Film20A: The Film ExperienceFall 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

• 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 non-Vietnamese singer of Vietnamese pop songs is idolized for her whiteness and all-American image).

• 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 non-narrative 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 neo-realists 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.