How to develop style/atmosphere of your documentary

From MediaStudies

Description of Class

Robin says: "In "Documentary as a Political Tool: Activism vs. Propaganda" we got a little into discussions of the importance of formal concerns in crafting a political work. In an age of post-modernism and general skepticism towards direct claims to "Truth" within creative works, it seems more and more difficult to formulate effective strategies to draw in audiences and convince them. Attempts at self-reflexivity within works are more and more common, at least at the level of making yourself the foremost subject of the film (cough...cough...Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock....cough). But efforts at self-reflexivity at the level of the aesthetics or format of a film still seem to largely be the domain of "video art" or "overly academic" filmmakers (I do seem to love these scare quotes). Kendall and I wanted to talk about ways in which self-reflexivity or acknowledgment of the position held by the filmmaker can enhance the creative value of a work and even come off as natural rather than self-conscious or forced. This also becomes a discussion of the importance of format or adhering to genre conventions to get your work taken seriously."

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Assignments for Class

Please bring in something that is representative of your project, kind of like a show-and-tell. It could be a shoe, a book, a toothbrush, etc. It should be something physical.
To aid conversation, come to class with one comment and one question about the material in mind. We'll go around and discuss these at the beginning of class.

Read 2 out of the following 3 options:

1- http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html

This is a 1969 Cuban film essay by Julio Garcia Espinosa. It deals with questions of how film aesthetics should reflect the political values of a post-revolutionary society. Came out around the time that other Latin American film theorists were shaping the values of what would get deemed Third Cinema. It certainly speaks to questions of how the form of artistic work should reflect content when one seeks to create revolutionary works or, less provocatively put, politically responsible/activist works. A little dense, as you may imagine, but worth it.

2- http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:WOhYPf6fuGkJ:www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/uploads/docs/060004.pdf+%27Chris+Marker:+The+Art+of+Memory%27&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=safari These essays are from a 2002 conference called ‘Chris Marker: The Art of Memory' about the work of director Chris Marker. Notoriously elusive, Marker has been called 'the essential ghost', and to quote from the reading's introduction, "exists for us not as a physical, biographical human presence, but as a tantalizing screen, one whose function is to assemble and perpetually reprocess those visual, textual and aural traces that resonate in us as memories, whether of the public events that compose our sense of History, or of the fleeting,intensely personal and often supremely trivial moments that we treasure as keys to our own subjectivity. Working both successively and simultaneously through writing, photography, filmmaking, video, television, music and digital multimedia, Marker’s particular gift is less in narrating or cataloguing specific memories (although these are abundantly present across his œuvre), than in functioning as a sort of avatar of Memory itself: drawing the reader/viewer directly inside memory’s characteristic obsessions, random drifts, and fatal elisions; while continually providing an elegant, unforced meta-commentary on how memory functions, and to what possible ends"

- (only read one of the 3 essays in this document- also sorry about the highlighted bits)

3-http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=14163310&site=ehost-live

This is a 2004 essay by Tom Robbins that came out in Harper's Magazine. He argues that, within the Western tradition, serious works of literature are expected to have an uniformly "serious" tone. In contrast to this he advocates for a "crazy wisdom" approach to literature. Though the essay talks more about questions of literary conventions and forms, there are certainly precedents for textual readings of film. For those of you that aren't theory heads, this is a much more approachable article. It has a sense of humor and is designed to be a pleasure to read.

Please watch one of these clips before class:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6eSg1R5UM&feature=related

or this one but its 26 mins so just watch as much as you can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RvmJan17q8

or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRz_AbZV4Ik&feature=related ok great

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