This essay will be looking into the ways that the documentary form and narrative cinema have impacted and influenced each other. The documentary text chosen, Louis Theroux: Behind Bars (2008) depicts the life of prison inmates within America’s infamous San Quentin State Prison. Theroux speaks to serial murderers, gang members, at-risk inmates and guards whilst questioning their sentence alongside their feelings about life within prison. Similarly, the narrative text chosen Carandiru (2003) looks into the life of fictional inmates within the Brazilian Carandiru Penitentiary, a factual prison with its climax based on the 1992 police attack. The film has a strong emphasis on poverty and the realities of underdevelopment, taking influence from Documentary Louis Theroux: Behind Bars and narrative film Carandiru both feature elements of realism, focusing highly on social issues, poverty and exploitation, comparable to films of the 19th century. Complementary to the films of the Lumiere brothers, both texts are set within real life locations, the San Quentin State Prison and Carandiru Penitentiary, emphasizing the everyday life of inmates as a form of entertainment and education. Louis Theroux: Behind Bars positions the audience with Theroux as an outsider looking in. His performativity displays him as being naïve and oblivious, not showing an understanding of what life is like within the walls of imprisonment, yet keen for answers. Referring back to the idea of actualities being prearranged and structured, it is easily argued that documentaries of today, especially those with the documenter shown on screen or heard through overhead narration, are biased, manipulative and/or prearranged and structured to enhance a particular ideology. Theroux’s awkward persona helps provide answers through a ‘friend of truth’ parody; whilst he interviews guards and inmates he ‘becomes intimate in a slightly fake way’ to gain the appropriate answers. Theroux himself has stated that 'professional manipulation ' plays a role within his documentaries, comparing journalists with prostitutes claiming that they both involve 'a little bit of beguiling and seduction. (Chanan, 2007:
Bridge to Freedom provides the historical documentary behind the events that served as the narrative for Selma. Instead of a drama, the viewers receive an actual documentary that shows the confrontations between the marchers and the government. Like Selma, it highlights the violence, the deaths, and the beatings, but also goes further back in time to show society’s treatment of African Americans.
November 1998, written for FILM 220: Aspects of Criticism. This is a 24-week course for second-year students, examining methods of critical analysis, interpretation and evaluation. The final assignment was simply to write a 1000-word critical essay on a film seen in class during the final six-weeks of the course. Students were expected to draw on concepts they had studied over the length of the course.
This paper is about the book 'Behind a Convict's Eyes' by K.C. Cerceral. This book was written by a young man who enters prison on a life sentence and describes the world around him. Life in prison is a subculture of its own, this subculture has its own society, language and cast system. The book describes incidents that have happen in prison to inmates. With this paper I will attempt to explain the way of life in a prison from an inmate's view.
[1] How I came to choose Missing as the focus of my project is as a result of the learning experience I have been engaged in during my college career. Having first seen the film for a class, I thought of it as nothing more than a movie about something monumental that happened in Chile more than two decades ago. I watched it, unhappily, thinking about all the other things I could be doing, and even falling asleep during some of it. In the time between my first viewing of Missing and embarking on this most recent project, I have learned a great deal about history, politics, and people. My views on all three of those subjects are constantly changing, with each new piece of information I receive further complicating my thoughts. Missing has gone from a movie, the title of which I had difficulty recalling, to being a thought provoking exposition that has forced me to examine, evaluate, and reevaluate almost everything that had once been certain in my own mind.
Neither Conover nor Santos paints a favorable picture of conditions within prison. In particular, Santos description of violence within prison shows a very disturbing setting for people to live. Santos describes a daily fight to remain safe and alive. ...
Stop Australia its time to act on this ice epidemic that is overtaking are country! This is something you all may have herd in the new or in the paper. This is how the media portrays dugs, but is this really happing or is the media over extracting to make it seem worse then it really is. This is where the media is bombarded us with titles like “Inside Australia’s drug epidemic: how ice is tearing our country apart” that is to make us believe things that are over the top and exaggerating on a small statistics to get a good story. There are only 7.0% of Australians aged 14 years and over have used meth/amphetamines such as ice one or more times in their life. Where cannabis has 34.8% of Australians aged 14 years
Films are also treasures of culture, filled with clues and insights into the attitudes and perceptions of the people of the day. While documentary films obviously present a historical record of people and events, dramatic fictional movies can also reveal the same. Comparing the main characters in Hitchcock's 1934
Documentaries serve to draw a response through the use of literary techniques in order to present a particular point of view. Michael Cordell’s Music and Murder subscribes to this principle, the documentary focuses on three men serving prison sentences for taking a life and how music has changed and shaped their outlook on their own lives. Music, structure, verbal language and selection of detail all work on the viewers emotions which serve to draw a positive response towards rehabilitation in prisons.
This documentary, “The Freedom Riders” shows the story of courageous civil rights activists called ‘Freedom Riders’ in 1961 who confronted institutionalized and culturally-accepted segregation in the American South by travelling around the Deep South on buses and trains.
New Cinema however, also known as Cinema Novo became a film movement that appeared in Brazil in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the late 20 century to be used as a historic, political and economic device This movement sought to Rerepresent a culture while shedding new light on a national cinema which contributed to a new multinational aesthetics; thus thwarting the utopian idea of Brazil by suggesting that the country’s historical, social, political and economic ills were still very much evident. Although Cinema Novo borrowed some attributes from Classic Hollywood Cinema storytelling, these two Cinemas are different and are defined by their greater purpose for visual storytelling.
The first social issue portrayed through the film is racial inequality. The audience witnesses the inequality in the film when justice is not properly served to the police officer who executed Oscar Grant. As shown through the film, the ind...
Oscar Wild once said, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” and he is right. But no matter what the outcome is, or how complex the truth is, we will always strive for the truth. The concept of truth is no stranger to film documentaries, and one filmmaker that certainty was aware of that was Dziga Vertov. During the 1920’s Vertov created a newsreel series to promote the concept of ‘Kinopravda” which translated to English mean “Film truth.” Unfortunately, Vertov was ahead of his time, and this concept disappeared along the filmmakers’ path. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that other filmmakers around the world once again recognized the importance of the truth. Two movements with the purpose of revealing the truth of life, emerge in different parts of the world, Direct Cinema in North America and Cinema Vérité in France. Although, both had the same purpose, their approaches towards getting the truth make them completely different. Cinema Vérité’s approach gave the filmmakers a chance to manipulate and distort reality by participating and observing at the same time, while Direct Cinemas approach was strictly observational, and there is no better way to find out the truth than observing without interfering.
One can easily note the physical and sexual violence brought upon the people (black and white) of Congo after independence, but we must locate the other forms of violence in order to bring the entire story of Patrice Lumumba to light. The director’s attempt at bringing the story of Patrice Lumumba to the “silver screen” had political intentions.
In the media, prisons have always been depicted as a horrible place. The film, The Shawshank Redemption, is a prime example that supports the media 's suggestions about prison life. In the film we are familiarized with Andy Dufresne, who is a banker that is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. While trying to both remain discreet and find his prison identity, he assists Ellis Boyd 'Red ' Redding, a peddler, and Brooks Hatlen. In his attempt to fit into the rough prison subculture, Andy strategically starts a business relationship with the captain Captain Bryon Hadley and Samuel Norton. The film gives an insider 's look at various aspects of prison life. These aspects include prison culture; explicitly, guard subculture and inmate subculture.
One of the integral things that must be addressed when making a film is the ethics involved. Ethics are a constant issue that have to be carefully considered when filmmaking. This difficult decision-making is highly prevalent in that of documentaries, because of the difficulties associated in filming ‘real people’ or “social actors, (Nichols, 2001).” More importantly, the issues faced by a filmmaker differ between each of the documentary modes. Each particular documentary mode poses different formal choices that must be made in order to operate in an ethical fashion. Two films that have been made both display examples of how ethics must be considered when embarking on a documentary are Etre at Avoir [To Be and to Have], (2001) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). These films have been made in different documentary modes, highlighting that there is not one mode which is easier or has fewer ethical issues associated with it. Additionally, what must be considered is how these style choices in these different modes affect the power relationships between the filmmaker, the subject and its audience, (Nichols, 2001).