Poetry Power

Through viewing this week’s films, doing this week’s reading and viewing Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, I realized several things about the poetic mode that I hadn’t fully grasped before.  I’ll ruin the punch line right now and just tell you what I came to realize.  Basically, the poetic mode has built within it the ability to mesmerize its audience in a way that few other styles have.

I first realized this when watching Laughter, then saw it again as we watched Glass.  Pretty much every piece after that just confirmed it for me.  Basically every element allows for a spellbinding experience.  The usual lack of narration allows the viewer to be sucked in and view in the content in a way that a narrator would prevent.  Narration isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does guide your audience to a degree, while the lack thereof allows for further exploration on the part of the viewer.  Their mind is free to wander in whatever direction they’d like, uninhibited.  The use of music and rhythmic editing also has the power to bring its audience in closer.  Music allows for a subtle kind of narration that at least clues the audience in to how they’re supposed to feel and the predictable rhythm of it often leaves one tapping their toes due to its catchy tune or beat.  The use of juxtaposition in editing is also particularly effective in making the viewers think.  During Berlin, I often found myself thinking why the filmmakers chose certain shots in sequence and losing myself in my own thoughts wondering this.

As I realized the power built within the medium, I found myself wondering how the filmmakers sometimes get away with being so heavy handed without us caring.  Take Glass for instance.  The piece is obviously somewhat more kind to the glass blowers than it was to the industrialized machine babysitters.  Why are we ok with this?  Generally, I think that we accept it because we’re explicitly aware of what’s going on.  In other words, I think I accepted that message because I knew I was being fed a message and it happened to be one that I agreed with.  If the music had been swapped in the piece, glorifying the machine workers and belittling the glass blowers, I think I would be much more aware of how much I didn’t agree with the message of the piece.

To prove this point, I picked something on theyoutube that I feel demonstrates this.  The first time I saw this, I didn’t really know what to think.  I remember thinking it was a really cool commercial and the sentimental value of it was obviously high.  This definitely has several elements of the poetic mode in it.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the entire thing depicted a commercialization of sentiment; a sort of manufactured love, which I wasn’t as wild about.  I’d be interested to see what conclusions you all drew concerning this poetic-esque commercial.

Week 3

Ok, so here’s the deal.  Most of what I’m going to be commenting on today has to do with the film I viewed outside of class instead of what we viewed in class.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life.  I thought it was very interesting and appreciated the effort that both the filmmakers and the subjects put forth to make this film happen.  But I couldn’t help but feel that some of the shots may have been a bit contrived.  In essence, I think the filmmakers here weren’t purely just along for the ride.  I think they likely asked for certain shots, asked people to do things over again.  While I can’t prove it, I can most definitely suggest that the use of Eisenstein-like editing and the picturesque shots, as well as the amazing luck they experienced in capturing such spur-of-the-moment subject matter may not have been as lucky as we originally believed.  That is not a bad thing though.  I’m merely saying that at times, this documentary seemed to cross into narrative territory.  Sometimes this is almost necessary in telling a coherent story so I have a hard time saying I hate the filmmakers for doing this.

On the other hand, I chose to watch Bright Leaves for my outside film this week.  I saw this the first time about two years ago when I was applying to the program.  I honestly didn’t quite know what to do with it but I knew that there was definitely something more going on than what we experienced during the first viewing.  It has since become one of my favorite documentaries and I pulled one of my favorite clips for your enjoyment.

As a side note, if you pause the video at 4:32 after you’ve seen the whole clip, you’ll witness one of the most incredible impromptu compositions I’ve ever seen.  In reference to that frame and the clip as a whole, you couldn’t write stuff this good.

Bright Leaves definitely crosses some boundaries as well but it does so in a very tasteful, inquisitive way.  McElwee’s documentary definitely qualifies to be considered part of the poetic mode if you ask me.  He uses narrative techniques pretty liberally, but he does so in a way that supports his quest to find out more about his grandfather.  Often, he’ll actually mimic parts of the film depicting his grandfather (called Bright Leaf) and edit them together with his footage.  This is undeniably contrived, but I say that without trying to employ the negative connotation of the word ‘contrived.’  He definitely had something in mind as he was filming these sequences.  In fact, Petric even asks him how he’ll edit the two together, which implies McElwee had a gameplan as he shot some of his footage.  But McElwee did something different than the filmmakers of Grass.  He obviously took his sweet time carefully selecting what he would put into his final edit.  If it were up to me, I would have trashed this interview immediately after shooting it.  But Ross kept it around, thought about its content and discovered that it actually delivered a very poignant point that taught even him something.  McElwee isn’t making a movie for us.  He’s learning just as much as we are and is allowing himself to be malleable in the filmic process, which eventually makes a documentary that says a lot more.  He came to the table with a plan but he remained healthily skeptical of it.  He was fluid in the creation of this film and his flexibility allowed his message to be different than what he probably originally intended, but also more honest and poignant.  I’m getting to almost 650 words now so I’m going long and should probably wrap this up.  I’ll just end by saying that Bright Leaves is poetry on celluloid.

That’s my schpiel this time.  Amen.

Roses Are Red...

A friend reminded me of a joke limerick I once told a few months ago.  Roses are red, violets are blue, which makes violets a really stupid name for them.  Considering that ‘blue’ and ‘them’ don’t even rhyme, it’s a pretty pathetic limerick, which I readily admit.  I think the idea behind it deserves some attention though. 

                I’d be the first one to tell you that I’m a novice to documentary.  I’m completely untrained in the watching of the films we’re viewing here and I feel like I’m at about the level of your average documentary viewer.  I think they’re wildly interesting but if a film presents itself as a documentary, I’m signing up for one thing by watching it and am kind of disappointed when I get something else.  In essence, I’m reacting to this week’s explanation of what documentary is.  Nichols said “with documentary, we expect to engage with films that engage the world.” (23)  He then talks about how documentary is edited different than fiction and that “documentary is therefore much less reliant on continuity editing to establish the credibility of the world it refers to than is fiction.”   I feel that the general consensus of documentary is that it is supposed to document things, which implies an inherent fidelity to reality.  This reading, however, was interesting in that I agreed with a lot of the ideas presented, but also felt that too much creative liberty can result in something like propaganda donning the façade of what most people consider to be documentary, which is in essence, truth. 

                Documentary seems to have a sort of charisma or charm built into the medium that makes the lay man trust what he’s seeing.  This trust should be taken very seriously, especially when we decide to make a doc ourselves.  The desire to heighten drama can be strong and I totally get that, but straight up lying seems like it’s an easy pit to fall into when you’re creating a documentary.  I have a personal vendetta against such documentaries because I saw a film in high school that supposedly “exposed” something that I believed in.  I had a really hard time trusting it again because of how inaccurately portrayed it was in the documentary.  There was plenty of truth in it, but the tone in which it was portrayed mixed with the blatant falsehoods made it anything but a documentation of the truth.

Above, I’ve listen one piece of documentary I’ve always found fascinating.  I think a part of the reason I enjoy it is simply because it’s real life and it’s impossible to debate that anything in here is contrived or that any sort of misrepresentation.  It’s just real life documented for all to see.  Nothing sketchy about it.

So I'm an idiot...

My first post, as valid as it may have been, did not apparently meet the minimum requirements for this first blog post, which was supposed to be about me.  Whoops.  In a lot of ways, I feel like this is the story of my life.

In preparation for this second attempt at a proficient blog post to satisfy the requirements of the class, I did probably the worst thing I could have done:  I watched Benjamin’s video on Damon.  Documenting my life has always been a huge struggle of mine.  The only pictures of me you’ll ever find on facebook aren’t mine—I’ve simply been tagged in them.  If you look at my journals, they’re for the most part empty.  That isn’t to say that my life is undocumented.  That would be a grave lie.  Rather, my life has been documented in slightly non-traditional methods which require an annoying degree of persistence to decipher what they say about me.  Here’s an example:

Out of the Picture

I urge you to skip the first two minutes if you decide to indulge. 

Probably not what you were expecting, was it?

So what does this say about my understanding of the documentary idea?  To me, I strongly believe that documentary is in large part layered.  I don’t know if I’ve ever viewed a single documentary and believed it wholeheartedly.  Instead, I’m a much bigger believer in subtext and in picking a piece apart.  When I watch the aforementioned piece by me (done over 5 years ago so don’t judge), I see something different than what you may have encountered.  To me, this is a piece about a boy about to go on a mission who wants desperately to be remembered even though he’ll be on the other side of the world for an extended period of time with few or limited devices of communication.  This was a major worry for me back when I made this.

In essence, I feel that every piece of art encapsulates some seed of documentary within it.  Documentary, as the reading so aptly states, is sort of an elusive term.  I feel that most art have some sort of documentation within it pertaining to the artist at that particular time.  I kind of shudder every time I watch this film.  The slow beginning, amateur VFX, shoddy acting and poor creative choices speak volumes of my inexperience, but the story also holds within it a small piece of my soul at the time I made it.  I was just downright scared of being forgotten.  I wanted pictures of me to be in everybody’s frames.  I was insecure about a lot of things, and those worries shine through.

Even films that are considered to be true documentaries say something about the artist(s) compiling them.  I have a hard time believing in truly unbiased documentary filmmaking.  Documentaries are really about people in my book.  Even something like Who Killed the Electric Car? deserves a study of the filmmakers and what their motivations were. 

Admittedly though, I’m insecure of my definition of documentary, which is why I’m taking this class.  Lack of exposure to the medium has surely given me several false notions concerning the art, but I genuinely hope to be able to explore it and help my currently malleable opinion of documentary become more resolute.

Nanook of the North- Inuit Wasn't True. (Get it?)

Through the viewing of Nanook of the North, This is Spinal Tap and the required readings for this week, several of my longstanding ideas regarding documentary were reinforced, and I was able to glean some additional ideas in the course of the last week.  Documentary seems to be like salt in the sense that one inherently knows what documentary is (sometimes) but has a difficult time describing.  This supposed inherent knowledge can, however, be sometimes tricked or made fun of with interesting results.

The first thing we watched in relation to the question of what documentary is was the 1922 film Nanook of the North.  I was quite charmed by the seemingly authentic nature of the piece in documenting the day to day life of an Inuit named Nanook and his family.  In talking with my friend Hayley about the film on a later occasion, we even talked about how cool it was to learn about the tribe and their way of life.  We truly thought it was an authentic record of the lifestyle of the Inuit people during that time.

However, once I started reading this week’s assignment, I discovered much to my chagrin that the record wasn’t as authentic as I had originally believed!  Flaherty obviously realized the narrative power and romance that the medium of film had.  He definitely did portray the Eskimos, but he portrayed them in a way that more closely matched his original thoughts concerning them rather than portraying them as they actually were.  This made me realize several things about documentary.

This experience helped me realize that a filmmaker is still involved in the creation of the piece.  This means that they will be editing things out, directing our attention to the things they believe to be important and sometimes narrating what is being exhibited.  All these things decrease the validity of the subject.  Real life is never edited, we direct our attention where we want to and narration seldom occurs in reality.  I don’t feel that I was necessarily misled in the viewing of Nanook of the North, but this experience helped me realize that I too am susceptible to being tricked.  Everything in this documentary seemed so valid to me that I never once questioned its authenticity.  Documentary is often exploited and its form employed in so-called Mockumentaries, but the audience is usually in on the joke.  When a filmmaker is showing things in a manner that is contrary to reality and audiences take the piece as truth, documentary all of a sudden can become a dangerous and manipulative tool.