The Decisive Moment by Paul Auster

A large point stressed in this piece is to properly experience life you have to remain invisible, you have to blend in, in doing so you don’t have any effect on what is happening around you and can get a true glimpse a the beauty of life. The piece focuses on the work of poet Charles Reznikoff, whos poetry comes from experiencing life from a distance. He captured the essence of everyday life in New York for example by walking miles opening him up to more of what the world had to offer. The piece draws a similarity between Reznikoff’s style of poetry and Cartier-Bressons ‘Decisive moment’, in saying that for both of these processes to work properly you have to look at the world around you, be ready to capture life. Overall the piece gives good insight into how the ‘decisive moment’ should work and how it should be more of a spontaneous decision rather than that of a set up. 

HOW REAL IS THE REALITY IN DOCUMENTARY FILM?

JILL GODMILOW, IN CONVERSATION WITH ANN-LOUISE SHAPIRO

In this extract Jill Godmilow, a documentary maker reflects on what makes a documentary and how reality is portrayed. Whether a documentary has to contain ‘actuality’ or ‘archived’ footage to be classed as true, or whether it can be a representation of real events, put forward in a form of re-enactments or interpretations of an event. She goes on to say that too many documentaries have ‘To survive, to take public space and attention, it has had to borrow all kinds of structural and strategic devices from fiction in order to achieve what I would call “satisfying form,” that is, to send the audience out of the theater (and/or off to bed) feeling complete, whole, and untroubled’.

She believes that as a documentary filmmaker it is necessary not to lead to a form of narrative closure, or to create you subject as a hero or heroin as she says in the interview ‘By producing their subjects as heroic and allowing us to be glad for their victories, or by producing them as tragic and allowing us to weep, the audience experiences itself as not implicated, exempt from the responsibility either to act or even to consider the structures of their own situation.’ I agree with her statement as having seen documentaries with a focal ‘hero’ character and a glimpse of resolution leaves me feeling a lack of regret or responsibility for that person. It fits in with the N.I.M.B.Y theory where it’s not happening to me so why should it affect my life.

Where as Godmilow believes that documentary so be left so of open ended, with no real sense of closure so that the audience leave thinking about the particular subject at hand, it has to educate them. ‘I consider the mind the sixth sense…So to educate that sixth sense, the mind, you would take on the job of refining it…So good film- making (responsible filmmaking) should always be good art, good education of the mind.’

Documentaries that bring or reach wider audiences/the box office seem to be more for entertainment purposes, or portraying some sort of ‘abnormal’ person for public interest, rather than education. For example ‘Supersize Me[1]’ or ‘the girl with eight limbs[2]’ which weren’t educational, so in some respect agree with what Godmilow is trying to say as they conform to the standard way of practice, for more of an entertainment sense rather than the educational route.

 Documentary in the digital era

This reading was split into two essays, one by Sharon Lin Tay and one by Dale Hudson. The essay that I was interested most by was the Dale Hudson essay, as the essay is looking into the database documentaries, which I had never heard of before. The Goobalization Project was fascinating as it used the Google search engine to produce pictures relating to the four topics of ‘Surveillance’ ‘Difference’ ‘Resistance’ and ‘Globalization’. Although it seems random ‘It is important to note that subjectivity is implicated by my choices. Images were downloaded and then selected in order to create narratives with a deconstructive critical position. In this way, Goobalization presents material from around the world, which is dependent on four ideological terms that are particular to one person's point of view.’[1]

This portrays a clear example of the web 2.0 process, as they are creating their own web source, while using the pre existing format of Google to practically fuel the project. A similar trend can be seen on ‘Kabul: Reconstructions’ as mentioned in the essay, ‘originally launched in 2003 as an interactive documentary and public dialogue project to document reconstruction projects in Kabul at yearly intervals. By adopting both a conventional documentary mode (representing) and a less conventional mode (dialoguing), the Internet documentary seeks to offer multiple perspectives of particular situations’[2]. From looking at this site there are a lot of dialoguing formats of information, mainly articles or extracts from newspapers or government official statements, but then there are accompanying short one to two minute documentaries and photographs documenting particular events/ progress.

Overall this reading forced me to look into the database documentaries because it allowed me to understand the reading more thoroughly, but also opened me up to the web 2.0 style that these projects have used to create their work.

What Third World?

‘The 'distorted picture' was and still is an outcome of the underlying economic logic: the content of news (what and how is covered and what importance is attributed to it) is primarily determined not in the locations where it is gathered but in the locations where it is consumed and paid for.’

From reading this article it is made clear that the majority of news given from third world countries is reported in a negative perspective. Although this article is based around Delo the daily newspaper from Slovenia, there are trends from this paper that relate to our own news coverage. The article points out that it is through the use of photojournalism that the negative news is portrayed,  ‘One of the major changes in Delo's international news reporting has undoubtedly been the increased importance of press photography in structuring and narrating the news, however this change appears to be connected with a shift toward more symbolic use of photographs… Through this, symbolic use of photographs becomes one of the vehicles for construction of difference between 'us' and 'them' and essentially serves to articulate and demarcate social boundaries of an imagined community of Slovene nation.'

         The use of symbolism gives us a glimpse of how the ‘others’ live, but as it is symbolic we are left up to our own ideas as to how they live or the situation being reported, rather than being given a clear visual representation. In not being given hard fact we are forced to use pre-established ideas we as a society already have which we have only created through us of visual stereotypes. ‘The repetitive use of visual stereotypes such as armed Palestinian demonstrators or starved African children to name but two of the most standard examples creates a flow of decontextualized and ahistorical interpretations of reported events.’ Through using repetitive images we can never learn or gain a new perspective we are forced to continue this naïve or ignorant idea of the ‘others’ and how they live, unless we choose to visit the third world countries and experience them for ourselves we will never get the full picture because negative news is, seemingly, the news that makes it to us.

Charles Forceville : The Source –Path-Goal Schema in the Autobiographical Journey Documentary

         This reading indicates that like people in their everyday lives we do things based on a Path, with an aim for a particular outcome or Goal and having a reason or Source for wanting to set out on the path in the first place. The author looks at three autobiographical documentaries, where he analyses their use of the S-P-G Schema within their films.  

Forceville shows a table within his article portraying the various concepts of the S-P-G Schema, for example in regards to a journey the Source is the starting point, the Path is travelling, the Goal is the destination, or in regards to a Quest, the Source is the problem brought to light, the Path is the search of answers to the problem, and the Goal is the solution of the problem.  He talks about when looking at the S-P-G Schema, you also have to take into consideration the Quest, Journey and Story links, for example if the Journey is focused around travel then the quest will focus around the person and the story will focus around the character. These things affect how the story will develop and progress but also help create a definitive narrative structure for the documentaries to follow.

         According to Forceville the documentaries need to have narrative integrity for the schema to work, otherwise audiences wont be interested for the duration of the film, to keep the integrity the film makers use language, including direct address to the camera or post production voice over, which put along side their film ‘turns their quests into the plots of stories.’

         So from reading this article it helps develop the knowledge that if following the S-P-G schema consideration needs to be placed towards how it is put across and interpreted by the audience, rather than relying on the journey to tell the whole story.