Analysis of Documentary Film - Assignment Example

Mauricio Chernovetzky Prompt A In his essay, the Filmed Century, Joel Black refers to the 20th century as “documented” era. (Black According to Black “all sorts of events are graphically preserved as never before.” (Black, 1) The 20th century conscientiously departed from the concept of film as a representational art that primarily appealed to the eyes and the ears. (Black, 3-4) The current “postrepresentatilal” era feeds “directly into the brain.” (Black, 4) In this regard, latter day film becomes a part of reality and must therefore take responsibility for shaping perceptions of reality. (Black, 6) While film technologies today continue to engage the senses, it can be downplayed to create a false sense of reality and by doing so shapes perceptions of reality. For instance The Blair witch Project, an entirely fictional film, holds itself out as a docudrama. This approach validates Black’s contention that postrepresentational film practices have become a part of our realities, lives and history. (6) The plot is loosely based on a scenario in which three students undertake a documentary on the legendary Blair Witch and travel to Burkittsville, Maryland for this purpose. The three students are never heard from or seen again, but a year following their departure for Burkittsville, their film is allegedly found and this film which documents their experiences in the woods in Burkittsville forms the entire and only filmed material for The Blair Witch Project. In many ways the The Blair Witch Project is a “mockumentary” in that it makes light of the ongoing practice of documenting everything in the style and practice of reality film. (Higley and Weinstock, 54) The mocking of docudramas is manifested by the blurred lines between Mauricio Chernovetzky Prompt A Continued reality and performance. While watching The Blair Witch Project, the average viewer is aware that it is not really a documentary and that the horrified actors are merely performing and not responding to actual events and experiences. This juxtaposition brings to mind the art of acting and performing which is no more than the imitation of “real persons.” (Naremore, 21) This approach serves to question the truth in all film forms, whether documentary or fictional. The film Sans Soleil likewise questions the truth in film. It does so by representing fractured recollections that are absorbed and distorted in the mind of Hayao Yamenko. Sans Soleil raises the issue of using film as a means of validly documenting “a contingent past”. (Montero, 107) Sans Soleil represents the presentation of letters from an imagined cameraman which offers a commentary of worldwide images. It represents Japan as it currently is and the consequences of globalization. Intricately tied to the idea of Japan and globalization is the concept of recall and the mechanics of time. Image ties these concepts together and raises questions as to meaning and connections. Everything becomes relative in the sense that meaning shifts in space, time and imagery. Inevitably, Sans Soleil brings to mind Black’s concept of film manipulation of reality or shaping perceptions of reality. (6) Sans Soleil presents a themed film montage that necessarily involves perceptions bases on association. This is accomplished by camera angles and the constant shifting from Japan to Iceland and to Holland. Further shifts occur between original footage to either found or borrowed footage and from film to television and then to video. Mauricio Chernovetzky Prompt A Continued Sans Soleil also incorporated Black’s theory that film becomes a part of and shapes reality. This aspect of Black’s theory is reflected in a dream sequence where Japanese passengers are asleep on an underground train and their dreams reflect images derived from television viewed the night before. The ingenuity of Sans Soleil is in the first impression it creates. It gives off the impression that it is a travelogue documentary by taking the viewer from one destination to another. (Branigan, 208) In actuality, Sans Soleil is just as much a time travel in that it covers a period spanning over 16 years, making it an exercise in postmodernism raising complex questions of the role film plays in shaping reality and at times distorting it. In this regard, Sans Soleil like the Blair Witch Project adequately reflects Black’s argument that film both captures and manipulates reality. Mauricio Chernovetzky Prompt C James Latham maintains that films and videos characterized as autobiographical “bear witness to our lives” in a variety of ways which can be “untidy and contradictory”. (Latham) The truth of these representations can be manipulated in film by “a break in the silence” which can “lessen the isolation and despair that we often experience” either personally or culturally. (Latham) The truth created is therefore built on the “relationships between subject, filmmaker, and audience” with the filmmaker endowed with artistic freedom. (Latham) In other words, filmmakers are at liberty to either use the positivist approach in which original sources are utilized or they may represent a gap between fact and fiction thereby reinterpreting, recreating and manipulating images so as to create truth rather than reveal it. The “truth” will largely depend on “story telling devices,” and “content and form.” (Dolye, 42) The film Bontoc Eulogy provides an example of truth manipulation in its tendency to combine historical facts with recreations. In other words, fictional details are employed together with historical actualities. The filmmaker has a story to tell in context and where historical data is lacking, fiction compensates to follow structure, content and form. Bontoc Eulogy engages the boundaries between fiction and fact by chronicling a Filipino-American filmmaker’s search for his grandfather who was an Igarot warrior and disappeared after he had been exhibited at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904 as a specimen in human anthropology. The film depicts a combination of the filmmaker’s own biography, detective angles and documentary footage originating from archive and photographs brought together with dramatized Mauricio Chernovetzky Prompt C Continued recreations. Half-truths, whole truths and fabrications are sewn together to create what appears to be a seamless documentary but is in fact a mockumentary. In actuality, Bontoc Eulogy transform from documentary to mockumentary by design. In current trends, documentaries are more about telling stories and as such are structured and manipulated in much the same way as fictional cinema, a concept referred to as direct cinema and cinema verite. (Ellis and McLane, 223) Bontoc Eulogy lavishly follows this new genre of documentary story telling. Like the 1995 film Bontoc Eulogy the film The Third Memory filmed in the year 2000 also creates its own truth by skewering the boundaries between fact and fiction. The Third Memory is loosely based on John Wojtowitcz’s bank robbery which had been previously depicted in the movie Dog Day Afternoon. In The Third Memory bank robber Wojtowicz recreates by reenactment, the robbery immortalized by the film Dog Day Afternoon. Recollections, fact and fiction coincide by virtue of reenactments, footage from Dog Day Afternoon and footage from actual news coverage of the robbery. Like Bontoc Eulogy, The Third Memory tests authenticity by reproducing events and tailoring them to fit a structured context. In other words, documentaries take on the characteristics of mocumentaries in their attempt to achieve narrative form and convenience. The only distinction between the two films is perhaps found in the fact that distortions of fact are not deliberate in The Third Memory as they are in Bontoc Eulogy. There is no deliberate attempt to fill factual gaps with fiction in The Third Memory. Instead Wojtovicz’s memory is displayed Mauricio Chernovetzky Prompt C Continued in all its human fragility and whether or not it conflicts with the film or the news footage is a matter for the audience to sort out. These discrepancies and gaps are not compensated for by the filmmaker. In the final analysis, the use of film, sound effects and images are manipulated by filmmakers to create a specific reaction to the content of the film. In this regard, truth is created to manipulate reactions to and perceptions of realities. In both films, Bontoc Eulogy and The Third Memory these manipulations occur in slightly different ways but both by virtue of manipulation of film, memory, history, fact, images and sound effects. In the end, the filmmakers tells his story in context regardless of continuity or veracity. It therefore follows that concepts of truth are entirely up to the film. Works Cited Black, J. “The Filmed Century”. Cited in Black Joel (ed) The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative. Routledge, 2002. Doyle, A. Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera. University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2003. Ellis, J. and McLane, B. A New History of Documentary Film. The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc, 2005. Higley, S. and Weinstock, J. Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Wayne State University Press, 2003. Latham, J. “Your life is not a very good script": David Holzmans diary and documentary expression in late-1960s America and beyond.” (2007) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go1931/is_3_26/ai_n29394587/ Retrieved June 8, 2009. Montero, D. “Film Also Ages: Time and Images in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.” Studies in French Cinema, Vol. 6(2) 2006, 107-115. Naremore, J. Acting in the Cinema. University of California Press. Read More