Level 5 Documentary has begun we have received our briefs and are beginning work already! In this weeks lesson we began by trying to define documentary, a task which we learned is not as easy as it sounds. It may have something to do with content, contributors or theme among other things.
Documentary is most easily defined as "a representation of the world we already occupy"(1) which is extremely broad but works for almost all documentaries. It definitely covered the Doc's we watched in class, the first was Touching the Void (2003 Kevin Macdonald) a film about two climbers who get lost. The thing that stands out about this doc, or this kind of doc, is that it is representing something from the past, it therefore uses recreations to show what it was like. Although voice over is provided by the climber, the recreation uses a large amount of drama techniques such as lighting, sets, actors and music. These elements are used to dramatise and represent what happened to the climber but are obviously an extreme representation of what happened. This dramatisation brings the status of documentary into question, the technique is often used and widely accepted despite its dramatic elements, it shows that doc doesn't have to be fact or actual footage.
We then watched Grizzly Man (2005 Werner Herzog) a film about Timothy Treadwell, this is a very personal documentary about Timothy who lived with grizzly bears in the wild, protecting and loving them. He used his camera as a tool to document his life and to be his friend, his diary and his companion. The clip we watched showed Timothy at a deeper level, it showed how he bared his soul to the camera on some occasions and on others he took repeated takes of introductions to insure he had the appropriate stock footage and had good takes of every shot. This shows both the truthfulness of doc's through Timothy's raw emotion as well as the lies and retakes used in the editing process of docs.
The Alcohol Years (2000 Carol Morley) was another of the conventional docs we watched, however we only saw the intro. This consisted of peoples opinions of the director Carol Morley's life in the 80's of which Carol was so drunk she knows little of herself. This was clearly another different style of doc, it showed opinion, a completely subjective look at the subject through the eyes of people that both liked and disliked her. It was an interesting way of looking at someone however a whole hour long doc would have gotten a little boring as each persons statement was intercut with others and the pace of the film was tiring.
Finally we watched a clip from Man with a Movie Camera (1929 Dziga Vertov) which is almost as clear a documentary as one can be. It uses absolutely no elements of drama or ant retakes, it is simply shots of the Russian public. Its not particularly interesting but it is a fairly accurate representation. However some would argue, Bazin particularly that as soon as we cut and edit we are no longer telling the truth or being real, every cut is a lie.
We also looked briefly at the history of documentary, of Nanook of the North (1922 Robert Flaherty) and Greerson's "post office" movement in the 30's in Britain, of Humphrey Jennings and the mass observation group. However the biggest leap in doc's came during the 60's, with the development of 16mil cameras and portable sound systems four different types of doc's developed, Direct Cinema (USA), the UK Free movement, Candid eye (Canada) and France's Cinema Verite.
Finally we looked briefly at types of doc, Poetic, Expository, Observational, Particapatory, Reflexive and Performative. After forming groups to do our poetic 2 min and final 5-10 min docs our lesson ended. I don't yet have any ideas but am meeting with the group soon to talk over anything we come up with in the next few days. I believe it may be best to address an issue rather than look specifically at a person or type of person, I feel this way because I have previously done Doc's about specific people and would like to do something new, we would also be less restricted if doing a doc about am issue than we would if we were doing it on a specific group, person or place.
Over the next week I will be finishing the section of "Introduction to Documentary" by Bill Nichols which has some interesting theories and basics about understanding the documentary form.
Bibliography
1. Nichols Bill, Introduction to Documentary, (Indiana University Press, 2001) p20
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