What is Documentary

From MediaStudies

We will meet in Pitzer, Broad Center 208. For this class session, When is a Documentary, there are three assignments to be completed before our meeting.

1) please read:

• When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception

   * Dirk Eitzen
   * Cinema Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 81-102
   * Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies
   * Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.libraries.claremont.edu/stable/1225809

(attached as a PDF).

2) Then, in response, put a url or clip of a documentary (three mins max, note the clip can be longer, but you need to let us know what 3 minutes to watch) on to the wiki with a brief comment attached that begins: "This is a documentary when..." Please post by noon on Sunday.

3) Before class, view the documentary clips and statements of your classmates. We will re-visit them in the class section as needed.

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We will meet in Pitzer, Broad Center, 208.

Trang Pham

Lindsay Talbot

Robyn Kopp

Michelle Aspis

Caitlin Pierce

Kendall Fleisher

Robin Margolis

Tomo Kawate

Magee Clegg

Documentary Links

Invisible Children is a documentary about the effects of a 20-year-long war on the children of North Uganda. The children live in fear of being captured by rebel armies and being forced to fight in the war.
Watch from 24:28 to 25:58. You can watch the whole documentary here, but the main reason why I chose this clip is for you to pay attention to the images and question where and how the three young American filmmakers were able to obtain these images. -Trang

Tarnation is director Jonathan Caouette's fragmented emotional document of growing up with a schizophrenic mother, made in response to her death. This is just a trailer, but it gives a good feel of the dizzying way that he brings together snippets of home movies, early films, reenactments, 80's pop culture, etc. I chose Tarnation because I thought its emotionally driven documentary format might make for an interesting comparison with some of the more traditionally structured clips. It is also an interesting example of how technology continually influences both form and content: Tarnation was made solely on iMovie with a tiny budget (something like $200 I think).

Manda Bala Watch minutes 1-4. This is a documentary when a particular "actuality"(kidnapping of the wealthy for ransom) is set in historical context (urban Brazil) and makes an assertion (by using "narrative" film techniques and edits) that this is an intensifying problem and imminent danger within Brazilian society. The situational cues (grainy BW images juxtaposed with high quality "helicopter" footage to suggest a distinction between "killers footage" and "filmmakers footage;" subtitles to translate the voices or an on camera translator which further intrigues the audience trust) help the audience contextualize this film as a documentary according to today's conception of a "documentary." -Lindsay

Grey Gardens Watch first five minutes. Watch the opening five minutes of Grey Gardens, a film released in 1975 by the Maysles Brothers about a mother and daughter living together in a dilapidated mansion. I thought of this clip and the word documentary because of the relationship the film proposes between the filmmakers and the "subjects" of the film. The film contexualizes the setting and subjects of the doc., but does it provide a "reason" for its existence? Do documentaries need a "reason" to exist? -Robyn

The Thin Blue Line This is a documentary when a jury believed in its truth enough to free a man from death row. The question "Might it be lying?" is extremely relevant in the situation of a murder trial. -Caitlin

Tibet:Cry of the Snow Lion Watch from 4:00. This is a documentary when the director reveals what Chinese government tries to hide about the relationship with Tibetan people and monks as well as the brutality of their treatment to them. The clip talks about one of Tibetan monks who had dedicated himself for people and how he was treated by Chinese government. Before Beijing Olympic began, all media from foreign countries were restricted to keep them away from seeing the brutal treatment of Chinese government on Tibetans and from seeing claims of Tibetans. This documentary shows both statement from Chinese government and Tibetans and how Chinese government severely takes control over Tibetans. - Tomo

Super Size Me This is a documentary when a man claims that eating McDonalds everyday makes an individual fat. This is the opening sequence giving statistics regarding how many fat people are in the U.S. and also explaining how McDonalds is a global franchise feeding terrible food to 46 million everyday.-Magee

Afrique Je Te Plumerai/Africa I Will Fleece YouThis is the only clip I could find from a documentary by Jean Marie Teno on the state of Cameroonian National Literature and the enduring legacy of colonialism. I picked this film because it plays with the conventions of documentary filmmaking (the talking head behind the chair, the stock newsreel footage, the tourguide lecturing to the camera) in order to challenge the usual assumption that a documentary's form can be divorced from its content. Elsewhere in the film the fiction device of a flashback is used and even in this clip you can see the ways in which the filmmaker/cameraman has a presence and one which does not always interact as expected with his surroundings.

[1]This is the trailer for the Errol Morris documentary titled The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. I picked this trailer because I saw it a few years ago and found it to be a fascinating subject and a true tell all of what really happened during of the most important chapters in the United States' history. The documentary is predominantly interviews conducted with a seated McNamara cutting away to other shots that further explain what he is talking about. This is the format for the kind of documentary I want to do for this class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZPYoJrGOQg&eurl=http://grassrootsgourmet.net/ This is a documentary when a small group of people wants to get out a message and show the world how important it is to them. Documentary gives a voice to those that may have otherwise been silenced. The pitzer garden documentary allows an inside view of what creating a garden means to these students, and also offers an alternative to industrial food lifestyles that moves of us lead. Plus, I made this one, so extra brownie points ;-) haha -Michelle Aspis

Class Summary

I believe we had a lively and productive session, to which I was pleased to see all were well prepared.

Definitions of Documentary

We began by thinking about traditional definitions of documentary which tend to be built upon a strange binary where form/approach/subjectivity is put into a tense relationship with content/objectivity. Hence [Grierson's] "the creative treatment of actuality" or Nichols' "an argument about the historical world." We noted that with a more "postmodern" (and current) understanding of the documentary, there is a complex circling around these binaries that now occurs: i.e if objectivity or truth are uncertain, then the content side of this binary begins to seem like the creative approach side, and visa versa. Even so, however, we found that one's stake and ethics remain pivotal in a personal definition of documentary, leading us to the conclusion that the first task is always to decide one's goals in relation to real people, events, and objects, as one begins to consider making (or analyzing) a documentary.

Trust & Ethics

Some of the most important parts of our discussion were about stake, ethics, and trust.

We then looked at Eitzen's unique definition, "i might be lying," one that focuses neither on production, the necessity of reality, or text, and instead moves the essence of a documentary to context (or index)FRAMING and reception. A documentary is when the viewer thinks it is one, because of extra-textual or textual cues that produce in the viewers a "yummy" documentary feeling that is founded upon a recognition of actually having had (or being able to have) the experiences represented. We noted how fake documentaries play with this feeling, as do fiction films. Connected to this, we discussed the film No Lies, which is a fake documentary that plays with audience's emotions. If the audience does not know that the film is not a documentary, they have a much stronger reaction to the ethics of the filmmaker. When the audience learns that the film is not a documentary, they feel like they have been taken advantage of, and in the case of No Lies--raped. Is it worth exploiting the audiences emotions for 90 min to get them to connect on a deeper level, more so than if they had gone in knowing it was a fiction film?

What boundaries are you willing to cross?

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The documentary creates a unique relationship between the producer-the subject-the audience.

We mentioned the film "On the Bowery" a film where the makers placed a guy in in "New York City's skid row," with only alcohol and no money. Certain films and documentaries come at a price and where you draw your ethical line is up to you.

It is critical for the producer to be aware of the exploitation inherent in the making of a documentary in order to minimize that and always be thinking of ways to subvert it. The producer should be mindful of the power dynamics and the trust of her subjects and audience.

Voice

We considered the voice of documentaries, and how this is usually a strong cue that we are watching one. We looked at the films Super Size Me and Grey Gardens and saw how the voices were very different (from voice of God to self reflexive to observational) but each could be used to cue the audience that the film is a documentary.

Nichols "Voice of Documentary" (I think there were five, but I only have 1-2-3)

1. God?-omniscient

2. Self-reflexive voice

3. Observational

Other Thoughts We also discussed what it might mean to make an experimental or autobiographical documentary that pushes at the idea of reality or objectivity so intensely that it departs from the documentary field altogether. Alex