as unit 1: practical 2 documentary history

8/14/2019 AS Unit 1: Practical 2 Documentary History

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Unit 1 Practical 2: Film Form ArtVideo

History of Documentary Film

1) We believe that the cinemas capacity for getting around, forobserving and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new andvital art form. The studio films largely ignore this possibility of openingup the screen on the real world. They photograph acted stories againstartificial backgrounds. Documentary would photograph the living sceneand the living story.

2) We believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (ornative) scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of themodern world. They give cinema a greater fund of material. They giveit power over a million and one images. They give it power ofinterpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in thereal world than the studio mind can conjure up or the studiomechanician recreate.

3) We believe that the materials and the stories thus taken from theraw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the actedarticle. Spontaneous gesture has a special value on the screen. Cinema

has a sensational capacity for enhancing the movement which traditionhas formed or time worn smooth. Its arbitrary rectangle speciallyreveals movement; it gives it maximum pattern in space and time. Addto this that documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge andeffect impossible to the shim-sham mechanics of the studio, and thelily-fingered interpretations of the metropolitan actor.

John Grierson First Principles of Documentary

The word "documentary" was first applied to this category of film in a

review ofRobert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), February 1926 andwritten by "The Moviegoer", a pen name for famous documentarianJohn Grierson.

In the 1930s, Grierson further argued in his essay First Principles ofDocumentarythat Moana had "documentary value." Grierson'sprinciples of documentary were that cinema's potential for observinglife could be exploited in a new art form; that the "original" actor and

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"original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts tointerpreting the modern world; and that materials "thus taken from theraw" can be more real than the acted article. In this regard, Grierson'sviews align with Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeoisexcess", though with considerably more subtlety. Grierson's definition

of documentary as "creative treatment of actuality" has gained someacceptance, though it presents philosophical questions aboutdocumentaries containing stagings and reenactments.

In his essays, Dziga Vertov argued for presenting "life as it is" (that is,life filmed surreptitiously) and "life caught unawares" (life provoked orsurprised by the camera).

Pare Lorentz defines a documentary film as "a factual film which isdramatic."[2] Others further state that a documentary stands out fromthe other types of non-fiction films for providing an opinion, and a

specific message, along with the facts it presents.[3]

Documentary Practice is the complex process of creating documentaryprojects. It refers to what people do with media devices, content, form,and production strategies in order to address the creative, ethical, andconceptual problems and choices that arise as they makedocumentaries.

History

Pre-1900The filmmaker John Grierson used the term documentary in 1926 torefer to any nonfiction film medium, including travelogues andinstructional films. The earliest "moving pictures" were, by definition,documentaries. They were single-shot moments captured on film: atrain entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leavingwork. Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showingan event. These short films were called "actuality" films. (The term"documentary" was not coined until 1926.) Very little storytelling tookplace before the turn of the century, due mostly to technological

limitations, namely, that movie cameras could hold only very smallamounts of film. Thus, many of the first films, such as those made byAuguste and Louis Lumire, are a minute or less in length,

1900-1920

Travelogue films were very popular in the early part of the 20thcentury. Some were known as "scenics". Scenics were among the most

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popular sort of films at the time.[4] An important early film to movebeyond the concept of the scenic was In the Land of the Head Hunters(1914), which embraced primitivism and exoticism in a staged storypresented as truthful re-enactments of the life ofNative Americans.

Early color motion picture processes such as Kinemacolor andPrizmacolor used travelogues to promote the new color process. (Incontrast,Technicolor concentrated primarily on getting their processadopted by Hollywood studios for fictional feature films.)

Also during this period Frank Hurley's documentary film, South (1919),about the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, was released. Itdocumented the failed Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton in1914.

1920s

Romanticism

With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentaryfilm embraced romanticism; Flaherty went on to film a number ofheavily staged romantic films, usually showing how his subjects wouldhave lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then. Forinstance, in Nanook of the North Flaherty did not allow his subjects toshoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but had them use a harpooninstead. Some of Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloofor interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of

the time.

Paramount Pictures tried to repeat the success of Flaherty's Nanookand Moana with two romanticized documentaries, Grass (1925) andChang (1927), both directed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack.

The city symphony

The continental, or realist, tradition focused on humans within human-made environments, and included the so-called "city symphony" filmssuch as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City(of which

Grierson noted in an article[5] that Berlin represented what adocumentary should not be), Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien Que les Heures,and Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera. These films tend tofeature people as products of their environment, and lean towards theavant-garde.

Kino-Pravda

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Dziga Vertov was central to the Russian Kino-Pravda (literally, "cinematruth") newsreel series of the 1920s. Vertov believed the camera with its varied lenses, shot-counter shot editing, time-lapse, ability toslow motion, stop motion and fast-motion could render reality moreaccurately than the human eye, and made a film philosophy out of it.

Newsreel tradition

The newsreel tradition is important in documentary film; newsreelswere also sometimes staged but were usually re-enactments of eventsthat had already happened, not attempts to steer events as they werein the process of happening. For instance, much of the battle footagefrom the early 20th century was staged; the cameramen would usuallyarrive on site after a major battle and re-enact scenes to film them.

1920s-1940s

The propagandist tradition consists of films made with the explicitpurpose of persuading an audience of a point. One of the mostnotorious propaganda films is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of theWill. Leftist filmmakersJoris Ivens and Henri Storck directed Borinageabout the Belgian coal mining region. Luis Buuel directed a"surrealist" documentary Las Hurdas.

Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Broke the Plains and The Riverarenotable New Deal productions, each presenting complex combinationsof social and ecological awareness, government propaganda, and

leftist viewpoints. Frank Capra's Why We Fightseries was a newsreelseries in the United States, commissioned by the government toconvince the U.S. public that it was time to go to war.

In Canada the Film Board, set up by Grierson, was created for thesame propaganda reasons. It also created newsreels that were seen bytheir national governments as legitimate counter-propaganda to thepsychological warfare ofNazi Germany (orchestrated byJosephGoebbels).

In Britain, a number of different filmmakers came together underJohn

Grierson. They became known as the Documentary Film Movement.John Grierson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, andHumphrey Jennings amongst others succeeded in blendingpropaganda, information, and education with a more poetic aestheticapproach to documentary. Examples of their work include Drifters(John Grierson), Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright), Fires Were StartedandA Diary for Timothy(Humphrey Jennings). Their work involved poetssuch as W. H. Auden, composers such as Benjamin Britten, and writers

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such asJ. B. Priestley. Among the most well known films of themovement are Night Mail and Coal Face.

1950s-1970s

Cinma-vrit

Cinma vrit (or the closely related direct cinema) was dependent onsome technical advances in order to exist: light, quiet and reliablecameras, and portable sync sound.

Cinma vrit and similar documentary traditions can thus be seen, ina broader perspective, as a reaction against studio-based filmproduction constraints. Shooting on location, with smaller crews, wouldalso happen in the French New Wave, the filmmakers taking advantageof advances in technology allowing smaller, handheld cameras and

synchronized sound to film events on location as they unfolded.

Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there areimportant differences between cinma vrit (Jean Rouch) and theNorth American "Direct Cinema" (or more accurately "Cinma direct",pioneered among others by French Canadian Michel Brault, PierrePerrault, Americans Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Frederick Wisemanand Albert and David Maysles).

The directors of the movement take different viewpoints on theirdegree of involvement. Kopple and Pennebaker, for instance, choose

non-involvement (or at least no overt involvement), and Perrault,Rouch, Koenig, and Kroitor favor direct involvement or evenprovocation when they deem it necessary.

The films Primaryand Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment(bothproduced by Robert Drew), Harlan County, USA (directed by BarbaraKopple), Dont Look Back(D. A. Pennebaker), Lonely Boy(Wolf Koenigand Roman Kroitor), Chronicle of a Summer(Jean Rouch) and GoldenGloves (Gilles Groulx)[6][7] are all frequently deemed cinma vritfilms.

The fundamentals of the style include following a person during a crisiswith a moving, often handheld, camera to capture more personalreactions. There are no sit-down interviews, and the shooting ratio (theamount of film shot to the finished product) is very high, oftenreaching 80 to one. From there, editors find and sculpt the work into afilm. The editors of the movement such as Werner Nold, CharlotteZwerin, Muffie Myers, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde are often

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overlooked, but their input to the films was so vital that they wereoften given co-director credits.

Famous cinma vrit/direct cinema films include Les Raquetteurs[8] ,Showman, Salesman, The Children Were Watching, Primary, Behind a

Presidential Crisis, and Grey Gardens.

Political weapons

In the 1960s and 1970s, documentary film was often conceived as apolitical weapon against neocolonialism and capitalism in general,especially in Latin America, but also in a changing Quebec society. LaHora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, from 1968), directed byOctavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas, influenced a wholegeneration of filmmakers.

Modern documentaries

Box office analysts have noted that this film genre has becomeincreasingly successful in theatrical release with films such as SuperSize Me, March of the Penguins andAn Inconvenient Truth among themost prominent examples. Compared to dramatic narrative films,documentaries typically have far lower budgets which makes themattractive to film companies because even a limited theatrical releasecan be highly profitable.

The nature of documentary films has changed in the past 20 years

from the cinema verit tradition. Landmark films such as The Thin BlueLine by Errol Morris incorporated stylized re-enactments, and MichaelMoore's Roger & Me placed far more interpretive control with thedirector. Indeed, the commercial success of these documentaries mayderive from this narrative shift in the documentary form, leading somecritics to question whether such films can truly be calleddocumentaries; critics sometimes refer to these works as "mondofilms" or "docu-ganda."[9] However, directorial manipulation ofdocumentary subjects has been noted since the work of Flaherty, andmay be endemic to the form.

The recent success of the documentary genre, and the advent ofDVDs, has made documentaries financially viable even without acinema release. Yet funding for documentary film production remainselusive, and within the past decade the largest exhibition opportunitieshave emerged from within the broadcast market, making filmmakersbeholden to the tastes and influences of the broadcasters who havebecome their largest funding source.[10]

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Modern lightweight digital video cameras and computer-based editinghave greatly aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop inequipment prices. The first film to take full advantage of this changewas Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, where 150 DVcameras were sent to Iraq during the war and passed out to Iraqis to

record themselves.

Other documentary forms

Compilation films

Compilation films were pioneered in 1927 by Esfir Schub with The Fallof the Romanov Dynasty. More recent examples include Point of Order(1964), directed by Emile de Antonio about the McCarthy hearings andThe Atomic Cafe which is made entirely out of found footage thatvarious agencies of the U.S. government made about the safety ofnuclear radiation (e.g., telling troops at one point that it's safe to beirradiated as long as they keep their eyes and mouths shut). Similarly,The Last Cigarette combines the testimony of various tobaccocompany executives before the U.S. Congress with archivalpropaganda extolling the virtues of smoking.

7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kunerthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Maneshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_of_Iraqhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esfir_Shubhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_de_Antoniohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atomic_Cafehttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Last_Cigarette&action=edit&redlink=1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobaccohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Congresshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kunerthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Maneshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_of_Iraqhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esfir_Shubhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_de_Antoniohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atomic_Cafehttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Last_Cigarette&action=edit&redlink=1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobaccohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Congress

as unit 1: practical 2 documentary history

Documents