Film20A: The Film Experience
Fall 2009
Prof. Peter Limbrick
129 Communications
(Mon 10am-12pm)
Our website:
http://ic.ucsc.edu/~limbrick/film20a/
Recapping Monday’s lecture:
Elements of the Documentary:
1.
Non fiction and non-narrative
a) Note that these terms are not at all clear-cut. For example, we saw a
clip from Cover Girl: A Gift from God that used fictional elements as
part of a documentary strategy, using fiction to make an argument
about the implications of the facts it presented (about a how a nonVietnamese singer of Vietnamese pop songs is idolized for her
whiteness and all-American image).
b) The term “non-narrative” is also slippery when used with
documentary. While some documentaries do avoid narrative
strategies (Q: do you think Berkeley in the Sixties used narrative or
not?) other docs seem to deploy conventions commonly used in
narrative. For example, The Times of Harvey Milk begins its “plot”
with an event from well into its “story” of Milk’s life, that is, his
assassination. The film then goes back to much earlier in the story,
relating the history of his rise to being a public figure, then catches us
up to the moment of the death, and continues on after it. This is
clearly a clever manipulation of story and plot material, in the same
manner as other kinds of narrative film might do.
• CLIP: The Times of Harvey Milk. The first few
minutes of the film.
• Non-fiction and non-narrative discussed.
• The role of the voiceover (exposition) and the
unseen interviewer (evidence of a
participatory interview structure, by which
many subjects are interviewed and respond
to the unseen, unheard questions.) This is
also a structure used by Paris is Burning.
Ways to analyze documentaries
2. Expositional organizations:
• Cumulative
• Contrastive
• Developmental
3. Rhetorical positions:
Explorative
Interrogative
Persuasive
Reflexive and Performative
Using the terms, together.
To some extent, all documentaries are expositional, in that they
show us things. Some are more expository in nature than
others, eg. Monday’s clip from The River that showed
(exposition) as well as persuading us of something (i.e. in
terms of rhetoric, it was persuasive). Film-Essay on the
Euphrates was contrastive, but also persuasive-- so much so
that the director later regretted how “pro-government” he’d
been in praising the dam project. That film was also
associative and metaphorical (terms from the experimental
realm) in its approach to facts. While non-fictional and nonnarrative in nature, it was also unconventional in the style of
its exposition, being influenced by other cinematic traditions
such as Soviet montage.
Key pt: > Documentary is not all the same, and is not
divorced from other filmmaking styles and traditions.
How was Berkeley in the
Sixties organized?
• Developmental: built up a history of the Free Speech movement,
then showed how this grew into the anti-Vietnam-war
movement, which was challenged by the involvement of the
Black Panther Party. Feminist movements emerged that invoked
the black struggle for civil rights, the hippies rejected the
suppositions of the culture, and together all of them helped
formulate the challenges that resulted in People’s Park and the
harsh government attacks on protestors around downtown
Berkeley and the campus.
• The shocking events at the end of the film are the culmination of
all the other shocks and disruptions, such as the fire-hosed
protestors in SF that open the film.
The social documentary
• It’s not hard to see Berkeley in the Sixties as a social
documentary. Perhaps its less of a political documentary than a
historical documentary, however. Does it try to agitate and make
us see the side of the protestors? In a way, perhaps it does. But
it also attempts to recover a history of events that we may not
know about, and show us how it now looks in the light of History
(note how many interviewees contrast their views of events at
the time to their understandings of those events now). The
incredibly careful and well-edited use of archival footage also
helps this film document the history of a political movement.
The social documentary (cont’d)
• Paris is Burning (you saw a clip in section) is also a
social documentary, but arguably functions more as a
political documentary than an historical one: it tries to
show the social conditions, the marginalization, and
the injustice suffered by its subjects, while also
showing their agency in creating their own culture
and their radical transformation of social institutions
like gender and family (or, their capitulation to those
values, depending on one’s point of view).
• CLIP: Paris is Burning
Ethnographic Cinema
• Focuses on people, culture, and
communities. Corrigan and White
isolate two sub-traditions within the
ethnographic genre:
– Anthropological films
– Cinema verité or “direct cinema.”
Anthropological cinema
• Examples: Grass, dir. Merian C. Cooper and
Ernest Schoedsack (King Kong creators).
1925 film about Persian tribes.
• Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North (1922),
Moana 1926) studied non-European cultures
through the lens of European ideas, often
distorting or fictionalizing elements of what
was shown.
Cinema verité (US: direct
cinema, observational mode)
• “cinema of truth”. Emerges historically with the advent of
lightweight 16mm cameras and sound recording equipment
(influential on narrative filmmakers too, like the Italian neorealists of the post-WWII period, and the French New Wave of
the 60s).
• Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin: Chronicle of a Summer (1961)
interviewing Parisians in the street.
• A variant of this tradition in the US became known as “direct
cinema” because of the idea that it offers a “direct” appreciation
of its subject. (Bill Nichols, “What kinds of Documentary are
there?” calls this the “observational mode,” which clearly
describes how it works.)
• [“direct cinema” can also refer to what Stan Brakhage and Len
Lye did, scratching “directly” on film without using a camera. Be
careful with the term.]
Observational mode of doco
(direct cinema)
• CLIP: Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967).
• Pennebaker (Primary) and the Maysles Brothers (Grey Gardens,
Gimme Shelter) were early proponents of this form, along with
Frederick Wiseman (Titticut Follies (1967)
• It’s important to apply the same analytical skills and skepticism
to this form of documentary as others. While interviews are
avoided as too intrusive, and the camera acts like a “fly on the
wall,” recording what others do without intervening (Gimme
Shelter famously records the beating death of a concertgoer, as
the camera keeps rolling) one can argue the presence of the
camera changed events, and that the makers arranged the
material in the editing room in ways that constitute an
intervention too. (Wiseman is quite open about this, and says
that the idea that the form is “pure” documentary is false).
Other strategies
• The performative mode of documentary (Nichols, Corrigan and
White) offers a different way of negotiating some of the positions
and traditions covered so far. For example, Marlon Riggs’
Tongues Untied uses performance as a way to narrate the
experience of being gay and black, a life narrative that might
otherwise be difficult or impossible to convey in its complexity
(Paris is Burning tried to just have its participants speak their
truth, but Riggs offers a more complex, less “realist” way of
approaching the question.)
• CLIP: Tongues Untied (1988) and performativity.
• This strategy began to be deployed by many queer filmmakers
(we could argue that Sadie Benning’s films might also be
performative documentaries) because of the possibilities of the
form to reject “straight” or conventional documentary forms.
(How might you compare Riggs’ approach to queer life and
history to Bennings’ or to Times of Harvey Milk?)
Reflexive forms
• Other kinds of documentaries become (self) reflexive in different
ways. For instance, Man with the Movie Camera is an early
Soviet experiment with documenting the life of a city, but
includes scenes in which the intervention of camera and editing
are made obvious and visible in the frame.
• CLIP: The Man with the Movie Camera dir. Dziga Vertov, 1925.
• CLIP: Fog of War, dir. Errol Morris (2001). Here, elements of
reflexivity allow us to see that this is a constructed interview with
ellipses, breaks, etc. This strategy, and the use of other
elements of exposition such as the archival footage, also
construct a rhetorical position that potentially undermines the
speaker’s authority. How truthful is Macnamara being? What
does Morris think of him? How does Macnamara’s later version
of history inform this social/historical documentary? What role
does Philip Glass’s music play?
Addressing the conventions:
the mockumentary
• The extent to which we experience all
these strategies as “conventional” is
made very clear when those
conventions are used to undermine
veracity and to trick us.
• CLIP: Forgotten Silver, dir. Peter
Jackson (1995).
Papers
• How would you use the documentary material to
construct a paper topic?
• The role of archival footage in constructing our
knowledge of “Berkeley in the sixties.”
• The unreliability of documentary convention in
Forgotten Silver.
• The role of the interview in constructing a portrait of
marginalized communities in Paris is Burning.
• How contrastive exposition is combined with
metaphor in Film Essay on the Euphrates.
• How the notion of the essay structures Film Essay on
the Euphrates.