Dee Blind Mice

DropShots Day

A family put a webcam into a birdhouse and you can see the birds all making nests and laying eggs.

For class this week I watched three movies, all of which I enjoyed and each of which crafted a documentary with very little original footage. I am really getting into these experimental films, although I think the ones we are watching are more accessible than some.

The first one I saw was the charming History and Memory by Rea Tajiri. It really is a charming film and that is not to in anyway lessen the importance of its subject, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or the powerful impact the film had on me. This movie is really made up of scraps – a repeated re-enacted “memory” she never had of her mother in the internment camp, some archival footage, some Hollywood footage, and some footage of a visit to Poston where the “camp” was located. There is also a device I loved where she uses text to describe a scene not captured on camera – as if to reclaim that which was not recorded on film. The movie is particularly resonant right now at a time when people’s human rights are being rescinded in the name of war or the perception of their not being truly American.

The next movie I really loved, and it was Bontoc Eulogy by Marlon Fuentes. It’s a great story about a Bontoc Igorot and his journey to America to take part in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair where there was an exhibit of Filipino “natives” who were like animals in a zoo. The storytellling is amazing, the film is a blend of fiction and fact, and it signposts its unreliability as “truth” although there is something about it that feels very like accuracy.

Finally The Ties That Bind by Su Friedrich, which got kind of a hard time in class, but which I really enjoyed. I hated the ways questions were asked through a scratch on-screen text and I found the plastic house building pointless and the pictures of current events insulting to the gravity of the main story, but tha main story was powerful and beautifully told, and the character of her mother was fascinating and sympathetic. It’s about a woman who came of age in Nazi Germany and who refused to join the party, but did little to fight against it.

Also a good read on Bontoc Eulogy is “Bontoc Eulogy, History and Craft of Memory: an Extended Conversation with Marlon E. Fuentes”. It gives interesting insights into what parts of the video were based on what footage and his thinking behind the movie.

I watched a couple of movies recently for Experimental Approaches to Non-Fiction Media.

The first was The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris. This is a really interesting film about the investigation into the murder of a police officer in Texas, and the eventual conviction of a man who it is strongly suggested was innocent. The film works by means of re-enactments, but what we see relates to what witnesses are saying and are often contradictory, so there is certainly a refusal to use video to show “what really happened” That said, Morris definitely has a point of view and he is not shy of bringing that across – it is clear that he does not believe the man convicted of the crime was the one who committed it.

The second was a weird, weird movie Close Up by Abbas Kiarastomi. Ed had said in class how much it affected him although he found it quite boring to watch, so after I watched it I was waiting for this revelation. It didn’t come though until after we discussed the movie in class yesterday. It’s a story about a man who poses as a famous film director and tricks a family into believing he is going to make a movie about them. In the end a movie (this movie) is made about the family, that starts the family, the famous director, and the impostor. It also includes real footage from the trial of the impostor. It’s so meta and layered that you really have to see it to get it. It’s pretty wonderful. I interpreted totally differently to everyone else in class – they seemed to see the end as happy and the redemption of the impostor. I saw it as hollow redemption based on abject performance of contrition and thought the making of the film in the end only heightened the sense that those with access to the media have the power. It was very interesting to hear what other people took from it.

I also read some articles Sarah assigned from a great book called New Challenges for Documentary

The first was “The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film”, which is a short piece by Jay Ruby where he argues that a documentary filmmaker has a responsbility to be reflexive, i.e. remind the viewer of the contructed nature of the flim. His argument is persuasive. Rather than buy into the bogus idea of journalistic objectivity, it is far more truthful to reveal your bias. In documentary and non-fiction film terms I think that means making movies that point to their constructed nature.

Another was “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Image-Making” by Calvin Pryluck looks at the responsibilities a filmmaker has to his subjects. Should a documentarian involve subjects in editing and in choosing how they are respresented? I think yes. I think it is unconscionable to invade people’s privacy or exploit them just to make a movie. However different rules apply when you are filming the powerful – in that circumstance it would be unethical to allow people to determine how they will be depicted.

Lastly another Ruby article and another called “The Ethics of Imagemaking”. It is about an artists obligations to herself, her audience, and her subjects and how they often don’t align. I’m all about these ideas and questions at the moment. This is a piece from the article, it’s absolutely spot on:

“If we perpetuate the lie that pictures always tell the truth., that they are objective witnesses to reality, we are supporting an industry that has the potential to symbolically recreate teh world in its own image. Technology grows out of a particular ideology. The Western world created image-producing technologies out of a profound need to have an irrefutable witness – to control reality by capturing it on film.”