Magic Camera

Yesterday I went to the library and spent a lovely day reading. I was reading some articles recommended by Sarah Teitler, my teacher of Experimental Approaches to Non-Fiction Media.

I read a great article called “Beyond Observational Cinema” by David McDougall. I’m very interested in observational documentary because it really emphasises the relationship between all the humans involved in the endeavour and the machines. Observation requires a minimisation of machinery - you can’t observe people’s behaviour with a three camera shoot and full lighting.

I’ve always believed that cameras have a magic to them. I have quite some sympathy with the mythical natives who fear having their souls stolen by a camera, or the camera wielder. McDougall points out that when we watch film we ignore the scenes that might have been but weren’t, even though we have no idea what they might have been. We give our eyes a lot of credit for showing us the truth, even where we know the image is manufactured using machines.

I also read “The Ethnographers Tale” by Bill Nichol. It’s in Blurred Boundaries, which is a far better book than Representing Reality. The language is still quite mannered, but it’s a lot more playful, and the use of a lot of epigraphs brings lots of ideas to the table. It’s an interesting critiqute of the ideas of anthropological truth and ethnographic film.

Finally I had a look at Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning”, which I enjoyed despite its tendency towards unnecessary punctuation of the bracket variety. She also points to the power we grant the camera when we think of editing as trickery, and ignore the human choices involved in using a camera.

1 March 2006 | video | Comments