After Tuesday’s theory-based class, Thursday was all about putting it into practice. Our guest lecturer was Giulio, an Italian documentary maker whose task was to teach us the basics of filming an interview.
We started by setting up our tripods and our audio. A handy tip I’d never thought of before was to record your second track a bit lower as a back-up in case your audio peaks. But the main focus of the class was framing and the cinematographic side of the interview. We looked at the aperture, the focus, the white balance, and other features of our cameras (another handy tip was that the viewfinder only works when the screen is put away, solving a mystery I’ve been trying to puzzle out at work!). I felt like I knew most of the technical things but it was good to think about it in the context of documentary – considering factors such as depth of field around the subject, background, how wide or close the shot should be to evoke a certain tone, etc.
Of course, it was then time to Go Out Into The World and Do Good Things (TM). The original plan had been to ask strangers on the street for interviews to really challenge our abilities in getting good material out of a subject. However, most of the class decided that we wanted to focus instead on getting the technical side of filming down pat so we opted to interview each other.
In my little group of three, we were inspired by the Old Melbourne Gaol and decided to create a (not so) true crime doco, with ourselves featuring as the criminals. We had a lot of fun coming up with our unlawful histories, and Jason pulled out an Oscar-worthy performance in his retelling of the time he stole a pen. We didn’t get a chance to do any editing but over the course of the next few weeks (if any of us can be bothered) it’s sure to become a hilarious short. Maybe we didn’t learn as much about interviewing as we could have but it was a super fun way to practice the technical aspects of using the camera.
This week our focus was on how to conduct interviews. On Tuesday Kim showed us a range of interviews from different documentarians to show us the different styles of interviewing we might like to use, and to think about ways to incorporate our theme of ‘participation’ in our interviews.
We first looked at the famous example of Chronicle of a Summer, in which French directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (or, more precisely, their minions) asked random Parisians whether or not they were happy, amongst other things. I’d seen part of Chronique D’un Ete before but what was particularly interesting and relevant for this class was the sequence that featured the subjects actually watching parts of the film and reflecting on it themselves. It was a sort of hyper-reflexivity; not just the film-makers acknowledging the role of the camera but the subjects doing so as well.
The second example was one from the renowned Werner Herzog, in this case interviewing a reticent researcher about arctic penguins. Herzog’s voice was very present in the piece (both metaphorically and literally), and we discussed whether his leading questions were successful in drawing out a more colourful response from a reluctant interviewee, or were attempts to skew the truth to fit a narrative he had already established.
Another example was an interview with Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Gates of Heaven) explaining his own interviewing techniques. Interestingly, where I’ve always thought the standard for documentaries (in my own experience, both as a viewer and as a creator) is to have the subject talking to the presenter off-screen, Morris had actually created a device whereby he could comfortably film subjects talking straight down the barrel. It makes for an interesting effect. Personally, I always think it looks more natural for a subject to be talking to the side of the camera, but there is something in Morris’ technique that really works for his own documentaries.
Finally, we explored the line between participation and exploitation in Lauren Greenfield’s Kids + Money. The section we watched was two tween sisters with quite a lot of money at their disposal. It was fascinating to watch, but afterwards the class consensus seemed to be that it leaned towards the exploitative. They were only young girls, and it really seemed as though we were being encouraged to dislike them, as Dan described when pointing out the scene where there is a jump cut from one of the girls making a particularly snide comment to their mother claiming to have two ‘beautiful’ girls.
As a post-script, we watched a scene from Brian Hill’s Pornography the Musical, a – well, a musical about pornography, that also happened to be a documentary. I’d previously seen Hill’s musical documentary Drinking for England, in a similar vein. It’s a very weird concept, and I find it quite uncomfortable to watch (think the camp and melodrama of a musical, except with real people singing about their real lives), but then part of me thinks maybe that’s the point. It’s really relevant to my own piece though I think, because of the way the subjects are complicit in the dramatisation of their stories because they know that it contributes to a depiction of their character that is ultimately truthful. This idea of the fiction conveying the truth is what I want to capture in my project so it was really interesting to see an example of it.
Unfortunately due to Kim’s absence and an ill-timed medical appointment I missed out on a whole week of GOITWADGT (yeah, I have to think of a better acronym . . .). Thursday we were due to present our video essays to the group for reflections and feedback so obviously I’ll be doing mine in class on Tuesday (remembering to bring my dice of course!). But what with newfangled gadgets these days such as the interwebs I’m fortunate to be able to catch up on some of the others’ essays on their blogs (those who have posted them, anyway). I’ve included some below so you can see just how good my classmates are; I’m reluctant to show you how outshined I am but it’s fantastic to have such skilled and creative people around me to give feedback and push me to produce the best work I can.
Dan’s video essay on Birrarung Marr (the Yarra)
In a more recent post Dan was really critical of this piece, saying that it wasn’t technically or creatively up to scratch. I think he’s being quite harsh on himself. While the ‘argument’ or ‘discourse’ of his essay isn’t necessarily as clear as it could be, I understand the general message he’s trying to convey (the dangers of the over-development and urbanisation of the area) and I think this is aided by a dramatic tone throughout the film. I think his editing is quite successful – it’s pacy and synchronised with the music which gives the whole film a foreboding, rhythmic feel that’s really effective.
Fab’s essay on the Camberwell Markets
I think Fab really nailed the concept of an essay film – structurally and aesthetically it’s very similar to the stuff we looked at in class, with her voice and perspective guiding us through the film. Aesthetically I really liked it; I’ve looked at some of Fab’s photography on her blog and admired it, particularly with the interesting subject matter that is the Camberwell Market, and I think she’s used her eye for framing well in this film. I find it interesting that she went with the theme of nostalgia as a starting point, rather than going straight to discussing the market; I think that was a really novel approach to looking at it and I wonder how much that will form a part of her final project.
Okay, so I actually couldn’t find any others – only about half the class’s blogs are linked on our homepage and most of them haven’t uploaded their essays to their blogs. Which I totally understand – it can be hard to surrender your work up to being viewable by the rest of the world (including creepy classmates like me who stalk your work wearing a pink dressing gown and listening to jazz on a Sunday morning). But I’m glad I got to see these two and hopefully on Tuesday there will be a few others still to present so I can see more of my classmates’ work and get a sense of where they’re all heading for their final projects.
This week Kim headed off to the U S of A but that didn’t mean a break for us documentarians in Go out Into the World and do Good Things, because our second project brief was due: the video essay.
The brief for the video essay was fairly broad, as it’s a fairly broad genre. We had to produce a 3-5 minute video from our own personal perspective that explored some of our initial ideas regarding our final project. It would be part pitch, part research journey and part teaser trailer.
All the readings we had about video essays spoke about the importance of the authorial voice, and because Dungeons and Dragons players are my focus for the final project, I was immediately inspired by the role of the dungeon master in the game. Basically, the dungeon master is the person who narrates the story and guides the players through their quest. Because this seemed to me to be similar to the way in which the authorial voice guides viewers through a video essay, I thought I could do something a little bit different and turn my video essay into an interactive game of D&D.
Of course, I still wanted to actually convey the information I’d discovered through my research, and emphasise my argument that D&D players are not the lonely, incapable geeks that they are often portrayed as. To demonstrate this point, I created a video in which the viewer is invited to roll a dice to choose a ‘character’. Each of the options took them to a branch of the story where something good or bad happened to them depending on the number of the dice roll.
I was only able to create one place where the videos branched off, as it was too labour-intensive to multiply the options by six again, so it wasn’t as interactive as it could have been. I also think that the attempt to create a more narrative-based focus detracted somewhat from the video being an ‘essay’ as it was less formal and less informational. However, as this project brief was fairly broad, I don’t regret going down this path with my video because I think it was a little bit more interesting than a standard video essay comprised solely of found videos, images and text and I think it did successfully convey the ideas that I wanted it to.
Despite the difficulty John Oliver seems to have believing it in this clip, Jorge Ramos is right: he and his peers – America’s hugely popular slew of comedy newscasters – aren’t just pulling in the ratings: they’re becoming a remarkably influential force in the political sphere. When Time magazine named Oliver in their top 100 most influential list, they cited reasons such as the $25,000 in donations collected by the Society of Women Engineers just days after his piece on Miss America scholarships, and the crashing of the American Federal Communication Commission website when he released his famous segment on net neutrality. (1) These anecdotal cases are supported by the numbers: in a study of political comedy and satire viewers, researchers Hoffman and Young found that “viewing satire or parody has a positive and significant effect on political participation through the mediator of political efficacy.” (2)
But why are these shows so influential, and why now particularly? Parody of current events and news is not a particularly modern phenomenon, so why are we only now seeing such a huge boom in their popularity and influence? I would argue that these shows are successful now because the post-broadcast era of TV allows them greater reach and accessibility.
Traditional broadcast TV is designed to be watched on a certain day at a certain time. Ellis discusses the importance of scheduling when he writes ” . . . scheduling delivers programs to audiences when they are most likely to want to watch them . . . so a narrative is constructed about the ebbs and flows of audiences for each evening’s viewing.” (3) William further expands on this idea when he discusses the importance not just of the way individual programs are scheduled but the way they are scheduled in consideration of each other: “This phenomenon, of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form.” (4)
This idea of flow and scheduling has always been particularly relevant when considering traditional broadcast news; scheduled at 6.00pm when the adults arrived home from work, your choice of news was considered the key to anchoring you to that station for the rest of the evening. But of course, the ‘technology’ that William references is changing, and many argue we live in a post-broadcast world. With the rise of web TV there is a push back against rigid scheduling and a preference for control of when and where you can watch TV. I would argue that it’s this environment that fosters the success of parody news.
Because these shows are mostly popular among young people, (5) and as such embrace the technology that the web has to offer. They are famous – Last Week Tonight in particular – for the way in which individual segments go viral, and the programs seem to almost be built for this web shareability more than the initial TV broadcast. When writing about the segmentation of broadcast TV, Ellis says that “the basic organisation of material is that of the segment, a coherent group of sounds and images, of relatively short duration that needs to be accompanied by other similar such segments.” (6) But Last Week Tonight and similar programs don’t rely on this sequence, instead contextualising individual segments with cultural touchstones and references (7) so that they can be watched on the web outside of the whole program. By not relying so heavily on scheduling and flow, Last Week Tonight and other satirical news programs are able to embrace new technology and give themselves greater access to (and greater influence over) modern audiences.
John Oliver was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2015
(1) Luckerson, Victor. “How The ‘John Oliver Effect’ Is Having A Real-Life Impact”. TIME 2015. Web. 14 Aug. 2016.
(2) Hoffman, Lindsay H. and Dannagal G. Young. “Satire, Punch Lines, And The Nightly News: Untangling Media Effects On Political Participation”. Communication Research Reports 28.2 (2011): 159-168. Web.
(3) Ellis, J. “Scheduling: The Last Creative Act In Television?”. Media, Culture & Society 22.1 (2000): 25-38. P29
(4) Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology And Cultural Form. 2nd ed. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. P86
(5) Hoffman, Lindsay H. and Dannagal G. Young. “Satire, Punch Lines, And The Nightly News: Untangling Media Effects On Political Participation”. Communication Research Reports 28.2 (2011): 159-168. Web.
When I first heard this quote on Friends, I had to laugh – what do people without TVs point their furniture at? At home, all our furniture is – and always has been – pointed squarely at the small screen, and just about everyone I can think of is in the same boat. The TV is the focal point of our living space.
If we go right back to the very start of TV, the box was accorded pride-of-place because it symbolised the resident family’s achievement of the middle-class ideal; the “shining centre of the home”, it was one of the must-have items of the ’50s.(1)
Fast-forward fifty years and in my humble childhood abode the television wasn’t so shiny: our first TV was a second-hand gift from my grandparents that was two decades older than me. It was brown, showed ABC in black and white, and even as an only child the lack of remote lead to several arguments regarding whose turn it was to get up. And yet this batty old gogglebox still sat proudly in the centre of the room.
Because the symbolic image of the family huddled around the TV hasn’t changed: the format of TV is bound up with ideas of domesticity and even the content of programming frequently reflects this theme. As Ellis eloquently puts it: “The particular ideological notion of the nuclear family in its domestic setting provides the overarching conception within which TV broadcast operates.” (2)
And yet this conception of the happy wife, husband and two children is becoming increasingly problematic: as Morley points out, this family dynamic accounts for less than 5% of households [in Britain]. (3) Certainly, my own parents divorced when I was fifteen, and our one household became two.
Further railing against this idea of the shiny family with their happy box is the persistent notion that there is something uncultured, mind-numbing and even dangerous about TV. I remember my mother insisting on a tech-free meal at the table until I reached adolescence, claiming that all the studies show TV over dinner tears down families and causes diabetes (or something, I wasn’t paying that much attention). This derision for TV has existed since its inception and can be seen afresh in most corners of the internet (think “the quality of TV today” and “they won’t be getting my viewership!”)
So with a not-so-unified family unit, at least five years of a static-y hand-me-down and a preference for (albeit sometimes reluctant) dining room meals, why did our family still keep the TV at centre stage?
I think the answer is conversation – the very thing my mother sought to inspire when we sat down together at the dinner table. We’ve all heard of ‘water-cooler moments’, the events that get you talking at the office the next day; but what about the conversations we have as the show’s still going? The ‘Oh My God‘s and the ‘No they didn’t‘s and, most importantly, ‘that reminds me . . .‘
Because some of the best memories I have of childhood are not of TV per se, but of the conversations and, more importantly, laughter that I shared because of it. Lull refers to the “comunicative substance which surrounds the viewing experience” (4), and my mind turns to political conversations sparked by the nightly news; stories remembered thanks to a visual cue; or even just yelling at my mother through the bathroom door after watching the genius of the IT Crowd.
Morley suggests that the shared possession of the TV is what defines a household (5), but I disagree. Shared conversation and experience is what defines a household – and to an extent a family – and TV is just one thing that helps to inspire those intimate and hilarious moments. That’s why the TV is at the centre of the room. And besides, what else would the furniture point at?
Footnotes
(1) Morley, David. Home Territories. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. P88
So I’ve been in India for the past two weeks, and though it was an incredible experience that was worth it all, it has put me a bit on the back foot in terms of my new studio, Go out Into the World and do Good Things.
The studio’s all about looking at documentary in a different light. Rather than seeing documentary as a hierarchical media form where a filmmaker creates a documentary about a passive subject, we’re focusing on the idea of participatory documentary (or ‘open space’ documentary, as it was called by De Michiel and Zimmermann in one of our early readings), in which the subject and the filmmaker collaborate to create the project together. This allows the subject to have more input over how they are portrayed.
Obviously, this type of documentary relies on the subject being a person or group of people (Sir Attenborough might struggle to ask the lions how they feel they are being misrepresented), and for me it brings up some interesting ethical questions. (Ethics was our focus in one of the weeks that I missed, but was explored also in that week’s readings from Patricia Aufderheide, Edwin Martinez and of course Bill Nichols – what kind of a documentary course would it be if there weren’t any Nichols in it?) On the one hand, there’s a constant push within the documentary genre – and a constant expectation from its viewers – for objectivity and ‘truth’. How many times have we seen documentaries criticized for being ‘biased’ or twisting the facts to suit their narrative? Famous documentaries Supersize Me, Nanook of the North and even crowd favourite Bowling for Columbine have all had their fair share of controversy regarding how ‘truthful’ they were. So on the face of it, it seems that allowing documentary subjects to actually control their own representation immediately eliminates the possibility of true objectivity.
But then on the other hand, can documentaries ever be truly objective? And should they have to be? I don’t think anyone watching Bowling for Columbine thought Michael Moore was attempting to be objective; he had a message to promote and he did it in an entertaining, persuasive way. Even documentaries that seem to attempt objectivity (such as expository or observational documentaries) often don’t achieve it simply because it’s only human for a filmmaker to be influenced by their own social context and values. If this is the case, is something like a participatory documentary actually more truthful for acknowledging and being clear about the influence of the subjects?
Obviously, the only way to answer these questions, and the others that will no doubt be posed throughout the studio, was to set about creating our own participatory documentary projects. We started small, with our first project brief in week three being a pitch to the class on our initial ideas for groups to collaborate with.
I was inspired by something I found in one of the Nichols’ readings: “Every film is a documentary . . . In fact, we could say that there are
two types of film: (1) Documentaries of wish fulfilment and (2) documentaries of social representation . . . Documentaries of wish fulfilment are what we would normally call fictions.”
I was fascinated by the idea that fiction could be considered documentary, in the way it demonstrates a greater truth. This reminded me of a film we’d watched in a documentary studies course I did last semester called Forbidden Lie$. Filmmaker Anna Broinowski’s portrait of serial conwoman Norma Khouri embraces Khouri’s lies and uses the interplay of fiction and fact to further highlight her deceitful nature.
Inspired to use a mix of fact and fiction myself, but in a lighter context, I thought of three groups who embrace fictions and alternate personalities: LARPers (live action role players), D&Ders (Dungeons and Dragons players), and cosplayers. I thought that collaborating with these groups could present an interesting opportunity to bring their imaginative fictions to life and to use those stories to say something about them as a group and as individuals.
