YU A Journey Through Time Blog
BLOG REQUIREMENTS Blogs should typically be between: York students: 700–750 words (total length) Blogs: For each blog you will choose an image (or up to three) from your daily environment that connects or relates in some special way to the lectures, readings and screenings taken up in the course (during the period specified for each blog above). Reflect on what draws you to this image and on how, and in which way, you relate it to the course lecture/readings/screenings. Go out and explore your environment as much as you are able to and start noting and making the connections between your daily life and what you have encountered in the course lectures, readings or documentaries. In addition, to each blog, note two (2) important points taken up in a given course lecture. Importantly, Indicate why and how they are important to that week’s lecture.(Regular York students: 200 words. (Total blog length: see above.) The image that you take up in your reflection should be original visual material; it may be a photograph that you take, or a drawing/sketch/water colour/collage that you make of the environment around you. The image should be engaged and grounded in a course lecture, reading or documentary in a substantive way. If you are unable to use an original image you may, as last resort, use an image from an online or other source. If the latter, make sure you cite the work properly. READING THE MYTHIC ORIGIN IN EARLY CINEMA Our discussion of documentary would not be complete without some consideration of how this form of filmmaking found its voice. The voice of documentary relates to the ways in which documentary film and video speaks about the world around us, but from a particular perspective. When a documentary makes a proposal or offers a per-spective, “voice” refers to how it does so. When did some films begin to speak in this distinctive form of voice? How is it related to other forms of cinema? How did documentary gain a voice of its own? We should note that no one set out to invent this voice or build a documentary tradition. The effort to construct the history for docu-mentary film, a story with a beginning, way back then, and an end, now or in the future, comes after the fact. It comes with the desire of filmmakers and writers, like myself, to understand how things got to be the way they are. But to those who came before us, back then, how things are now was a matter of idle speculation. Their goals were more immediate: make a film that answers to their own needs and intuitions about how to represent the subject of their choosing. Early filmmakers did not set out to blaze a trail for a tradition that did not yet exist. Their great passion was in exploring the limits of cinema, in discovering new possibilities and untried forms. Some of these efforts would jell into what we now call documentary film. Looking backward, though, the existence of a documentary tradition obscures the blurred boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, narrative and retoric, poetry and spectacle, documenting reality and formal experimentation that fueled these carly efforts. This tradition of experimentation continues to this day but in relation to new forms and new techniques from animation to reenactments: it is what allows documentary itself to remain a lively, vital genre. A standard way of explaining the rise of documentary involves the story of the cinema’s love for the surface of things, its uncanny abil-ity to capture life as it is, an ability that served as a hallmark for early cinema and its immense catalog of people, places, and things culled from around the world. Like photography before it, the cinema was a revelation. People had never seen images that possessed such extraor-dinary fidelity to their subject, and they had never witnessed apparent motion that had imparted such a convincing sense of motion itself. As film theorist Christian Metz noted in the 196os, to duplicate the impression of movement is to duplicate its reality. Cinema achieved this goal at a level no other medium had ever attained. The capacity of photographic images to render such a vivid impres-sion of reality, including movement as a vital aspect of life that painting and sculpture had been able to allude to but unable to duplicate, prompts two complementary myths to unfold-one about the image and one about the filmmaker. Both stand in need of correction. REALISM AND THE DESIRE TO EMBODY IT: INSUFFICIENT GROUNDS FOR DOCUMENTARY The remarkable fidelity of the photographic image to what it records gives such an image the appearance, and often the status, of a docu-ment. It offers visible evidence of what the camera saw. The underlying sense of authenticity in the films of August and Louis Lumière made at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Workers Leaving the Lu-mière Factory, Arrival of a Train, Watering the Gardener, and Feeding the Baby (all 1895), seem but a small step away from documentary film proper. Although they are but a single shot and last but a few minutes, they seem to provide a window onto the historical world. Fiction films often give the impression that we look in on a private or unusual world from outside, from our vantage point in the historical world, whereas documentary images often give the impression that we look out from our corner of the world onto some other part of the same world. The departing workers in Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, for example, walk out of the factory and past the camera for us to see as if we were there, watching this specific moment from the past take place all over again. Many point to these early works as the “origin” of documentary. Many claim them as the “origin” of realism for the fiction film. In either case, by maintaining a “faith in the image” of the sort the influ-ential French critic André Bazin admired, the Lumières’ films seem to record everyday life as it happened. Shot without adornment or editorial rearrangement, they reveal the shimmering mystery of events. They appear to reproduce the event and preserve the mystery. A note of humility was in the air. The cinema was an instrument of extraordinary power; it required no exaggeration or spectacle to win our admiration for what it could do. The second myth involves the filmmaker. The remarkable accu-racy of the image as an indexical representation of what the camera saw fascinated those who took the pictures. A compelling need to explore this source of fascination drove early cinematographers to record diverse aspects of the world around them. Even if they staged aspects of the action or decorated the scene, as Georges Méliès did in works such as his A Trip to the Moon (1902), a fascination with the power of the photographic image to record whatever came before it and to present the result to an audience by means of the film strip, capable of projection over and over, took precedence over the niceties of story telling and character development. We have, then, two origin myths: (1) the filmmaker was a hero who travelled far and wide to reveal hidden corners and remarkable occur rences that were part of our reality, and (2) film images possessed the power to reproduce the world by dint of a photomechanical process in which light energy passed through a lens onto a photographic emul-sion. These two qualities form, for some, the mythic foundation for the rise of documentary film. The combination of a passion for recording the real and an instrument capable of great fidelity attained a purity of expression in the act of documentary filming. As we will see, however, a considerable leap has yet to be made from the cinematic document to the documentary film. The conven-tional story of the origins of the documentary film, though, culminates in the dual attainments of the narrative polish with which Robert Flaherty brought Inuit life to the screen in Nanook of the North (1922) and the marketing skills with which John Grierson established an institutional base for documentary film. Grierson spearheaded the government sponsorship of documentary production in 1930s Britain as Dziga Vertov had done throughout the 1920s in the Soviet Union and as Pare Lorentz would do in the mid-1930s in the United States.In point of fact, Vertov promoted documentary quite a bit earlier than Grierson but remained more of a maverick within the fledgling Soviet film industry; he did not attract a corps of like-minded filmmakers nor gain anything like the solid institutional footing that Grierson achieved. John Grierson became the prime mover of the British and, later, the Canadian documentary film movements. Despite the valu-able example of Dziga Vertov and the Soviet cinema generally, it was Grierson who secured a relatively stable niche for documentary film production. Coupling the uncanny power of film to document preexisting phenomena with the rise of an institutional base corresponds to the emergence of the four constituents of documentary film discussed in chapter 1. These developments generated a group of practitioners, an institutional frame, a body of films, and an audience attracted to these distinguishing qualities. That the image’s incredibly accurate rendering of reality, including movement, and Grierson’s pivotal role in creating an institutional base are over 30 years apart suggests, however, the beginnings of a problem. Why was there no Grierson in 1895? How were these extremely realistic representations received from 1895 to the late 1920s? What we have so far amounts to necessary but insufficient conditions. This origin story amounts to a myth. DOCUMENTARY AS THE CONVERGENCE OF MULTIPLE factors One of the problems with this mythic origin is that the capacity of film to provide rigorous documentation of what comes before the camera leads in at least two other directions besides documentary: science and spectacle. Their presence indicates that the indexical quality of the image did not lead directly to documentary film. Both directions begin with early cinema (roughly from 1895 to 1906, after which narrative cinema gains dominance). Both science and spectacle contribute to documentary film development but are hardly synonymous with it. The differences can be noted briefly. First, the capacity of the photographic image (and later of the recorded sound track) to generate a precise replica of aspects of its source material forms the basis for scientific modes of representation. These modes rely heavily on the indexical quality of the photographic image. An indexical sign bears a physical relation to what it refers to: a fingerprint replicates exactly the pattern of whorls on the fleshy tips of our fingers; the asymmetrical shape of a windswept tree reveals the strength and direction of the prevailing wind. The value of this indexical quality to scientific imaging depends heavily on minimizing the degree to which the image, be it a fin-gerprint or X-ray, exhibits any sense of a perspective or point of view distinctive to its individual maker. A strict code of objectivity, or insti-tutional perspective, applies. The indexical image serves as empirical or factual evidence. It offers no perspective and has no voice, or a very faint one. It is the trained analyst or interpreter whose voice brings meaning to the image. Documentary flourishes when it gains a voice of its own. Pro-ducing accurate documents or visual evidence does not, on its own, grant it such a voice. In fact, it can detract from it. The early cinema of Lumière and others, like that of science, still lacked the voice that would come to characterize documentary. Documentary does not depend on the indexical quality of the image for its identity. It is not science. In fact, early documentary embraced reenactments that documentaries have embraced animation. Documentary commonly makes use of indexical images as evidence or to create the impression of evidence for the proposals or perspectives it offers. Robert Flaherty, for example, created the impression that some scenes took place inside Nanook’s igloo when, in fact, they were shot in the open air with half an oversized igloo as a backdrop. This gave Flaherty enough light to shoot but required his subjects to act as if they were inside an actual igloo when they were not. Night Mail (1936) created a sense of what it felt like to hurdle across England on the overnight express mail train, bearing mail to Scotland, but the interior scenes of sorting mail were shot on a sound stage, not on the train. For The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris shot a series of reconstructions that represent the murder of a Dallas police officer as various figures in the film describe it. Not only are the reconstructions discrepant from each other, raising the question of “What really happened?” but every one of them was shot in New Jersey, not Dallas. These choices all represent tactics by the filmmaker to generate the effect he or she desires on an audience. These tactics may amount to bad science, but they are part and parcel of documentary representation. When we believe in something without conclusive proof in the validity of our belief, this becomes an act of faith, or fetishism. Docu-mentary film often invites us to take on faith that “what you see is what there was.” This act of faith may derive from the indexical capacity of the photographic image without being fully justified by this quality, as reenactments suggest. For the filmmaker, creating trust, getting us to suspend doubt or disbelief, by rendering an impression of reality, and hence truthfulness, corresponds to the priorities of rhetoric more than to the requirements of science. A documentary not only documents events but conveys a distinct perspective on or proposal about them. Its perspective or proposal will be one among many. We accept the evidentiary value of images as proof of any one perspective’s validity with some peril. Second, spectacle also differs from documentary. Early cinema not only supported the scientific use of images, it also led to what film historian Tom Gunning has termed a “cinema of attractions.”The cinema of attractions relied on the image as document to present viewers with sensational sketches of the exotic and unusual depictions of the everyday. The term refers to the idea of circus attractions and their open delight in showing us a wide variety of unusual phenomena. Such attractions could both whet the curiosity and satisfy the passion of early cinematographers and audiences alike for images that represented the odder aspects of the world around them. A tone of exhibitionism prevailed that differed radically both from the sense of looking in on a private, fictional world and from generating scientific evidence. Like scientific images, attractions hold a different form of appeal from documentary perspectives or proposals. The “cinema of attractions” pitched its appeal directly to the viewer and took delight in the sensationalism of the weird, exotic, and bizarre. It sought to amuse, surprise, titillate, and shock rather than deliberate, evaluate, or commemorate. (Part of its legacy is the vast array of reality TV shows that have proliferated since the 1990s.) The distinctive point of view of the filmmaker took second place to the spectacle reported. Louis Lumière sent scores of camera operators around the world armed with his newly patented cinématographe (an invention that not only shot film like a modern motion picture camera but also served to develop and project it!). We remember the names of only a handful of them. What they shot mattered more than how they shot it. Aspects of this tradition of a “cinema of attractions” linger on just as scientific uses of the photographic image remain strong. It is vividly on display in a variety of films that peek into the underbelly of everyday life. We find it, for example, in “mondo” movies, beginning with the classic tour of outrageous customs and bizarre practices, Mondo Cane (1962), with its catalogue of bare-breasted women, the mass slaughter of pigs, and august pet cemeteries in different corners of the world. We find a similar display of “attractions” in programs like Australia’s funnti- est Home Movie Show and Monster Kid Home Movies (2005), as well as the adult movies, where an exhibitionist tone seems to know no limits. Safari films and travelogues on everything from surfing to architecture also rely heavily on this exhibitionist impulse to appeal to us directly with the wonders of what the camera discovered. Clearly an element of documentary film, this “cabinet of curious attractions” is often treated as an embarrassing fellow traveler rather than as a central component.
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