Yusuke Ito 10/23/2014 In Bill Nichols’s “Introduction to Documentary”, he categorizes six different modes for documentary filmmaking. The poetic mode, expository mode, observational mode, participatory mode, reflexive mode, and performative mode. My paper is going to describe particular artists, often associated with the documentary filmmaking style, and how they used the “observational mode” as a way to explore their understanding of place through time. “11x14” ”(1977), by James Benning is re-presents the American Midwestern landscape through the window of 11x14 format. It is a non-literary documentary film, a non-conventional narrative, and finds meaning in the space and construction of film. 11X14 opens with a lengthy shot from the back of the Evanston Express (a carriage ride into downtown Chicago). 11X14 includes two other extremely long shots, constructing three ambiguous plot strands dispersed …show more content…
In one of my video piece, I want to use fixed camera as a way to contemplate on the Morandi’s last painting from 1963. Zoomed in form a distance, with telescope lens, to simply observe the painting for a long time, as the painting should present itself to the viewer. Morandi paints in pale, nearly dead color, which itself cannot or will not rise to full spectrum. It will not reach across space to communicate visual power, but makes you reach across space toward it. We do the walking. The painting does the waiting. It lets you, in fact invites you to walk past it and ignore it. However, during the busiest time of the day, crows of businessman and traffic, people doing what they need to do, will be walking in front of the camera. The rupture of vision and noise of the city as an unease of contemplation. I hope to create a tension in the pace of the painting and pace of the
The documentary 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay, is centered around the argument that slavery did not end with the inclusion of the 13th Amendment in the United States Constitution. To enhance her argument, she includes interviews with well-educated authors, professors, activists, and politicians. She also tells the stories of African Americans who have been wrongfully prosecuted by the police and have not received the justice they deserve, including Trayvon Martin. This essay will analyze the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman scene in the documentary and how DuVernay effectively uses ethos, pathos, and logos in the film. Duvernay includes the Trayvon Martin case to further her argument that slavery did not disappear with the 13th Amendment;
Norman Mclean’s A River Runs Through It explores many feelings and experiences of one “turn of the century” family in Missoula, Montana. In both the movie, directed by Robert Redford, and the original work of fiction we follow the Mcleans through their joys and sorrows. However, the names of the characters and places are not purely coincidental. These are the same people and places known by Norman Mclean as he was growing up. In a sense, A River Runs Through It is Mclean’s autobiography. Although these autobiographical influences are quite evident throughout the course of the story they have deeper roots in the later life of the author as he copes with his life’s hardships.
This book contains, amongst other things, an insightful account into the foundations of documentary, in particular its British base and its early days via the medium of radio. It features quotations and journal extracts, as well as interviews with some of the prominent figures of early documentary programming during the first half of the 20th century, before leading into the mass observation experiments beginning in the late 30’s. The book describes the documentary format’s departure from its BBC London base under the guidance of Hilda Matheson and Charles Siepmann, who relocated their mobile recording units to what was kn...
According to Ruby’s book, film can be used a research tool. Visually experiencing something gives us a greater understanding of it, rather than just reading or hearing about it. Ruby expresses the idea that film makers looking to make a visual ethnography have a lot of responsibility to the culture they are sharing so as to give them fair and accurate representation, free from artistic molding or outside influences. They should not highlight the differences in culture, but merely document it in true form. We have studied many people that have made contributions to ethnography such as Robert Flaherty, Timothy Asch and Jean Rouch. An anthropologist that is currently still making major a contribution to this field is Robert Lemelson.
Documentary is a term that stresses a broad category of expression that is based on the attempt to ‘document’ reality. The classification of documentary includes formally structured or seemingly unstructured films that are either non-fictional or entirely fictional. From around 1921, early films captured real people with everyday situations and filmmakers edited these footages to create a structure with either a story or an argument. By 1932, John Grierson had formulated a definition that distinguished between documentary and other factual forms of cinematic journalism, travelogue and scientific or nature films. Grierson found documentary beyond arrangement and description because it used a ‘creative treatment of actuality’. This shaping offered
The Netflix original documentary 13th directed by Ava DuVernary focuses on race in the United States Criminal Justice System. The documentary is named after the thirteenth amendment in the constitution. The thirteenth amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except when it was a punishment for a crime. The documentary uses archival footage and commentary from experts to show how the exception to the thirteenth amendment allows the legal system to be exploited and target black people to enslave them. The documentary also charts the growth from America’s prison population from 1970 at 200,000 prisoners until today at 2.3 million prisoners. Although the United States has only 5% of the world’s population, it has about 25% of the worlds
It has been asked, "Are reflexive or cinema vérité documentary films more accurate at truthfully representing reality?” This question can be answered many ways. One obvious path is to side with reflexivity, because it is honest about the shortcomings of filmmaking. However, we cannot be so quick to assume to know what the question is asking. The question must be broken down first in order to come to a satisfactory answer.
This book is a note written by Roland Barthes to record the dialectical way he thought about the eidos(form, essence, type, species) of Photographs. Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist in his lifetime, but surprisingly he was not a photographer. As Barthes had a belief that art works consists with signs and structures, he had investigated semiotics and structuralism. However, through Camera Lucida, he realized the limitation of structuralism and the impression to analyze Photography with only semiotics and structuralism. Barthes concludes with talking about unclassifiable aspects of Photography. I could sense the direction Barthes wanted to go through the first chapter ‘Specialty of the Photograph’. He tried to define something by phenomenology
John Hess, Patricia R. Zimmermann. "Transnational Documentaries: A Menifesto." In Transnational Cinema: the film reader, by Terry Rowden Elizabeth Ezra, 95-105. New York: Routledge, 2006.
In the presented essay I will compare the style of work of selected artists in the montage of the film. I will try to point out some general regularities and features of Soviet cinema. At the same time I will try to capture especially what is common in their systems and similar or conversely what differ. For my analysis, I will draw on the feature films of the Soviet avantgarde, namely these are the movies - The Battleship Potemkin (S. Eisenstein, 1925), Mother (V. Pudovkin, 1926) and The Man with a movie camera (D. Vertov, 1929).
Postmodernism is a vague term that can describe a variety of disciplines that include, architecture, art, music, film, fashion, literature…etc. (Klages). In the case of “Videotape”, postmodern literature would be the main focus or area of study. This type of literature emerged in the era that succeeded World War II and relies heavily on the use of techniques such as, fragmentation, the creation of paradoxes, and questionable protagonists. Furthermore, postmodern literature also exudes ambiguity and critical thinking where the focus is mainly on the reader and his/her experience of the work rather than the content and form. Building upon that, the selected passag...
Documentary film style has been used in films dating back to the pre 1900's. It was later a term that was used by John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana in 1926. Documentary films are often regarded as films that display reality and tell stories about real facts and interview real people. Although this does not mean that fiction does not exist in documentary films. Films such as Nanook of the North can tell a story that is perceived to be reality when in fact the events are staged or not true. This can be done through the editing process, script writing as well as through camera work. Truth is a fuzzy concept and our understanding of reality is so subjective and the line between truth and fiction often becomes blurred.
Pasolini develops a difficult argument of semiotics as discourse for cinema. Although widely controversial because of the use of semiotics, Pasolini’s critical theory is relevant to the study of film lyricism. He stated that: “language of cinema is fundamentally a “language of poetry” (Pasolini 3). The Italian film director proposes a terminology of “free indirect subjectivity”, “im-image” and “free indirect discourse” (Pasolini 1) to link the verbal and visual mediums. These units compose the cinematic language which made out of signs, distinctively visual signs and verbal signs. “The linguistic instrument on which cinema is founded is thus of an irrational type. This explains the profoundly oniric nature of cinema“ (Pasolini 2). Here the dichotomy of objective and subjective manifests. The “im-image” posses both dream like qualities which are subjective yet the unit also has objective archetypes: “as also its absolutely and inevitably concrete nature, let us sayits objective status (Pasolini 2). Linking these two natures is where cinema of poetry
2. Nichols, Bill. ‘Documentary Modes of Representation (The Observational Mode).’ Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press. 1991. 38-44
...ie Calle’s works in the context of documentaries. It bases its arguments on the nature in which Sophie Calle collects her photographs and uses established sources to buttress theories put foward.