In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the
director.
--Alfred Hitchcock
What does it mean to say a documentary film has a director?
Documentary voice: voice of the film betrays its maker’s form of
engagement with the world in a way that even he may not have
fully recognized.
Like style but with an added sense of ethical or political
accountability voice serves to give concrete embodiment to a
filmmaker’s engagement with the world.
Voice of documentary speaks with all the [technical and rhetorical]
means available to its maker: the decisions about what to film,
when to film, how to film.
Use of irony and comedy
How is wiseman’s voice as a filmmaker manifested?
Titicut as metaphor
Privacy
Lines between sanity and insanity: ponder our own tenuous
links (jim…)
Our complicity: our role in constructing and maintaining
these institutions
“I naively thought that all you had to do was show people how horrible a
place was and something would be done about it. I learned from Titicut
Follies that this is not the case.
ETHICS! What are the ethical problems and issues raised by the making of
this film????
What does wiseman expect of his audience? (viewers have to “fight the
film, the have to say ‘what the hell’s he trying to say with this”? have to
think thru their own relationship to what they’re seeing.”)
Audience as voyeur? What is our position vis a vis the images on the
screen? Are we simply fly on the wall observers?
Relationship of omnipresent surveillance of inmates and our own
surveillance as audience
What do you make of the abruptness of the start of the film? Why start this way?
How do scenes connect?
Is there a plot or storyline in the film?
What function do the characters Jim, the child molester, guards, doctor and man who argue with
doctors play in the documentary discourse? Other characters?
How do these characters (and others) add to the overall theme and purpose of the film?
What function does the scene where the man is being forced fed do for the film? Why have
the scenes with the dead person correlate with this scene? What is the intent of this
scene? .… The shaving scene?
How does the scene where the man is arguing with the group of doctors and nurses portray the
doctors or the character?
What does the effect of having no narration do to the film?
What are some techniques used in the film that add to the effect/theme/intention of the film?
What type of film is this?
How is this film different from all the other films we have seen?
Why make this film?
Are the scenes random? Obviously there is a purpose to the seemingly randomness?
What is it?
Is this film cinema varite? Is it filmed like the fly on the wall?
The camera seems all over the place but why does it focus on certain things? What is the intent
of the focused scenes?
Does the film seem edited/ cut?
Individual scenes original in the real world but in terms of cinema they “really have
no meaning except insofar as you impose a form on them.”
“Voyage of discovery: “ the process of finding meaning and form in editing and
structuring the documentary footage:
as opposed to chronological ordering of strict Direct Cinema advocates:
organization of shots to establish themes, rhetorical points…like an essay rather
than straight recording of profilmic event.
How do the guards treat the inmates? (scene with Jim) How are they portrayed in the film
or are they even portrayed a certain way? Is the film neutral/ objective?
How does the scene with Jim add to the overall theme or intention of the film?
What does the conversation among the inmates about Communism say about the prisoners?
Is the man who argues with the doctors crazy?
Why choose to have an intermission? What is its purpose? Why have it at this point in time of the
film?
How is the first half different from the second?
Why choose to focus on child molester in the beginning?
What is the filmmaker’s purpose or intention for making the film?
What are the filmmaker’s arguments?
Why focus on this facility?
Does the film evoke emotion? For whom?
How does the beginning connect with the film? [function of music]
How does the beginning connect to the end? Does the end offer a conclusion?
Does the beginning and end fit with the overall tone of the film? What is the tone?
Why begin and end with these scenes? What purpose do they serve? What is the filmmaker
trying to portray with these scenes? What is his intent with these scenes?
What does he do to get these arguments across?
What is the overall theme of the film (or themes of the film)?
How are these themes presented?
How are the images used to get the filmmaker's points across?