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.