Documentary Notes: Sellebrity

This film looks at the increasing concern of Paparazzi in celebrities lives and also the consumption of media.  It is directed by Kevin Mazur, who is a famous event/celebrity phtoographer.

In the beginning of the movie, Kevin makes the distinction of his style of photography to one of a paparazzi. He shows a scene from a recent awards gala where he is situated directly on the red carpet. Stars come up to him, and are genuinely happy to get their photo taken by him. Meanwhile, across the red carpet, penned up like wild boars are the "paparazzi". It looks like hundreds of photographers who call out to celebrities trying to get them to look directly at them for a photograph.

The film tries to take a critical look at the world of paparazzi, talking with the first photographer who can be credited with the phrase paparazzi. However, the film fails to take a true critical look at the world. The director blames everyone including TMZ, the gossip magazines and even the general public for buying into it. He fails to look at his own involvement in this as well. His photographs are just as much feeding into the celebrity madness. Yes, his photos may still be considered different because they may be in studios, but he is still gaining notoriety by taking photos of a certain class of people.

In regards to the technical aspects of the documentary, it definitely tries to feed into that paparazzi style effect. The cuts are fast and flashy... the interviews with a-list celebrities are lit like they are in an interview for Entertainment Tonight. Sofgt

Documentary Notes: Gasland

Gasland was an emotional and informative documentary about the issues surrounding Natural Gas in the US.  The documentary should be viewed in the mode of Activist Documentary. Josh Fox, the director is also in the film as a "character" as he travels across the country to gather stories from people who have already been exposed to the dangerous repercussions of this industry.

This was the first documentary film that Josh Fox ever made.  The film feels like it borders on the edges of experimental, essay and traditional doc practices. It is experimental and essay in the way of specific scenes (especially when he is in the forest near his home). It's also essay-like because while Josh is seeking out the information from other people, this is really his journey as well.

It felt like the film was going to be one person taking on this big project at first, but early on, I noticed a second camera. This is because we saw Josh change from a small consumer camera to something that looked like a more professional rig. Josh was also in the scenes, so obviously, he had help. This came from a second cinematographer, Matt Sanchez (who also edited the film).

At first, it reminded me of the  aesthetic of Tarnation a bit. It had some experimental tinges to it, however as it moved into the bulk of the story, it changed into a traditional documentary. The movie seemed scattered in the sense that it didn't really know what it wanted to be. A Hybrid? The fancy graphics threw me off because it didn't seem like something that would be in this documentary. However, I think that the graphics did allow the audience (who may not know what fracking is) a deeper understanding of why this film and this topic is so important.

We didn't get to finish the film in class, but I do want to go back and check out the last half hour. How much more of the story can there be? I thought the committee meeting would be a great ending.

Reading Notes: Interactive Documentary and Remix Culture

Digital Distribution, Participatory Culture and the Transmedia documentary.

Robert Greenwald - Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq war.

Movie depicted prominent intellegence experts taking Bush's team to task about the war in Iraq.

Greenwald made it successful by his partnership with online organizations such as MoveOn.Org and AlterNet - they created house parties for people to discuss.

This allowed Greenwald to make more films with this distribution plan. Outfoxed and Iraq for Salew.

From Tyron:

 Greenwald helped to give form to what I am calling the transmedia documentary, a set of nonfiction films that use the participatory culture of the web to enhance the possibilities for both a vibrant public sphere cultivated around important political issues and an activist culture invested in social and political change. 

This concept of transmedia documentary builds upon and partially reworks the nonfictional modes of representation that Bill Nichols (1991: p. 3) has associated with “the discourses of sobriety,” which operate under the assumption that non-fiction films

“can and should alter the world itself, they can effect action and entail consequences.”

More;

Although these new forms of participatory culture are often treated as revolutionary, they are grounded in a much longer history of activist media. In fact, as Michael Renov (2004: p. 10) points out, media activists in the 1960s, such as Newsreel, sought to solicit involvement from their viewers, creating texts that “were active and intended as participatory,” leading to wholesale re-evaluations of normal film and television techniques in order to equip viewers with the means of engaging in their own media criticism. Newsreel also took advantage of alternative distribution techniques, placing advertisements in alternative weeklies and holding screenings that served as fundraisers for organizations such as New York-based community radio station, 


more:
Despite these forms of documentary activism, it is less than clear what happens once these films engage viewers. In fact, a number of critics, including Micah White (2010), have argued that online petitions, what he calls “clicktivism,” have short-circuited more demanding forms of political activity, breeding passivity rather than producing active political participants. Although the transmedia documentary opens itself up to this risk, projects such as Zeiger’s and Greenwald’s help illustrate the potential for filmmakers to direct attention to a specific issue.

Films to think about :

An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc, Murderball, The Age of Stupid, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, I want Your Money (ALL Follow this distribution model).

Documentary Notes: Bible Quiz

Bible Quiz is a documentary about a group of teenagers who are competing to win the National Bible Quiz Championship.  The film documents focuses on Mikayla, who is very interested in winning the competition, is more interested in gaining the affections of her bible quiz captain, JP.

The beginning of the movie brings us into the Bible Quiz world. The audience learns about how the Bible Quiz works and we are introduced to the main characters, Mikayla and JP. They are part of a team of kids whose life seems to revolve around their church and this competition.

The film reminds me of a coming-of-age narrative at times. The film captures teenage romance as Mikalya looks at JP in a way that many of us can remember from those days. While the director may have intended to document this team, it seems that her honing on these particular characters is what really drives the story.

To be honest, there were parts in the film that I wasn't comfortable with. It may have been the cringe-worthy scenes like the girls who tried to protheletize to a local street artist in Seattle. It made me feel a bit better knowing that Mikalya didn't think this was necessary. I warmed up to her "character" after that.

Reading Notes: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide By Henry Jenkins. P. 1-25

Jenkins starts off with a story about Dino Ignacio, a high school student who created an uproar by remixing photos of Osama Bin Laden and Bert (from Sesame Street). A publisher from Pakistan didn't know who Bert was but liked the photo so started printing posters up. Childrens Television Network saw it on CNN and threatened legal action, but they weren't sure who they would sue... the high school student, the publisher... etc.

This was one of the earliest pieces of Convergence...

From the pdf:

The term, participatory culture contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations—and even individuals within corporate media—still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. And some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others. 

Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives. 


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Rok Sako To Rok Lo in India... people were able to access this entire film via a mobile phone...

More notes from the book:

A best seller in 1990, Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital, drew a sharp contrast between “passive old media” and “interactive new media,” predicting the collapse of broadcast networks in favor of an era of narrowcasting and niche media on demand: “What will happen to broadcast television over the next five years is so phenomenal that it’s difficult to comprehend.”3 At one point, he suggests that no government regulation will be necessary to shatter the media conglomerates: “The monolithic empires of mass media are dissolving into an array of cottage industries.... Media barons of today will be grasping

to hold onto their centralized empires tomorrow.... The combined forces of technology and human nature will ultimately take a stronger hand in plurality than any laws Congress can invent.” 


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More thoughts - - a lot of this was coopted by captalist society... advertisers and companies saw the writing on the wall and began new relationships... video games and traditional media was one. 

From Jenkins:

1. Convergence is coming and you had better be ready.
   
2. Convergenceisharderthanitsounds.
   
3. Everyone will survive if everyone works together. (Unfortunately, that was the one thing
   nobody knew how to do.)
   

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IN this article, Jenkins also points out that nobody can be in a silo anymore. In one company, the print and web sections had to work with each other. This didn't happen before. It changed the way companies ran. 

More article:

Yet, history teaches us that old media never die— and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content—the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling’s project lists falls under this category. Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies. 

Reading Notes: The Intersectionality of Labor and Memory

Readings: Rabinowitz, Paula. “Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory.” History and Theory 32 (1993): 119-137.

Rabinowitz's thesis claims that documentary cinema can be "intimately tied" to historical memory. It can "reconstruct historical narrative. . . but often functions as an historical document itself"  (This reminds me of Oliver Stone movies for example)

1945 - Footage pulled together by British Ministry of information into film, Memory of the Camps - it was never released because of the graphic images. 

The british govt supprised it. It was recovered in the 1980s and was on television for Frontline

Shocking moment when the "blond children play before a bavarian cottage. . and the "camera pans through the trees to reveal barbed wire and piles of flesh and bones"

The documentary was supposed to help keep this in the public's memory. It was supposed to "freeze time" so we could remember later. 

The relationship between documentary and history and memory - - 

history relies on documents to support its narrative

documentary is mean tot instruct through evidence

poses truth as a moral imperative (p. 121)

P. 123 

Documentary crosses the boundry into anthropology  - - Nanook of the North

 Anthropologists are meant to just observe, but Flaherty intervened... so much that we learn to discover later that he set up scenes. 

--

Cinema Verite... "critiques fired at the direct cinema movment was its lack of social context - it's naturalizing of the viewing process" (. 125)

1960 s Primary - - "Solanas and Getino Advocated a cinema which intervened in history"  

"Battle of Chile - - infamous sequence ending the first section. Argentianean camerman films his own death after refusing to heed commands of an army officer to cease shooting" 

"The distinction between history and its representation in the documentary vanishes"

1985 release of Claude Lanzmans 9 hour and 23 minute documentary of rememrance, Shoah.  What? Woa.  He insisted his film is art despite it wrecking any boundry or previous instance of documentary film.  Reading Roger Ebert's review of the film gutted me. I need to see this film. 

 - documentary "sought to re-present reality - through the precise selection of objects surveyed by the camera and the sounds recorded by the microphone

P. 130

Two modes of presenting the real

 - the survey of objects

- the disclosure of subjectibity

Malcom X - spike lee begins film with credit sequence that intercuts Rodney King videotape with Malcom X's rhetoric. 

The Real is intermixed with the "fictionalised"... confusing to some. 

Another example - Madonna Truth or Dare"  

Uses "conventions of documentary", but the "Verite is not the truth, but Madonna's truth. She is "always performing"

-- Political docs - 

Historical doc, "not only tells us about the past, but asks us to do something as well. 

Examples - The Civil War... show's us the horror of war but wanrs us to remember too. 

Back to Lanzmann - - He "refused to use the cliched images of camps by the ss" - he asked the rough questions... 

Class Notes - 11/3/14

Documentary as a challenge to history

Capital H history> official, institutional
sanctioned, documented

Little H history - undocumented, offer oral renegade, in its impulse to speak truth to power, handled down and unsancteous.

Documentary as Critical Art fact as history.

Documentary cinema is intimately tied to historical memory
- not only does it seek to reconstruct historical narrative, but often functions as an historical document itself
 - different uses of documentary results in a wide variety of formal strategies

To persuade audience of films truth
these stratgies are based on a desire to enlist the audience in the process of historical reconstruction

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Documentary Form

documentary film differentiates itself from narrative cinema by claiming its status as a truth-telling mode

The documentary calls upon audience to participate in historical remembering by presenting an intimate view of ...

It relies on cinematic seimosis
- to convince its audience of its validity and truth
Through cinematic devices such as montage, voice-over in intertitles + long takes, documentary provokes its audience to new ....

Matt's Presentation----

Watched Paris is Burning
Drag Culture - what about issues about the film?

Subverting hegemonic ideal

Hooks argues that Livingston is too far ensconsed in white hegemonic power structures to do this accurately.

Camera changes behavior

"Observer effect"

Issue representative of "whiteneing" of class w/ film

Bell hooks says Livingston uses Venus Xtravaganza as "spectacle"
Film pays more attention to her life as a sex worker than her murder
no scenes of grief is shown

--Referencing Linda Alcoff's Speaking for others essay

- Speaking from within is speaking directly from experience
- first hand knowledge of culture problems, etc
 - passionate about group/cause

- speaking from outside is to speak from observation
-detached look
- perhaps access to resources outside of group (money, equipment, etc)

Criteria for legitmacy
- Awareness of hegemonic hierachy

Hooks positions Paris is Burning

- Speaking to rather than FOR
- Embrace of dicservice role
rather than rejection
accept and acknowledge position.
- Do not pressure authority over group
 - Accept the possibility of the group to produce their own counter-narrative

-When going to speak - figure out where you are going to speak from
Who is being represented in the documentary
Whose interest does the representation serve
who controls the means of documentary representation.