and sensitivity that isn't as prevalent in American culture. There is something so enduringly beautiful about the commitment people had to the deceased in Forever. Honigmann really brings us down and into the minute details of the love we see at the Pere-Lachaise cemetery. The watering of the plants, the sweeping, the gift giving, and the weeping, remind me of the simplicity of enlightenment one finds in some Buddhist traditions. Chronicle of A Summer keeps us close to the heart and mind as well, openly discussing French colonialism, racism, beauty, work and politics in a very ordinary way. Rouch is an intellectual and an artist and the subjects of this film follow suit. The juxtaposition of love and deep suffering make Forever and Chronicle strikingly similar. Rouch and Morin reveal the perceived emptiness of the economic structure that has turned artists and lovers into machines, the violence in the French political system that has left the feeling people harried, and the longing for an understanding of love and suffering in life.

In Forever, we hear Honigmann asking the questions. She has a very light touch in the documentary, giving the poignancy of the cemetery and its visitors full exposure. She lets the reality express itself, including the reality of her attempting to tease out the emotionality of the place. Rouch takes a more aggressive approach, fully participating in the conversations that go on in front of the camera. We hear him asking the question during interviews, see him directing the discussions when he is at the table, and interestingly enough, we also see his thought processes as the filmmaker when we read his face during the round table discussions. I think both films convey truth and reality equally well, so the filmmaker has the choice as to how much of himself or herself is going to be exposed/utilized. In terms of the goal of each film, Forever, feels like a meditation on life, whereas, Chronicle, is more of an interrogation and exposure of life. Honigmann uses the pianist as a means of accomplishing the goal of revealing the sensitivity and sentimentality of the human heart and mind, while Rouch opens old wounds, puts them on the table, then shows them back to the participants, lets them comments, and finally comments himself.

Chronicle of a Summer - Forever

A contemplation of life, a contemplation of death - these films essentially explore these divergent themes, but perhaps what the synthesis of the two shows is that the contemplation of one leads to the other and in fact the themes are inherently cyclical.
On the level of narration, Chronicle explores the happiness with or the disillusion with life as told through the lives of a group of interconnected French peeps. It supports my conclusion that everyone - each person that you meet or see on the street has an individual story full of drama, boredom, happiness, strife, fear, and desire. The beautiful Italian girl struggling to find reason, the holocaust survivor trying to forge some semblance of a real life after her reality had been shattered - both of these exemplify the brilliance of the filmmaker to capture the essence of the human condition. The reflexive nature of the film allows us to see the filmmaker and hear their discussion of the movie and its subjects - this, for me, makes it far more personal.

Forever relied far more on the filmmakers artistic ability to juxtapose conversations with cemetery visitors with statues and painting created by its dead inhabitants. It was less raw and less gritty and for this reason - less personal. It went on for too long and the lack of a connection between all of the people in the film weakened my connection to their common theme (the graveyard). I like when the film revisited subjects like the Asian pianist girl - this created a narrative that snapped me out of my boredom, but too many times new characters were introduced and not followed up on. It was a good movie, but could have shaved off about a 1/3 of its content and would have been less painful.

Chronicle of a Summer and Forever

It seems to me the goal of Chronicle of a Summer was to show that things aren’t as bad or as good as people think. The happiness question asked in the beginning framed the movie. The filmmakers then started getting into specifics and we discover that seemingly simple question is very complicated. In Forever, a cemetery, a place usually seen as sad and mournful, reveals a celebration of life through the way the living are still touched by the dead. Oddly enough, the film that centers around dead people is happier.
Rouch and Morin, while being featured in their film, don’t ever pose the question of happiness to themselves. They are characters but retain some distance. Honigmann is never seen but heard in her film. This distancing isn’t as striking because the people she talks to are usually reminiscing about someone else and how that person has affected them. She isn’t granting herself some kind of filmmaker special privilege because the point of the movie is to hear those stories not to get to the idea of happiness, which we can all share an opinion on.
Both films felt true to me. All the people seemed to be sharing their real feelings and because the filmmakers don’t hide themselves it doesn’t seem fake. As the participants in Chronicles pointed out, however, too much emotion can seem faked for the camera.

Happiness

The question posed for the week, "What do the two films have in common" was harder to answer than I initially thought. One film (Chronicle of a Summer) is trying to reveal the innermost truths of the people's lives who are living in the Land of Cheese and Snobbery and the other film, "Forever", is trying to show the connection the living have with the dead and the importance of art in people's lives. Then I thought well maybe these two movies could just be about happiness and what makes people happy.

In "Chronicle of a Summer" this question is asked directly by the women on the street. The variety of answers the women receive is interesting because it reveals a lot about the society at the time. Apparently if you are old then you are unhappy, and if you are young then you have no worries. This conclusion is then ripped apart at the round table discussions and one on one interviews that occur later in the film where a melting pot (or possibly ball pen) of people are put together to discuss the political issues of the day. In these casual yet well-organized discussions it is revealed that there are young people that are politically active, depressed, or have known heartbreak and therefore are unhappy and on the other hand there are some old people out there that have known some hard times and therefore are happy with what they have.

"Forever" gets to the idea of happiness in peoples lives in a more subtle way. Honigmann asks people why they are at the grave they are at and then asks them why that person is important to them. Honigmann discovers what keeps people going, what keeps their lives significant, and ultimately what makes them happy. She achieves this by not interviewing them but conversing with them which is exampled in the fact that she let the South Korean guy speak his own language even if she didn't understand it because she wanted him to fully express himself. Different people are inspired by different things and I believe whatever inspires you could be considered art so whether you are inspired by an artist, your father, husband, or daughter there is always a way to include that inspiration in your life and make you feel complete and happy.

I don't what to say about the absence of the filmmakers in their films and its effects on truth and reality but I thought it made sense for Rouch and Morin to include themselves in their film because they were doing a study of French society and they are a part of that society. Honigmann included only her voice which gave a feel that she was asking the questions we wanted to ask and that the characters were speaking directly to us.

How the French view life

Both Chronicle of a Summer and Forever use interviews with various seemingly-random people to explore the nature of life, according to the French. In Chronicle, the filmmakers were very involved. They included a screening of the film at the end so that the people seen in the film could have a chance to respond, as well as offering their own critique of the film which makes it very self reflexive but also creates the impression that the film was a sort of social experiment. The question Rouch and Morin were asking was "Are people happy?" but the interviews were only part of the answer. By looking at many people, their lives and beliefs, the film tried to discover an overarching state of the society, and then left it to the viewer to decide if that state was a good one or not, and if people were really happy there. I think parts of the film were more effective than others, like those shots of the woman who survived the Holocaust walking alone in big empty spaces while she reminisced were very powerful. Forever seemed to be exploring a similar concept as Chronicle by interviewing people in order to get a look into the lives of the French people, but in Forever the filmmaker is much less present. Forever uses a cemetery as a symbolic focal point for society. The film argues that the dead that people bother to visit at cemeteries can reveal whose those people are. In almost every interview, the subject revealed how the dead person they were visiting had been pivotal in their lives. The film then builds on all the individual interviews much like in Chronicle to create a picture of who has been key to French society as a whole; in this case the film argues that art is the central component. The filmmakers of both films attempt to look beyond the individual parts to try and grasp some "truth" about the nature of the society they live in.

Agnes Martin and Frank Gehry

Too bad Agnes Martin passed away 4 years ago, because I really think she would have liked to have met or at least have seen The Sketches of Frank Gehry. While watching With My Back to the Wall, I couldn't help, but be reminded of this artist portrait of Frank Gehry; the world's  premiere architect. The Sketches of Frank Gehry is obviously on a much larger scale and of a much larger career and directed by a much larger director, Sydney Pollack. However, both films show an aging artist, at times toiling over their craft, breathing heavy, or speaking quite candidly and poignantly to the camera. Both explore the angle of a life of creativity culminating into the art they currently make. But the tread that unites the two films is their opposite ways of working through the artistic process. Martin's strictly a horizontal line gal and Gehry is strictly a squiggly line on a napkin guy. Despite the underlying concepts of their art clashing, the two share remarkable similarity in their struggle to identify through their years exactly why and what they find visually pleasing. But a quote from Sketches, to me, marries the two elderly artist's visions, "That is so stupid looking it's great!" I think they could have been one of those iconic cute old couples.

Makino's Way

Contrary to some other thoughts, the Sumo Wrestlers of Tokyo Equinox made perfect sense to me. This shoots are the ones that give meaning to the trip (personal documentary) of the two girls that are looking forward to meet her father after 15 years of absence. 

It is a personal journey with a big dose of struggle. And what can be better than Sumo to represent struggle; it is a 2 men sport in which they have to push the adversary outside of the boundaries, it seems simple but it takes a lot of technique and strength to achieve it. Additionally, Sumo is framed by a ritual that serves as a metaphor for the process that Yuri Makino had to experience for the quest of his father. 

With this documentary I found a good example to address one of the questions I posted last week. (Should we use a specific approach depending on the film's subject?). The uncertainty of the situation in Tokyo Equinox was nicely supported with the images of the windows, with the nervous and unpretentious handheld camera, with the juxtaposition of the images of the people outside the metro station and the Sumo wrestlers, with the discovery of a new world through a meal, among others. 

This "palpable", theoretically Brechtian (?), technique used to narrate the personal quest story made me think on Natural History documentaries in which we rarely see the process, the struggle, of constructing the story. (And if we do it's normally in the DVD's special features or in a silly program driven by a talkative, annoying, James Bondian presenter). I would like to see or do a documentary in which time honestly represents what it takes to build a story. Audiences take for granted this time and that is why people get disappointed with reality once they face it. If you go to the Amazon you won't see what you see in Discovery or NatGeo....

PD. I don't want to leave Agnes Martin unmentioned. The length and peaceful pace of the documentary were perfect for the subject....

Portraits

Tokyo Equinox (Yuri Makino)

             The portrait of two girls, on their trip to meet their father after 8-15 years without having seen each other, is interestingly conveyed in this short film. It presents an unusual spontaneity in all the sequences. Even though the image quality is not very impressive, as it could have been taken by any tourist of an Asian country, they succeeded in the way they constructed the film. It was easy to follow the story as if we were participating of their anxiety and excitement during that emotional day. However, I think they could have extended the duration of the film. It was a beautiful story in which other different approaches could also have worked effectively. For instance, both of them could have used cameras. It seems that one of them hardly appears during the whole film.

 

Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World

            We enjoyed the portrait of a very inspiring old woman who dedicated her life to painting. “Beauty is the mystery of life…” or “ Perfection is easier to see than beauty” are her premises of work. The structure of the film could be divided into a first part in which we see a succession of historical events in her life, and a second part much more reflexive and philosophical. This second part is the most interesting and enriching of the film. However, the length of the film, the strange mobile-like soundtrack that it uses sometimes, and the compositions of some frames, such us the one in which we see the different works of the artist, make this portrait a monotonous and repetitive sequence of images.  

Timeless

Time seemed to be the central theme in these two movies. Tokyo Equinox began with establishing the amount of time that had passed between meetings. This gave depth and importance to the encounter recorded. And although the time of the movie itself was quite short the feelings it conveyed were those built over many years.

Likewise the most important thing I saw in the portrait of Agnes Martin was how much time had passed in her life. The length of the movie allowed for a slow development of the character. This led, at least in my experience, to a sympathetic association with Agnes. Not being able to see the full context of her life at first made her seem almost senile in her old age. This however faded as you came to see her life and the unique way she had been living it.

The filmmakers did an excellent job of choosing the moments and phrases that exemplified her eccentric nature without making her look crazy. It is not obviously direct in this point. As a result, I am sure different people probably took different meanings away from the film. I saw it as a portrait of an individual’s ability to deal with reality. Spending so much time alone must have been difficult, but it seems that she was able to deal with this by believing that she had had many lives with many husbands and children in the past. It offered me hope that peace of mind can be found, and that eventually, I too may be able to deal with my own personal inadequacies. The image of that wrinkled face relentlessly chewing on something became more. What was she chewing on: reality, disappointment, success, or maybe time itself?

Agnes Martin and Tokyo Equinox

Agnes Martin sure liked her horizontal stripes- even her shirts were striped! It made her seem very committed to her style of choice. I gradually found myself trying to think of everything as horizontal lines as I watched the film- from the more literal train crossing the vastness of the plains, to the "grid" of her disciplinarian mother. For me the film became not about Agnes Martin but the meaning of the line, what did the lines mean? The character development in that sense wasn't about the person but the cumulative creations of the person, and the development of her philosophy, and I think the longer length of the film was necessary. The film had to slowly build up Agnes's beliefs for the viewer according to the rhythm of how Agnes developed them- slowly, over her very long life. *As a side note- I grew up in Taos NM and there are a LOT of artists like that there- reclusive, "spiritual" and/or hippie artists communing with nature and believing in past lives (at one point Agnes talked about how it was OK she wasn't married because she had thousands of husbands and thousands of children and this time she chose to commit herself to the art)- basically there is a reason I pursued biology first, though I guess the artsy Taos side of me is finally getting its chance!

I agree with other postings that the juxtaposition of the sumo wrestlers and the woman waiting for her father in Tokyo Equinox was very strange. I like the way the camera rested on various older Japanese men so that the viewer searched for the women's father along with them, but the sumo wrestles were distracting. I think the length did a good job of relating this one event but I'm not really sure it conveyed a clear character. I guess you could argue that the film showed a facet of whose these women were, a tiny slice of where they came from and therefore a tiny slice of who they are. But the ending shots of the train leaving were again confusing- was the forest out the windows on fire? If so, what does that mean? The women reestablished a relationship with their father and it immediately goes up in flames? I'm not sure that was what they wanted to convey with the film...

Tokyo Martin

Tokyo Movie

What is up with the juxtaposition of the sumo wrestling and the anxious girl waiting to meet her father. It was clear that the moments of waiting were suspenseful and all the shots of random men that could possibly be their estranged(?) father were useful to convey this feeling. I thought it unnecessary to have the sumo shots - it seemed like maybe a case of wanting to use footage just because you have it (and I know the feeling). And also...they use a video camera for the 1st part of the movie and then they switch to tourist snapshots to tell the rest of what could have been a much more moving story. WHy not use the video camera? Maybe they were too caught up in the moment to want to stick a camera in front of eachother's faces.
They did succeed in conveying the awkwardness of merging their culture with that of their fathers - like the shots of them eating together. Additionally, in the same scene they showed the similarities in mannerisms of the father and the daughter which did help to show the kinship that they had hoped to re-establish. I am assuming a lot here.

Back to the World -

This movie was an excellent exposition of Agnes Martin. My sympathy turned to admiration as the movie went on and Agnes slowly convinced us that she had transcended the material world with the patience of a Tibetan monk. For me it was like the art was secondary to her story of solitude and contemplation - the recitation of poems served as a way for Agnes to more clearly articulate her thoughts and I found myself writing down quotes from her poetry more than notes about the movie itself. The interview style ranged from informal handheld camera, to steady dolly shots in a highly formalized art gallery setting. The angelic song that marked a transtition both in the video and in Agnes' life added to the transcendent feel that the producer was trying to convey about this lady. The movie did not make me feel like I was watching a film, rather it made me feel like I was experiencing Agnes' life. My qualms with it? It was a bit long and the angelic music a bit overused. It was a great portrait film and it immortalized this woman and her work very well.

Tokyo Equinox, Agnes Martin

Tokyo Equinox

Tokyo Equinox created a lot of mysteries for me. The film points out that the children haven't seen their father in 8 and 15 years. They show up at the train station and seem to wait forever for him to arrive, they seem to spend only a few hours together and then they leave on the train. But, why haven't they seen him in 15 years, and who is this woman that has come along with him, they never mention their mother. Aside from that the film is able to make a portrait of Japan or Japanese culture and, by suggestion, of their father and the cultural differences between the father and children. It does this by using images of sumo wrestlers, the parade, the sisters on the train, the sisters putting on kimono's for, what seems to be, the first time in a long time, and the sisters eating in kimono's only to cut back to them in western clothing which they wear for the rest of the film. It seems to me that they make traditional aspects of Japanese culture strange as a way of highlighting the differences between the father and daughters.


Agnes Martin

This film seemed to have a fairly traditional method of introducing us to Agnes. It starts off with Agnes talking about her art, and showing her art. Then it jumps into her personal history, her development as an artist, and her thoughts about life and art. It is split up into different sections like Solitude, Geometry, etc... which seem to be a way of compartmentalizing aspects of Agnes to make her more accessible. Sort of like the 11 lessons in The Fog of War. They weren't McNamara's lessons they were Morris's and they have the same effect. When both filmmakers create sections for their subjects it makes it more structured and less like a hodgepodge of information confusing the viewer.

Horizontal Lines and Reuniting in Japan

Mary Lance used the hour she had for the portrait of Agnes Martin well. Her use of those "subtitle" things such as "New York and "Innocence" divided Martin's life in a way that reflected Martin's paintings, very organized yet had a sense of softness and meditation to them. Agnes Martin has lived an interesting life and seems to have a good understanding of herself and of the way she views the world. If Lance tried to squish all of those stories of Martin's life in less than one hour I don't think it would have worked. Martin seems like a relaxed and contemplative kind of person and a slow and methodical portrait of her is needed in order to express those qualities. Everything within the portrait seemed to express who Agnes Martin is, the cuts to different shots of nature, the slow zooms on her paintings, and the fluid transitions between clips. Also, just as a little anecdote, I thought it was interesting that all of Agnes Martin's shirts had horizontal lines on them and that she paints her horizontal lines vertically.

Tokyo Equinox- This was an interesting take on a portrait because it was about two people yet you only saw one. I interpreted the strange motion effect as a way to portray the brother and sister's confusion and "overwhelmingness" about seeing their dad. The shots of things you might see while in Japan such as the water cup in the well, the large crosswalks, and trains were I guess establishing shots of their location. Also, another choice I did not understand was the jump cuts to sumo wrestling during the scene where the sister is waiting for her dad.

Morris, Scott, Caouette

The films of Morris, Caouette, and Scott have little in common, but in each case, the director's style of filmmaking was appropriate to the film's content. Errol Morris describes The Thin Blue Line as "a movie about a terrible miscarriage of justice." With a strong belief in Randall Adam's innocence, Morris set out to make a movie that would be watchable and convincing. All of his stylistic tools - dramatizations including multiple points of view, impeccably lit interviews, the creepy Phillip Glass score - were used to convince the viewer that Randall Adams was falsely imprisoned. Everything about the filmmaking was deliberate: the camera work was controlled; interviews were conducted mainly in wide shots, giving them a more "objective" point of view; the elaborate lighting helps the audience to feel comfortable and trusting of the viewing experience; the editing was sparse (but calculated). Onscreen, Adams was always shown to be calm, thoughtful, and rational; the witnesses were clearly shown to be unreliable, and the cops were depicted as desperate, uncaring bureaucrats. Morris used these techniques as a way to persuade the viewer to his way of thinking about the Randall Adams case.

New filmmaker Garrett Scott employed a simple, bare-bones approach to Cul de Sac. In order for the viewer to comprehend how middle-aged plumber Shawn Nelson could steal a tank in San Diego and go on a destructive rampage, Scott first has to take us into Shawn's gilded, meth-filled world. The foundation of this understanding comes from interviews with Shawn's friends, and we are privileged to see them as Shawn wound have: in their trashy living rooms, naturally lit, and tweaking on methamphetamine. After meeting his friends and hearing about his eccentricities, we also get to see Shawn's home and backyard goldmine. Stylistic flair is avoided in favor of simple, honest filmmaking - he shows us Shawn's world so we can begin to understand his motivations. Scott also effectively uses archival material to illuminate the broad, historical back story: the military-industrial complex spurred the rise of (meth-filled) suburbs in the post-WWII era.

Jonathan Caouette wasn't hindered by his minuscule budget or low-tech editing software when he was crafting his debut film, Tarnation. Instead, the film relies on its grittiness to propel forward its subjective, first-person narrative. As Caouette's life story flashes on the screen in kaleidoscopic montage, the viewer is able to get some sense of his chaotic, angst-filled life. Rough, hand-held camera work and interviews conducted from behind the camera make it very clear that this is a personal film, shot from Caouette's point of view. Of his film, Cauoette said: "I conceived the film as a new way of looking at documentary, as though it were imitating my thought process, giving the audience the experience of seeing what it is like to be inside my head." Perhaps it is not surprising then that Caouette, a sufferer of depersonalization - a dissociative disorder - would borrow familiar tropes from experimental cinema (such a multiple split screens, abstract images, abrupt shifts in color and motion) in order to give the audience the experience of inhabiting his mind.

Not only does content dictate style in each of these movies, but it seems that each director was uniquely equipped to successfully make the movie he set out to create. Morris had the necessary clout and budget to pursue an elaborate production; as a new filmmaker Scott had a fresh outlook to introduce us to a strange version of the San Diego suburbs; and Caouette had a crazy enough life to inspire him to make a new kind of personal documentary as his breakout film.

Night Mail & A Man with a Movie Camera

Night Mail and A Man with a Movie Camera are both state-sponsored films that celebrate modernity and the industrial age, but each takes a different approach to storytelling. At its core, Night Mail has a basic narrative structure, following the overnight journey of a mail train as it travels from England to Scotland. The film attempts to educate the viewer about the important service that the Post Office provides by alternating between sequences of expository narration, often over images of trains moving across the landscape, and character vignettes showing the roles of postal and railroad workers. These vignettes often take the form of short process films: railroad workers pulling levers to move the train tracks into proper alignment; postal workers taking bundles of mail from large sacks and then sorting the individual letters into the proper slots; and (arguably the most dramatic scene in the film) the delicately-timed process of collecting and depositing mailbags without slowing down the speeding train. These scenes also serve to humanize the government employees, depicting them as both hardworking and good humored. In the typical Griersonian fashion of "drama on the doorstep," the film employs a simple, linear structure to convince the viewer of the skill of Britain's workers and the importance of a government institution to provide a valuable service to its citizens. And with the educational message couched in narrative elements, the audience is able to absorb the message with little effort.

A Man with a Movie Camera eschews a narrative structure in favor of examining city life through a loose, linear progression from morning to nighttime. Daily life is explored through Soviet montage: waking up, going to work, indulging in evening entertainment. Sequences are often created around parallel (a blinking eye/shutters opening and closing; window washers/a woman washing her face) or contrasting images (rapid intercutting between a wedding, divorce, birth, and death). Emphasizing both industry and the human machine, the film celebrates the liberating power of technology and commemorates Moscow's move into the industrial age. It's also a self-reflexive film: a movie about making a movie. Images of movie cameras reoccur throughout the film and we often see Vertov's brother, Mikhail Kaufman, recording Soviet life or running through the frame with his camera and tripod. The film is also structured around this theme. A Man with a Movie Camera begins with a prologue: an empty movie theater; people begin to file in; a projectionist readies the film; the orchestra begins to play, the movie begins, and the camera zooms on to the screen. We become the audience, viewing the rest of the film from the perspective of the spectators in that theater.

Tokyo Equinox and Agnes Martin

Who was Tokyo Equinox portraying - the filmmaker, her sister, Japan? It seems in 10 minutes there wouldn’t be time for that much ambiguity. The film captured her feelings of being a fish out of water with the blurred shots and cuts to events in Japan. It also showed Japan as being very kinetic while at the same time closely connected to its past. The way she showed her sister waiting for their father and cut it with scenes from sumo wrestling captured the ambivalence of the situation, which was implied by how long it had been since they’d last seen him, better than some confessional/confrontational type sequence a la Tarnation.

Agnes Martin was more of what I would expect from a portrait of someone. She was shown in her studio, in galleries, preparing a canvas, reminiscing about old photos. There were extended scenes of her talking to the camera where the filmmaker didn’t cut to B-roll. I found that to be very respectful. It accentuated that she was someone worth listening to despite the fact that she just looked like some old lady who liked stripes. They didn’t frame the story around her completing a painting even though she was still a working artist; they just showed her preparing a canvas and then some of her finished works. This seemed to make her more of a person who’s been around for 86 years and manages to work as an artist instead of an artist who happens to be an 86-year-old woman.

Interview style says a lot

 I noticed somewhat of a continuum that starts in A Thin Blue line, follows through Cul de Sac, and ends at Tarnation, that I am not certain I would have picked up on if I did not watch all three films in the same day. The continuum to which I am referring is a gradual lessing of interview style and organization. Thin Blue Line is at the top of the stylized interview. Next we see less of the organization of the interview in Cul De Sac, as the interviewees seem to "come as they are," and although, there is obvious attention to lighting and camera placement, Cul de Sac is much more about the people and how they live as opposed to A Thin Blue Line. Moreover, on the bottom of the stylized interview yardstick, there is Tarnation, where interview occur sporadically through the length of the film in various handheld, less premeditated ways.

The result, for me at least, of these various interview styles is how the perception of character and the validity in the words they say changes. For instance, in A Thin Blue Line, I listened to the words of the interviewee much more closely, than say Tarnation, to push the story along. However, on the opposite end of our spectrum, Tarnation's interviews allowed me to speculate as to the character of the interviewee in a way that the controlled interview style of Errol Morris did not allow me to do. Again, Cul de Sac is a good bridge between these to poles, but even in it, the relaxed interview style, provided a sense that "I could" look at their character and not just their words. I believe that these style fit the purposes of their respective movies perfectly. A Thin Blue Line is literally and investigation and their for it is imperative that we look at the facts (words?) rather than speculate about character. Cul De Sac is a film diving into why this man did this? Therefore, it is important we hear out his friends, but also wonder about the characters of the people he associated with. And Lastly, Tarnation is a life long chronicle of a man's life, in which the candid words of the interviewees are quite useless if the view does not form an opinion of character.

Interviews and Lightning

The Thin Blue Line

 The real story of Randall Adams, who was unfairly arrested because of the murder of a police officer, it is superbly told by Errol Morris. He builds a long, yet brilliant compilation of interviews with almost everyone involved including the actual murderer. Technically speaking most of the interviews present a similar pattern of light. However, in some of them both the frame composition and lightning are not ideally designed, i.e. the woman that is cut by line of her breasts in a bizarre frame accompanied with a dark color saturated light. One of the most interesting points of the documentary is the high diversity of images. He tries almost everything, from fiction recreation of what happened, to handmade draws of the court. Additionally, even though the interviewees do not have labels, the excellent editing helps us to identify who is everyone and to follow the story through all the whole film until when the documentary arrives at its climatic peak with the tape-recorded confession of the actual assassin.

Cul de Sac

 Garret Scott presents to us a spectacular event with the aptitude of an apprentice filmmaker yet with the confidence of an experienced writer. The story of Shawn Nelson, who died in a police chase (1995, San Diego) after stealing a tank and destroying everything that he found in his way, is efficiently built around all the different factors that may have propelled him into that fatality. There is a very intelligent use of the interviews to connect the different shots of the chase. In addition to showing the chase, all of the interviews help us to understand the environment in which he lived; drug addict friends, a broken family, paranoia (he was sure that he had found gold in the backyard of his house), etc. Moreover, there are images of wars that provide information about the possible causes of their addictions and social chaos. Overall, it is a perfect combination of still photos, images of the chase, and different types of interviews that were achieved mainly because of the narrative abilities of its producer.

Tarnation

 This is one of the most impressive documentaries I have seen. The social and psychological implications of this film are tremendous. The author and main character of the film presents his own peculiar and unconventional life by constructing a biography of his problematic youth. He feels the necessity of recording every relevant moment of his life and communicating his most internal feelings. The selective editing of the film submerges the audience into a travel whose main goal is finding the factors that could have metamorphosed a common child into a 30 year old person with acute mental disorder. In his searching for answers he interviews all the members of his small family: His mother, a woman with serious psychological problems that spends a significant time of her life in mental institutions, and his grandparents, who took care of him while he was growing. The majority of the interviews present a consistent structure and style. Sometimes he speaks directly to the camera and the rest of the time he holds the camera or puts it on the tripod while he is talking with his family and boyfriends. However, there is an unexpected change of style at the end of the film when he decides to give the camera to his current boyfriend and lay down next to his mother while she is sleeping. That is one of the most intense moments of the film. He can no longer hold the camera, confessing his most deep-rooted fear, to become his mother when he gets older.  

Subject's aesthetics to sell.

The way an interview is done and presented to an audience has a direct effect on its interpretation. A filmmaker with his/her camera has a lot of power when filming people and regardless of his/her purposes, the projected material will always have a meaning. Viewers are not waiting to be told what is the significance of film aesthetics, they simply draw conclusions. The documentaries  The thin blue line (Errol Morris), Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette) and Cul de Sac (Garret Scott) are good examples of how a director can imprint a "specific" style/mood to an interview to illustrate a situation.  Barthes' expression "writing" with the camera immediately comes to my mind after having seen these three different approaches to controversial stories, once again a possible answerless question pops up for debate. 

Do documentarists, regardless of their style, should always use a specific approach depending on the film's subject? And if yes, should this approach have an aesthetical relationship with the topic?

Can you imagine Tarnation done by Errol Morris or Glassblowing shoot by Jonathan Caouette?

These questions could be important to us because depending on the answer -yes, each subject should have it's own style- we, as SNH filmmakers, would be attaching our projects to the current aesthetical commercial trend. If the answer is the opposite -no, filmmakers should represent their ideas freely regardless of the issue- our films won't probably reach as many people as commercial ones. 

Lighting and Interviews

The lighting in A Thin Blue Line is highly controlled and stylized. There is one Dallas cop, softly lit in his darkened office, with a yellow and white city map serving as the pastel backdrop. Randall Adams, on the other hand, is lit directly, with a key light bouncing off of his head and creating contrast between him and the very dark, almost black background that looks to be his prison cell. David Harris, in his orange prison uniform, is silhouetted against a reddish purple background, perhaps suggesting something of his guilt. The female cop, that was "lit unattractively," is hardly lit at all in that peachy room, with the blinds drawn behind her. (As an aside, you can see the shadow of boom operator which you might not even notice in the looser styles we see in Cul-de-Sac and Tarnation.) This is all to say, that each interview seemed uniquely lit to create a tone for each particular individual in relationship to what they represent in this case. Amidst all the interviews of professionals, with the staged lighting, are the outside interviews with Harris's friends. By placing these friends outside, a less formal air is attributed to them. Finally, we have the eye witnesses who basically perjure themselves in this film. Morris places the women who wanted to be a detective against a plain white backdrop in a room lit with white light, creating very little of the ambiance we see in some of the other interviews. This effectively focuses the attention on her bleached hair, bad make-up, and discreditable psychology.

In Cul-de-Sac we do not see the same manipulation with lighting. It is a very come as you are style. There doesn't appear to be any use of artificial lighting at all. The only exception might be in a few shots of the best friend where one side of his face is well lit and the other is in shadows. I would argue, however, that this is just the inclusion of extreme ambient light conditions encountered during filming. This film is very informal than Blue Line, as it should be. These characters don't need to be put into a stylized setting. In fact, to do that would diminish the truth of the situation. As the audience, we wouldn't believe that kind of aesthetic choice anyhow, these people are too real. There is little pretense in this culture. Besides, the point of the film was to get to the heart of the matter, not to create drama.

Tarnation is basically a film that documents and processes Jonathan Caouette's life. As such, there are not many highly controlled situations. This is not to say that there are not artistic choices being made, because obviously there are. The main choice, however, was to capture the rich, heart wrenching, and provocative scenes that are his life. Caouette recognizes the beauty in the chaos and suffering he is surrounded by. He recognizes the aesthetic appeal of his grandfather lying in bed talking about the weather, his grandmother saying she had T.B., "tobacco and beer," the garbage in the hallway, his mother, cigarettes, and tears. We do see the use of lighting in his scene of the abused woman that he does at age 11. It appears to take place in a dark room, with some sort of light pointing at him, disturbing and f-ing brilliant.

Post Modernism and Lighting

When I hear/read film theorists claim that the director's intent is secondary to the perception of the viewer I cringe. The use of lighting and general interview style of these three films provides fodder for my argument for why director intent is an important consideration in that it drives the viewers' perceptions.

I'm not going to go into too many details because they have been laid out over and over by other students in the class, but in the end I'd like to pose a question that is off the assigned subject just to see other people's reactions to a disagreement among my presentation group.

In each of these movies, lighting and interview styles set the tone and mood for the discourse. A Thin Blue Line used extremely staged lighting styles and reenactments to give the movie more of a film noire/ who done it tone. This, along with the dry-factual presentation style culminates in what I would consider a classical documentary. It's definitely not the style and/or aesthetics but the impressive compilation of the data that makes this movie such a classic.

Tarnation is almost the opposite. The viewer is being allowed into the personal thoughts, feelings, and chaos lying withing the director. As such, the interviews are personalized, using a "voice behind the camera" style along side personal "journal" type interviews. In order to bring the viewer into the guys life, he shoots his interviews in an extremely raw fashion. The aesthetics follow the the directors feelings throughout his life. It is cut faster and more intensely in the parts of his life that made him more like his mother; somewhat fucked up.

A few people place Cul du Sac right in the middle of the other two movies in terms of use of light, interview style and camera work. I'm not so sure that I agree with this. I don't see this as a continuum, bur rather three completely different styles. One of the themes to this movie is to explore a mind and logic that would lead someone to steal a tank and take it downtown. In order to do so the director does all of his interviews in a way that reflects the environment that the guy found himself just before his little adventure. The lighting and locations are natural and the general mood of (most) of the interviews is that of friends discussing amongst themselves. In terms of camera work, that's where many of his more intense statements are being made. He captures the mannerisms of the characters in such a way that we find ourselves doubting their words. For example, the girl (who claims she is off meth... as all of them do) moves like she has been taking meth right before the interview. This, along with the police narrative about her house, begs the question of the roll of drugs in this guys fallout of sanity.

Now, on to my big question...

Is Tarnation a Narcissist film, or is it just a guy making a story about how fucked up life can be?

The Thin Blue Tarnation Sac

Thin Blue Line

Morris has developed a style of interviewing, lighting, and editing which is very successful. He seems to have a knack for finding the right image to go with a particular part of an interview and he knows when to add it into his films. When a member of the police force mentions that the female officer was hypnotized Morris shows a stopwatch swinging back and forth, but he shows the watch swinging in slow motion after the interviewee mentions that they had to do something even if it was expensive, but before the interviewee says that they hypnotized her. I think this has the effect of creating a little mystery so the viewer is curious about what the interviewee is going to say next. Morris repeats this kind of intercutting with his interviews throughout the film, where he includes ECU's of newspaper clippings, CU's of blue Vega's and coronor's reports showing the location of bullet wounds.


Tarnation

This film has a very different style from the other two. The use of footage that dates back to when he was 11 (?), the very rough camera work, and the unprepared interviews with his mother and grandfather give the film a very chaotic feel which seems to accurately represent what Jonathan's life was like through his youth. I started off not liking the film, but the more time I've had to think about it, the more I like it. He did an excellent job of portraying the chaos that surrounded his life through the interviews of himself and his family and the extra footage and photos that he added to his film to give it more strength. But his editing style also gave a lot of strength to the film. He would show a photo of his mother and then rapidly switch between that photo and white while talking about electroshock therapy. The audio and video that contradict each other made me think about what kind of childhood he had and set a strong feeling of perhaps anger or of being lost. It was very well done.


Cul De Sac

I became more annoyed with this film the longer it played. Partly I think the filmmaker could have cut some footage out of the film and still retained the meaning that he was driving for. Also the interviewing annoyed me because he seemed to be jumping around from one person to another throughout the film. It didn't seem like the interviews were put into context with the footage that the filmmaker edited into the film. The extra footage, the construction of suburbs, Vietnam, and that jerk of a local news anchor, seems to drag on forever without a reason or a point. Then when the point is made it seems to be a minor one or maybe not relevant. He spent a lot of time exploring the connection between methamphetamine and Shawn's behavior but then barely mentions his back injury and hospital lawsuit, his unemployment, and I don't think it even mentioned his parents death. Other things that annoyed me was that he would return to people that he had already filmed and they would be in a different location and wearing different clothing and the police officer who's being interviewed wasn't really identified until the end of the film (as I recall).

The Thin Blue Line

I have seen a couple other errol morris movies and it seems like his ability to conduct and shoot an interview is the strongest point in hi movies. I may go as far as to say that his movies are interview movies if such a categorization exists. Morris points out in an interview about the film, that the thin blue line is not a movie about an investigation, it is an investigation. At the end of the film you finally hear Morris asking the questions to David Harris. Up until that point, Morris’ voice has been absent from questioning. This part of the movie is important for two reasons. First of all, without the audio of Morris asking the questions that officially indict Harris, the movie would have been questionable in its claims of truth. Secondly, here we see Morris’ questioning style – he does not “beg” the question as many interviewers often do, rather he interrogates in a way that convinces people to talk and present themselves on their own terms.

Cul de Sac

This movie was clearly not the high gloss, 35mm, Philip Glass scored piece that Errol Morris made, but it exhibited a rawness, especially in its interviewing that was perfect for the subject at hand. For a seemingly low budget doc, this movie addressed a whole host of interrelated issues, and in the meantime convey an emotional story. I appreciate this about Cul de Sac. In some regards it gives you all the information – the war/meth connection, the suburb/soldier connection, the white meth user phenomenon. But it also asks the viewer to think about other issues not so clearly addressed – did the cops use excessive force? was the guy really crazy from drugs or crazy from the circumstancees of society? Compared to Morris’ film, Scott’s interviews seemed to be far less controlled, less informative, and probably less contrived in their setting and lighting. I originally thought that Scott could have made the movie shorter, but in retrospect, I can tell now that he had much more to say than the story of a man wreaking havoc on suburbia.

Tarnation

I am going to roll with Devon's continuum idea for my understanding of the last film in our critique, Tarnation. This movie was made with iMovie and $238 and that is amazing to me - clearly WAY less than the other two. The camera work is super raw, handheld - but highly charged. The editing is similary gritty with lots of post production color effects, fast cuts, split screens - almost like a modern day Vertov/Brakhage with lots of drugs and a better soundtrack. more than the other two films, this one is biographical - and it appears to have completely consumed its creator. it is way more emotionally charged for this reason - not by virtue of its cinematic elements, but because of its subject and the absolute dysfunction in which the movie was made.

Lighting and Skulls

The lighting and camera work on the movies we watched for this week seemed to be meant to match the style dictated by each of these directors, and each style could be put on the line of a continuum, extending from the classic professional to the new wave artist. I couldn’t help, when seeing how distinct these styles are, wonder how much of this was a result of the personal approach of the director, much like how the style of a basketball game is dictated by the coach.

Beginning with The Thin Blue Line, I noticed how the argument of the story is very logical and structured. The lighting and camera work reflect this attitude. People are set up almost as if they are getting ready for a professional photo shoot. It seems that there are several different lights being used from different directions to illuminate not only different parts of the person being interviewed but also different sections of the background. This style is a lot like Duke Basketball. There is a firm emphasis on the fundamentals and their consistent execution in an ordered manner. I wouldn’t be surprised if Coach K. assisted in the direction of this film, giving it a consummate professionalism.

Contrary to this approach is the natural essence of Cul-de-Sac, which extrudes a kind of everyday realism. This movie’s lighting and camera work borrow from the basics of the industry, at times sitting people down in front of the camera and tripod, but on occasion also walking with them down the street or riding with them in a car. The lighting seems to be natural, usually flat without the planned and intentional drama of that in The Thin Blue Line. I would compare this to the style of Memphis. John Calipari definitely understands the game of basketball, but he allows his style to match the natural athleticism of his atheletes. His offense lacks the forced structure that has been the standard approach of most teams in the past.

The last film, Tarnation, is somewhat of a combination of the two styles mentioned before but then completely freaked out on drugs. The scenes seem to have been completely natural in the essence of the lighting as well as the handheld camera work. But there is something unnatural brought about by the unique editing of the film. There seems to be a post production artistic interpretation of the scenes and how their colors should be presented. I would say that this style is like the Harlem Globetrotters coached by Ozzy Osbourne, in that they are still playing the game of basketball, but it looks completely different, and no one really cares about the rules or the human skulls littering the court.

Thin Blue Line, Cul de Sac, Tarnation

It seems to me the thread that linked these stylistically different documentaries was toothlessness. I guess if you want to highlight white trash life style you make sure someone in your film is missing a tooth or two.

With more seriousness, I think The Thin Blue Line was the easiest film to watch. Ironic, sense it tells the story of a cop murder and an innocent man wrongly convicted. The interviews seemed much more conventional to me. The people were shot with pretty simple backgrounds, they were usually framed from just below the shoulders up, nothing tricky was done with the lighting, and they were looking right at the camera. The story was fleshed out with the reenactment shots edited into the interviews. What especially struck me were the different pictures that were used when the eyewitness couple was first interviewed and then their reputations called into question. Morris picked a normal middle class looking photo of the two when they were speaking but picked one with the man wearing a wife-beater and the woman looking particularly haggard when we find out they’d say anything for money.

Cul de Sac also featured interviews but Scott decided to widen the frame and show more of the interviewees’ surroundings. He didn’t rely on reenactments but used news footage of the tank chase to fill in that story. I agree with Kristyn, this movie had more to do with what suburbia and depressed economic areas do to people. As a result of cutting to a cop talking about the meth problem and the decaying plant that these people’s fathers once worked at gave the details in the wider interview shots so much more context. Is Karen just thirsty or does she have a 2-liter bottle of soda around to take the edge off? At one point, while interviewing Shawn’s brother, it seems the brother is watching TV and just glancing at the camera. What does that shot say about his sincerity when he’s crying about his brother?

Unlike the other two movies, which were made by outsiders to the action, Tarnation drops you right into the very messed up life of the filmmaker. There is nothing conventional about his interviews. His interview subjects are himself and his family. He combines video diary excerpts of himself with film he took of his family and scenes from movies that must have spoken to him about his situation. The experimental nature of the film highlighted the chaos he felt, and as Kristyn pointed out, made the scene with his mom even more painful. He didn’t cut away; he was present and dealt with the situation by taking her to NY. In most of the interview scenes the camera is handheld and Jon follows his family, it makes it all seem more spontaneous than the other films. As a result, even though the other films featured a murder and a tank rampage, this film affected me more because it seemed he wasn’t staging anything, his family is screwed-up all the time.

Reading Correction for tomorrow

hey bloggers
you may have figured this out by now, but the Rabiger chapter on interviews is chapter 24, not chapter 23 as the syllabus states. Please have the INTERVIEWING chapter ready for tomorrow
thanks
cindy

Night Mail / Man With A Movie Camera

Just as High School starts with scenes from the ride to school, Night Mail begins with a shot of workers calling in the schedule for the day. It then jumps between shots of the train and communication between the workers. This begins the basic structure of the film, montage sequences of the train and the mail delivery system. In one such montage sequence, a farmer is leading his horse and the train is going by. Then we see lots of shots from the moving train, then farmer with horse again, then train, next, a newspaper dropped from the train, and finally, the farmer yelling to someone about the arrival of the mail. Cavalcanti tells the whole story in this manner. Night Mail shows workers having coffee and a changing into their coveralls, sorting the mail, and loading and unloading the trains. We also see the dropping of mail into the baskets and men working on the tracks themselves. All of these processes are cut with shots of and from the train, giving Night Mail a fairly straight forward storyline and structure.

A Man With A Movie Camera has a similar structure, except with a few more layers added on. It is a movie within a movie that both films itself and watches itself. Vertov plays with his idea of Kino Eye by making the audience wonder where the final camera/observer/author resides. He did well to call himself the "Spinning Top," as this film is actually pretty crazy when you consider how much footage and editing went into its' creation. Vertov seems to take several themes and play them off of each other for a while. He then moves on to another series of juxtapositions and continues this structure throughout the film. For instance, there is the hair washing and laundry montage, the film editing/pedicure/sewing montage, the woman waking along with the city montage, the city/baby montage, the factory/waterfall montage, etc. In this manner, Vertov takes us through birth and death, waking in the morning, laundry, factories, exercise, haircutting, and so on, until we've seen a fairly large cross section of Moscow and the filming of this movie.

Heavy Stuff x 3

"Thin Blue Line"
Errol Morris' approach to Randall Adams David Harris's story was like a defensive and prosecuting attorney in a court case. He let the the different suspects and witnesses give their statements with no interruption from him. It was similar to a 20/20 story but without the Barbara Walters narration in the background. His camera and use of dramatic re-enactments acted as an investigative and evidential tool rather than as a tool to get beautiful and artistic shots. His lighting was noticeable in some interviews such as David Harris' because the lights hit the striking red wall perfectly that it really caught your eye.

"Tarnation"
I initially did not pick up on any interviews in this film because it was such a personal story and included only members of his family. However, now that I reflect on the movie I realize that when he made home videos of his family he was interviewing them and prying information out of them that could help him better understand his mother and himself. Jonathan Caouette's documentary used experimental techniques to tell a very depressing personal story. Since most of what he was trying to portray was in his mind it made since that he used abstract images. It is hard to express what is going on in a person's head so his use of this experimental techniques worked for this style of documentary. His lighting was very amateur but that is only because he was using old footage and was recorded life and testimonies when he felt they needed to be done.

"Cul de Sac"
This movie had a lot of sub plots underneath the story of Shawn Nelson and his tank rampage such as the meth problem in the U.S, WWII, and possibly suburban sprawl. I can't quite figure out Garrett Scott's approach to the interviews but I know he must of done something to make these people feel comfortable because they let him into their homes and revealed personal information while these same people were shoving and screaming at the news reporter. His inclusion of the ride-along with the cop was interesting because it really didn't relate directly to the tank story but in order to get a deeper understanding of the meth problem the cop's point of view was necessary. Scott used new footage of the event as well as WWII archival footage and archival footage of pre-meth San Diego to help tell this multi-layered story. The one lighting situation that stuck out to me was the lighting during the interview with the friend that said Shawn wanted him to the ride in the tank with him that morning. It was very dark and the camera was close-up on his face. All the other interviews were done in full light and the subjects were not as spotlighted as this one man.

Week 8: Murder, Psychosis and Rampage

The three films for this week, The Thin Blue Line, Tarnation, and Cul de Sac, all use the style of the films to support the topics they are covering.

Thin Blue Line uses the interviews and reenactments to lead the viewer through a murder investigation, which at first seems straightforward, but actually ends up being very ambiguous. None of the people interviewed are identified, though it is easy to tell by dress and speech generally who they are (cops vs witnesses etc.)The ambiguity of who the people are makes them become narrators telling "stories", supported by the changing reenactments for each person, rather than real people telling the "truth". Sometimes, instead of a reenactment the film even uses clips from old movies to illustrate the interviews, further casting doubt on the believability of the people involved, leaving the viewer to decide what to believe.

Tarnation uses rapid editing and effects to make an extended montage of Renee and Jonathan's life. The end result is a difficult to watch, rambling narrative that felt almost like a stream of consciousness to me- like the viewer was experiencing Jonathan's psychosis along with him. Unlike Thin Blue Line where the viewer has to try to put the puzzle pieces of the different interviews together to build the narrative of the murder, Tarnation is about overwhelming the viewer with impressions. The one exception to this is a later scene, after Renee has been brain damaged from a lithium overdose, where we see Renee in a long, extended shot singing to a pumpkin and laughing. After the rapid sequence of shots and music that make up the rest of the film, this one shot is incredibly hard to watch, partly because it so long and makes the viewer really SEE just how damaged Renee has become. The viewer isn't "rescued" from the scene by a quick cut to something else but is forced to stay and suffer through along with Jonathan.

Cul de Sac combines footage of Nelson's rampage through San Diego with shots of war-torn and destroyed cities, with propaganda scenes of how great 1950's San Diego was, with interviews of a cop talking about the meth problem in the suburbs, with interviews of friends talking about Nelson. The film seemed to be saying with these parallel stories that the suburb started out as this great hopeful place for the average person, a place where they could achieve the American dream (with cheap houses and a job at the weapons factory), but now the people living there are all drug addicts and crazy- crazy enough to dig gold mines in the back yard and steal a tank and destroy stuff with it. However, the film still left me feeling confused- did Nelson just snap because the city was hassling him about the gold mine? Was he just on drugs? Or had the government used "optical controlling devices" to subliminally control his mind like one friend claimed? Perhaps the point of the film was to cause the viewer to question what is it about society in the suburbs that makes people do drugs, dig gold mines and steal tanks. In other words, maybe the film is not so much about some guy who stole a tank, but about the state of our culture today and the thing that brought us to this point: war.

Night Mail Rap

NIght Mail

"Night Mail" and "Man with a Movie Camera" had a similar look and feel in terms of their quick cut editing and "machinery as art" close-ups. Both films were windows into the daily life of the industrial working class. However, "Night Mail" employed a construction (consciencely avoided by Vertov) by guiding the viewer through a classic process film complete with a beginning, climax and conclusion. We are initially introduced to the complexities of gathering the mail and then to the the marvel of the large-scale human coordination required for its processing. Tension builds as the train speeds towards the drop-off point. The climax occurs as the mail is successfully dropped and then again as the train strains uphill towards Scotland. The visual journey is made richer as the shots cut from the countryside (the past) are run next to the simple but nobel rail workers (the enablers of the future.) High contrast machine and rail patterns cut with with overview panoramics usher in the climax's theme song, which was easily the first - and likely the last - train rap.

By the second half of the film, the "Night Mail" train transforms into the central character and is attributed human qualities by the words of the poem. The individual workers featured in the first half of the film are absorbed into the train as they travel north as a single body. Her success becomes our success. The completion of her seemingly heroic journey (via the three act act structure) announces to viewers of 1936 that they are well on their way to a connected and modern Industrial Great Britain.

Man With A Movie Camera

"Man With A Movie Camera" takes a more free-formed approach to revealing its subjects. Vertov's "City Symphony" construction uses a day-in-the-life structure to capture what he felt was the human essence of growing, industrial Moscow. The beginning of the film invites the viewer to sit down by bringing us into the theater and mysteriously dropping the seats. We are pulled into the physical lens as we see what Vertov sees while focusing on the pedestrian scenes unfolding before him. The opening and closing of the lens marks the passage of time through the day. We are part of the intimate process as he develops his film and threads his projector.

What separates this seminal film from other "symphony" films popular at the time was the risks Vertov took in editing to achieve some of the first successful film visual effects. The split footage of Vertoz on a hill run above a close-up of the camera below became the iconic shot (and subsequent movie poster) of the film. His innovations in fading objects in and out of their setting and in stop motion animation made "Man With A Movie Camera" both a highly poetic and groundbreaking technical film.

Hornrims and Thick Thighs

How might have my life been altered had I known....

Walk with body weight directly over feet.
(note to self - put mod flowered dresses to back of closet. Thighs too thick.)
Check with father prior to beauty school.
Being subpar is an excellent condition for military recruitment.
Drama club always has the cool audio equipment.
and finally yes, respect to one's elder's is best demonstrated in a full- length gown.

The structure of High School is sequence of "a-day-in-the-life" shots as the filmmaker sits in seemingly undetected on student / faculty interactions. The camera's well-timed in and out zooms placed an emphasis on selected points in the coversation. Over -the-shoulder shots put viewers in the eyeline of the person being spoken to and proved an extremely effective convention for further pulling us into the emotional intensity and absurdity of the situation. The most powerful of the film's shots were the hand close-ups, whose fidgeting or wringing instantly revealed to the viewer the true discomfort of the subject. Additionally, the film rarely featured two people in the same shot during a scene of confrontation. Filming the frequent condescending conversations by full-framing the speaker added emphasis to the tension.

The camera's condemning line of sight was used to draw immediate attention to what was actually occurring in the scene over what was being said by the participants. In one particular scene, the camera pulls our eye to the biblical verse plaque on the podium while we hear the warnings dished out to would be promiscuous girls. The plaque's warning of "idle hands" is consistently kept in the lower third of the frame. The overall effect of the film's framing clearly emphasizes conformity via repetition (girl's legs in gym class kicking in unison) and mechanization (camera zooms on the reels of the tape player and the typewriter keys). The final scene used a long, chilling, uninterrupted close-up a faculty member reading a former student's final letter. Because we are denied the emotional expression of the audience before her, we have only her body language by which to gauge the letter's effectiveness. Her repeated "I may cry at any moment" is clearly betrayed by her near mechanical reading of the letter. The film maker's choice in framing, lines of sight and subject zoom emphasis leaves us with no doubt that this high school, and perhaps the majority of 1960's American high schools, served the sole function as factory of social conformity.

Lost Book Lost Again

Lost Book Found made strong stylistic choices which held my initial interest. However, their excessive repetition left me desperately searching for a visual point of relief. Like a guest that overstays their welcome, these conventions grew wearisome to the point that only the film's termination would satisfy. The physical alterations to the film were jarring. The film maker seemed to have used a bleach-byapss on the film, then saturated it with primary colors. Tungsten lights were pushed to a jaundiced yellow. Hard lines on the city pans were softened with an excessive bloom filter. Fish eye lens shots were interwoven erratically and without apparent meaning. The most uncomfortable choice made was the low frame per second, slow-motion presentation. Often selectively used to emphasize a dream-like feeling , the constant jerking action of this slow timing made the film physically difficult to watch. Hand generated or printed typography appears in every shot. I am completely pulled out of the film when the filmmaker choses to include snaps of the city's citizens that are cleary shot on another type of camera with natural coloring and natural timing.

Does this film contain a brilliant mathimatical formula that is completely under-appreciated by my untrained eyes? Are the lists equated with numeric sequences? To me, Lost Book Found serves as a warning that a high concept film can succeed in it's construction, but lose in its wider translation.

Lost Book Lost Again

High School / Lost Book Found

Wiseman shot High School in black and white in 1968, making this an aesthetic choice on his part. We could make the argument that this choice reflects the black and white nature of the indoctrination style of high school that he was trying to reveal. (It's too bad the kid got his foot shot off, "he was a pretty good soccer player." The cocktail dress is 2 inches above the knee. Boys who cannot afford to rent a tuxedo are not allowed to go to the "formal" dance in a dark suit.)
High School is made up of short vignettes, cut with close-ups of the situation. In the boring classroom, there are close-ups of the bored faces, wristwatches, glasses, girls knees. The shots are of mundane things, but give us something to ponder while we are in this submissive position. The film is brilliant at delay. While we watch these scenes, like the fashion show and the meeting in the office with the partents, the true theme is the movie is not revealed to us. We are never told what to think about all of this, even though we are definitely reacting to it. Wiseman is being ironic from the very beginning with Sitting on the Dock of the Bay playing as we are taken down the road to school in the opening scene. By the end, when the teacher praises the school for producing a student who wants to leave his insurance policy to them if he dies in Vietnam, we understand that the whole film is a critique of modern institutional society.
If you look at the film as an indictment, Wiseman's editing becomes subject to critical analysis. There is one shot in High School where he leads us to believe that the male administrator is trying to get a look at a female student. Then the film cuts to P.E. class and a bunch of shots of girls dancing around in their little outfits. It makes Wiseman suspect and reveals the fact that his editing created at least some assumptions, and led us to the final conclusion, which is that high school in general is fucked up.

In regards to Lost Book Found, the structure seemed to simply be lots of aesthetic, gritty, odd, city shots...one after the other, similar in length, style, and range. The artists choice of scenes was very interesting, but to me, there was no variety. In fact, the film became a monotony of things the filmmaker recognized to be cool looking and not much more. Just watching these shots, even though there was a story going on, wasn't enough of a payoff. In High School there is all kinds of variety, from the different scenarios, to the close-ups in those scenarios, to the overriding theme of irony, which was intermixed with interesting shots like those in Lost Book. Book taught me something that I was finding in my own first work, and that is, unique images are not enough to keep an audience interested.

I had forgotten the title...

Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and Night Mail (1936) gave me two different impressions: the former made me think on Vertov's great skills as a filmmaker (shooting and editing) and the latter convinced me that Britain's mail system was highly efficient and modern back in the 30's. One is a musicalized projection of day life in the fast growing and powerful Soviet Union and the other one is a narrated survey of a process. 

I would say that the structure of  Man With a Movie Camera is somewhat experimental since we are not told a specific story with a certain number of acts, we are being set up to see what Vertov wants us to see and that includes him shooting the movie. We are one more spectator from the public looking through his eye. He showed us an acute radiography of the first years after the revolution. At the end, the faster pacing of the images together with the sped up sound made me think of chaos and a never stopping fast life-style, such of an industrialized country. 

Contrary to this built up experience, Night Mail had 3 clear acts that focused on locating where the story is told, describing the process of the mail system and closing the story with evocative images of Britain's prosperity. 

Vertov's image and sound essay resulted a lot more compelling to me and I found a close relationship with Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982; 1989).  

Night Mail & The Man with a Movie Camera

I liked the selection of the movies this week. Both propaganda films have something interesting to point out. Night Mail presents the structure of a classical documentary. We see people involved in the innovative mail service of Great Britain in the 1930s. It is simply the depiction of a process that has the intention of showing the rest of the population how well industry is developing in the country. I would say that even though it is not a very complex/exciting story to film, Basil Wright and Harry Watt were able to build spectacular moments around it. One example of this is when boxes of letters are “delivered” throwing them from the train without stopping the machinery, all the cameras are place in the right position to able to show the moment with all its energy and tension. The fast cuts of the workers in that scene also help to transmit the critical urgency needed during that specific task.

In The Man with a Movie Camera, there is a more clear intention of telling people what to think about the Soviet Revolution. Dziga Vertov tries to communicate the great achievements they have experienced since that time. Parallel with this we can appreciate that he seems to be comfortable with all the possibilities that camera offers to him, experimenting different perspectives and frame compositions during the whole movie.

Maybe that is the reason why, if we compared the structure of both films, Vertov’s approach is more complex and difficult to extract the meaning of the film. If we hadn’t been told previously something about his figure and the type of sociopolitical situation in which he was involved, I am not sure that we would have been able to understand the significance of the film.

Saved By The Bell

The structure of both of these movies was quite segmented, not only by the differences in shots used throughout the two films but also by my eyes opening and closing and then opening again. Vertov seemed to be playing into this theme, correlating the opening and closing of eyes with the opening and closing of blinds. How did he know that I, an American film student who obviously was not his intended audience, would partake in not just figuratively but also literally the metaphors used in his movie? This structure of shot after shot progressing through the day, to show the life of the city was effective almost as a gold watch being swung before my eyes, pushing me into a trance. The music was whispering to me, “You are getting sleepy.”
I think that this concept ties in with the only other thought I had on the structure of these two movies. Variety is the spice of life. For instance, in Night Mail the structure of the movie changed from first setting the scene of the Post Office and the outside workings of the train, to eventually the inner climax of delivering and picking up the mail from a speeding locomotive. However, the structure of individual shots did not change. It seems like the producers of this movie were like, “Oh great, there’s another postal worker doing something with mail, let’s crossfade into video of a train, before crossfading again into some more workers.” Without any change to the structure of these shots, I was like, “Oh great, there’s another postal worker doing something with mail. I wonder if Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski stayed married. Monster trucks are really big.” So the lesson I took away was to add some variety not only to structure of the film as a whole but also the structure of individual shots. Maybe a sweet montage of cross-dressing mail men would have brought me back into the film.

Night Mail/Man with a Movie Camera

These two film are two good examples of showing patriotism through varied styles. Stylistically the two films have to be different as a result of their audiences, and although, the soviets populations could understand narration probably just fine, the fast, and varied style of Man with a Movie Camera achieves its goal of spreading a sense of patriotism about the industrial revolution in Russia to its populace. Conversely, Night Mail is done in Grierson's classical documentary tradition of Britain. Night Mail is of course the less discussed film, but still transfers that sense of patriotism through the lackluster subject of postal workers. By first centering on an the overlooked subject of the postal service and on top of that, the overlooked night shift workers of the postal service, the film conveys its thesis with hardworkers zipping through the country in the dead of night. The shots that show the urgency and never-endingness of the night mail are the aerial and systematic way of processing the mail.

Man with a Movie Camera is of course a more harold film that gives its message of patriotism through the business of its shots and montage. Appealing to a an illiterate mass, Vertoz uses the emotional effect of montage to show Russia's thriving economy. And even to a American in the 21st century it still gives me a sense of a country on the move even though the soviet union is long dead. Moreover, I believe this is the fundamental difference between Night Mail and Man with a Movie Camera is that Man with a.... still can give a uplifting feeling to a present day viewer of a booming country at it time, while Night Mail doesn't quite stand the test of time in this sense.

B's Before H's: Open to interpretation

Devon's analysis of Bro's before Hoes last week made complete sense. As film makers we need to think about what we want to portray first, and try to find an aesthetic sense and form that best portray that idea.

That's all fine and dandy, but here we are stuck with two films with the same intent, but COMPLETELY different interpretations as to the best way reach the goals.

Being one of the main players in the Russian Montage movement, Vertov focuses less on individual scenes than W&W. (Just to let you know before hand, I really really prefer this style... so this evaluation will be more than a bit bias). He uses the juxtaposition of scenes to show that the people, the machinery, and the city are all one. A few examples of this are the use of angles. The train in the first few scenes moves off camera in the same angle that the woman's arm rests in the next. He also uses machinery to represent human actions. Again, early on the woman's eyes focus with the camera lens and then open and close with the window. He contrasts the prolitariats with the rich showing similar scenes, but still different. The lady getting a hair cut is juxtaposed with a lady cleaning a towel (when she has a clean towel on her head), scenes of an ax (while her hair is being cut), and a shoe shiner (as her nails are being done). Heck, even the tripod becomes is anthropomorphised in the end!

Vertov is obviously being self reflexive in a way. He uses a split screen to suggest that he is the king of the prolitariate by placing himself on top of the prolitariate theater.

In short, Vertov is lifting the people in the new age using juxtaposing scenes that together represent the whole story.

W&W, on the other hand, go the opposite direction. The focus is less on the big picture and more on showing the industriousness of the poeple through an example (a la Grierson). They could not use short choppy scenes like Vertov. In order to focus on a specific situation they had to lengthen the scenes and place more relyance on chronological order. A story was required for this, as opposed to a snap shot in Man With a Movie Camera.

I don't know about anybody else, but what I took from this is that two films, even with the same goals, may require different structure.

Specifically, Vertov is taking a snap-shot of life in Moscow. So, he must intertwine the story together piece by piece like a puzzel in order to show the whole. W&W on the other hand are showing a story. They had to put several "whole pictures" together to make the story comprehendable.

Russia vs. England who has the better trains?

To be perfectly honest, I didn't understand the structure of Night Mail. I knew it was about the postal service in England, but I couldn't quite follow the story. I guess I was expecting Grierson to follow one letter from when it was sent until it got delivered to its correct recipient (too much Mr.Rogers or Seasme Street I guess). Night mail focused much more on the workers of the postal service, however, Grierson did include voice over-narration of how a letter was delivered even though the words did not always match the images. I don't know if anyone else got this vibe but it seemed to me that there was a little "anti-authority" feel to it. I got this feeling when the one worker couldn't figure out what the address on the letter said and these two "upper-management" men came to help him. When the second manager told him what it was in an "how could you not be able to read that?" tone, the worker gave him the "your a tool" look. Then, immediately afterwards there was the scene where the "manager" was drinking hot tea on the train while the worker was rubbing his hands together for warmth.
"Man with a Movie Camera" is a self-reflexive propagandistic film. Vertov had a more linear structure in the sense he started off in the morning with shots of everyone sleeping and then the "Industrial Train" passed through and woke up the people in Russia. He continued with footage of the kinds of activities people in industrious Russia would do throughout their busy days. He showed shots of machines being lubricated to represent Russia as a "well-oiled machine" and physically fit people in order to get across the point that Russia achieved success in the Industrial Age and he is part of it.

Night Mail & Movie Camera

Night Mail seems to be split into 3 different sections. The first part seems to mythologize the mail train. Railroad workers stop working while the mail train runs by (one of the workers says it's on time), statistics are given showing the number of letters and miles run, a passenger is told that his train will only wait a couple of minutes until the postal train passes, the shots of the train are all of it rushing past, or aerial shots of it moving at high speed. Clearly the intent is to show the importance and speed of this train. In the 2nd part of the film the focus is shifted to show the workers and operations of the train. It gives a strong sense that this train is run by ordinary people, that the train is great because so many people work together to make it so and because of the organization that keeps the train on time and the mail sorted. The final part is very poetic as the narrator intones to the beat of the train. All of this is clearly propaganda, but very good propaganda.

Man with a Movie Camera does have some structure. It seems to start off in the early morning and film the city coming to life and then working through the day. At some points it seems to show people as part of a giant machine, in one case a worker is completely surrounded by large gears. Usually I like the film and the editing, but it does seem to drag on and on. It seemed like Vertov was experimenting with editing and contrasting different shots together. At the end the cuts become very quick and it seems like he's suggesting how much is going on in Moscow or how busy it can be there. Beyond the city waking up at the beginning of the film I don't see much of a structure.

Week 6: Night Mail and Man with a Movie Camera

The structure of Night Mail seemed to revolve around the train, even going to far as to have POV shots from the train, looking at power lines and the countryside rushing by. I also thought that by focusing on the different people seeing the train and the mail workers, the film became much more personal than it would have been if Wright and Watt had tried to simply represent the process. The men counting the bridges or sorting mail made it possible for the viewer to relate- mail was not a mysterious forgotten process that we all take for granted but the result of the hard work of ordinary people. Definitely propaganda but clearly effective!

In comparison, Man With a Movie Camera had much more complex editing. The most interesting parts for me were when they used parallel editing to create connections. For instance, in the beginning the woman's eye becomes linked to the opening and closing window shutters which becomes linked to the opening and closing camera lens. Or when the shots of women washing and cutting their hair is juxtaposed to shots of slicing and piecing together film, both getting ready for the day. Again and again the city and the camera are mixed up until it is hard to tell which is the metaphor and which the reality. At the end the camera literally takes on a life of its own.

Night Mail and Man With a Movie Camera

Night Mail concentrates on a very narrow slice of life, how mail is picked up and delivered across the UK by train. Man With a Movie Camera was much more ambitious by trying to cover everything that can happen in a day from marriage to divorce, birth to death, accidents to sporting events.

Night Mail was more traditional with a narrator that shared facts and figures about the mail system and shots of the different processes involved. The structure of the film seemed to come from the approach to the train. The camera started outside the train showing an aerial view, then people going about there business as the train passed, then the station where the mail was loaded, and finally inside the train. Once inside repetitive shots were used, sort of like Glassblowing, and the poem, different from the rest of the music and voice over, that accentuated the importance of what they were doing.

Man With a Movie Camera was much less traditional. There was no narrator, lots of fast editing and special effects, and featuring the cameraman and orchestra accompanying the film in the film. Structure came from the linear use of time. The film within the film began early morning and we watched the city wake up. The fast editing allowed Vertov to show all the different ways a city does wake up. Then we progressed through the day to work, cleaning up after work, doing some sports, watching some entertainment. The process of editing, necessary for the film, was even included as a daily occurrence in the city.

Night Mail - M.W.M.C

Both of these films are propagandist in the way they glorify the technological advance of their respective film makers country - in this case Britain and Russia. While Grierson's focus is clearly on the workers who make the massive collection and dispersion of the mail possible, Vertov's is on the on the achievments in transportation, infrastructure, and information technology that his country has succeeded in.

The style and structure of Grierson's film is that of the classic documentary: poetic voiceover narrative, poetic music (with a sweet rap at the end), and a strong ideological engagement - in this case with British nationalism. However, although these features are all present in Night Mail, it is difficult to confine this film to the documentary category as the dialogue, acting, and action in the movie are clearly scripted. As a process film, Night Mail may not have succeeded so well in glorifying the postal system had Grierson not scripted many of the events - and I certainly don't condemn him for doing so. As I contemplate my own process film project this week, it is hard to not want to initiate the process that I will be filming in order to exercise more control of the product.

In a Man With a Movie Camera, Vertov also employs a mixture of images shot in the vertite style and images that he obviously set up and controlled. What makes this movie more interesting to watch than Night Mail however, is that Vertoz uses such a wide variety of shots and effects to illustrate the going-ons of daily life. His slow and fast motion shots give the viewer a more comprehensive picture of the city. Grierson used long, short, and even aerial shots in his film, but every time we see an aerial shot the voice over narrator comes on and tells us what he thinks we should know.