I heard about the One Day on Earth project on the radio while staying at the apartment of new friends in Seattle: the idea is that people around the world would film on October 10, 2010 and submit their footage to the initiative’s website. The footage can be seen on the site via individual users profiles and will also be edited into a film (submit at least 1 min of video and you will get online access to the film). I am interested to see what that will be.
What will the archive of footage look like? Who will have submitted? Will this in itself be a portrait of the world? Who has access to video technology & the internet and what do they care about?
I spent most of 10/10/10 on an airplane.
I found the perfect detail to film while waiting for my bags to arrive on the baggage carousel: a 24-hour vending machine for fresh flowers. What an odd and lonely commentary on nature and culture! Unfortunately I couldn’t get my camera settings set correctly and had to give up to catch the train into the city.
Chris Milk’s interactive online film The Wilderness Downtown mixes music video + documentary + personal history + Google satellite images + browser art. Try it out! The project is a collaboration with the band Arcade Fire, and is labeled “an experiment”.
Earlier Chris Milk worked on The Johnny Cash Project, a crowd-sourced video set to Cash’s “Ain’t No Grave.”
Filed under: Documentary
Here is a smart mockumentary from Heal the Bay about the life cycle and habitat of a plastic bag.
Filed under: Documentary, Duration, Information Entertainment | Tags: ethnography, japan
See a beautiful short document of a Tokyo restaurant by Dennis Wheatley and Stefan McClean here. The camera is set on a conveyor belt which takes plates of sushi by customers sitting around the small bar. It gazes both at the patrons and the filmmakers. More than any news report it gives a sense of what it is like to linger in a Japanese restaurant after work – of everyday life in Japan.
I had a conversation last night that has got me thinking about the incredible ubiquity of images: with digital cameras and the Internet the photographic image has proliferated to a point were it has little novelty. At this point of image-saturation, can we begin to use images in new ways? Perhaps, less as documents and more as tools for reflection?
Here is one way of using the image, both “written images” and “video images” as tools of observation:
In 2005 and 2006 I spent time in Beijing. While in China I both kept both a written and a video journal. There, I observed “everyday” things, including peoples’ homes, the textures of the sidewalks, hand movements used in cooking, the ways people cross the street. Through writing and filming I began to become aware of the things that I was noticing. While, in an overall sense, both journals are about “what I did” in Beijing – where I went, who I met, the two are more characterized by the details of objects, experiences, and social interactions. In particular, observations about things that seemed similar to and different from home, for example, the oddness of seeing plain white tea pots and cups in nearly every restaurant, and the familiarity of Starbucks Coffee shops (ubiquitous in Beijing). The journals are documents of the process of getting to know a place, not simply through its language, but through its social and aesthetic patterns. They are a record of what I thought was beautiful, but also what seemed ugly and surprising, of how I arranged my apartment, and of the foods that I gradually began to like.
(An image):
In Beijing, I ask my friend Yan Li if she would show me what her kitchen looks like. I’ve been in China twice before, but I tell her that I’ve never really been inside a Chinese kitchen. She laughs, and replies, “I don’t think it’s that different from a Western one.” But, humoring me, Yan Li walks in. Her kitchen is a small one, a little bit tricky for two people to stand inside and move around together. There are vegetable peels on a paper on one side of the sink and steamer with warm water in it on the stove from the meal we’ve just finished. It’s true that the familiar parts of a kitchen are there: a white refrigerator with a few magnets on the door, a gas stove, cupboards above, below, and opposite from the sink, a silverware drawer, a microwave, and places and containers to store dry foods.
But, also, looking deeper, the objects that are there, the details, ways things are organized, are different from my kitchen. Above the stove there is a sort of ventilation hood, essential for cooking with hot oil, but, below, there is no oven. Next to the sink, a typical stainless steel model, there are no sponges for washing dishes, and behind it there is a set of blue and white painted tiles showing a scene from a traditional Chinese painting. In the cupboard below the kitchen’s far window are old large soda bottles filled with rice and also red beans – the bottles keep bugs out in the summer. Next to them, there is a collection of containers of a dark liquid (soy sauces?), and two large plastic jugs of a golden-colored cooking oil. Another set of low cabinets is crammed with cooking devices that can be plugged into the wall. The only one I recognize is a rice cooker, the others, Yan Li, explains are for things like making a flat bread, or eating hot pot, something similar to fondue.
What is the purpose of this kind of “everyday” documentation? Can it change the way we see things?
Filed under: Documentary
What is ‘documentary’? As any documentary 101 course will try its hardest to show you, what documentary is, is tricky to pin down. As I see it there are at least three elements crucial to its definition:
1. The history of documentary, including when this term started to be used, and how its meaning has changed over time. As far as the history of art goes, it’s a pretty recent category.
2a. The particular documentary medium in question. For me (as a filmmaker) the first thing ‘documentary’ thing that comes to mind is documentary film. But, there is a strong tradition of documentary photography. There might also be a category of ‘documentary art’ – loosely, art that seeks to represent and potentially engage with the world politically, or otherwise. For example, artist Emily Jacir’s photo and video work.
2b. A majority curiosity of The Whole Fragment is whether the category of documentary can also be applied to new media projects – see the CASE STUDIES (on the left) for some examples of what might be called ‘documentary new media’ projects.
3. What kind of action or practice the term ‘documentary’ encompasses in relation to other types of representation. For example, theorists have defined documentary film by investigating where it brushes up with fiction film – on close examination the distinction between the two is slippery. Or, for instance, in his classic documentary film theory book Eric Barnouw explains documentary film practice by exploring the many roles that documentarians may take: prophets, explorers, reporters, painters, advocates, buglers, prosecutors, poets, chroniclers, promoters, observers, catalysts, and guerrillas.
3b. The book Future Cinema (see Feb 3 post), which looks at the future of cinema at large, provides another diverse categorization of film types – showcasing ‘films’ that might be termed transcriptive, recombinatory, navigable, interpoated, immersive, calculated, networked, or screenless. Can new types of documentary (as one type of new film) be analyzed by these categories as well?
Or, the larger question at stake is, can/should ‘new media documentaries’ be theorized in the same way that we look at documentary film, photography, and art? Is there a documentary sensibility that goes beyond particular media? What extensions can new media (web, interactive, multi-media) give to documentary practice?
Filed under: Distribution, Documentary, Production Models | Tags: activism
There is a quiet but fascinating synergy emerging between documentary filmmakers and social change organizations. Groups like Media Rights have emerged with the purpose of tying documentaries together with organizations or educational endeavors that are roused & galvanized by the same issues as the films talk about.
The idea is that educators and social change organizations gain new ways – beyond dull texts, e-mail calls to action – to show people how the system of mass food production works or why vinyl house siding is scary. On the other hand, documentary filmmakers get a new way of distributing their films – reaching, through educators and organizations, the audiences that want to see their work and for whom their work might make a difference.
We were encouraged by Working Films (‘linking non-fiction film with cutting edge activism’) via a kind & free phone consultation to pursue an unconventional distribution strategy by striking up relationships with organizations that work on the issues that our film touches – skipping the traditional film distributor world altogether. It’s a good idea. There’s also no road map for this:
- What do these partnerships between filmmakers and organizations look like? How do they get formed?
- Is this the death of film distributors? (e.g. cutting out the middle man between films and audiences)
- Or, will distributors adapt to this new sphere, perhaps creating relationships with social change organizations and targeted online spaces rather than festivals and TV stations?
- Are non-profit groups like Media Rights and Working Films the new ‘distributors’?
I like this short exchange between Doug Aitken and Matthew Barney, two creators of massive-scale cinematic art projects.
Doug Aitken:
The weight of film production is a heavy one. We’re coming into a new era of lightness and nomadism, where a sixteen-year-old with a Mac can direct, shoot, and cut a film. I’m interested in seeing how this changes the Hollywood studio system.
Matthew Barney:
Hollywood blockbuster films are so over the top, they have become something else entirely. Like you, I am interested in either end of the spectrum. It is everything in the middle – the straight-on storytelling stuff – that I am not really interested in, like so-called independent film.
From: Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative, 26 Conversations, p. 72, 2005.
I like the sense that this exchange paints of the film world – at one end of the spectrum there is the luxurious ideal of having all the resources you need to realize a visually luscious project: rich colors, on location in Tahiti, a constant supply of Alessi coffee/cups for the crew.
But, at the other end there is something beautiful too: the beauty of movement, simplicity, nomadism: where you use the medium to document what you see around you in a way that is closely connected to your own body and way of seeing.
This nomadism is similar to the concept of a video or film “camera as pen”, the idea that the camera is a powerful individual tool for observation and presentation, and that filmmaking does not need a trunk-full of lights and electrical cables & stacks of location releases to be powerful. (e.g. Why bother with everything in the middle?!)
Filed under: Documentary
It’s been nothing short of revelatory, being this age (26, 27) in this moment when everything we took as “whole” is being shredded into bits, pieces, fragments that have as much, if not more power than their former, larger selves. We have acquired a national taste for short film snippets and the tv no longer controls our media consumption habits. Our viewing is dispersed across gadgets, made possible at any moment in time, bypassing traditional outlets – theaters and theater times, that corner in the living room den at 9 pm – that once dictated where and when we should watch.
Sometimes I’ve been telling people (usually to stave off skeptical stares or the dreaded question of “what’s the story”?) that we’re approaching this film as more of a research project than we are approaching it as a typical documentary; that it will unfold as it goes.
But, it makes me wonder, what is the standard relationship between research and documentary? Or, can research be the documentary process?
It’s a subtle thing, and maybe there’s some truth to it, but there seems to be a sort of hierarchy in the documentary world in terms of the correct process of getting a project from start to finish. That is, you ought to: write a synopsis, write a treatment – the story, get your funding, get your locations, hire your crew, travel, shoot, edit, sweat, distribute.
There are other people who approach things quite differently. And, I like them.
Like James Longley who set out with a rough-and-tumble camera to Iraq in the early stages of the war; starting with the plan of just being there. Two years of filming led to a powerful work and Sundance awards. Or, like Jem Cohen who has the delightful approach of an archivist / snap-shot-picture-taker sometimes collecting footage over the period many years to place together a single story.
These ways of working don’t follow the textbook, but they make sense.
In high school I had an English teacher, decked with gray curly hair and smart sweater sets, that insisted on teaching us 16-year-olds to write essays by what she called the “bing bang bongo” approach. This was more or less a system of laying out your argument, points, and sub points and then starting to write.
I pretended that I used bing bang bongo. I got A+’s. But, as much as I tried, I never could make sense of the formula enough to actually use it. I wrote, and continue to write, by a very different process. One where the real purpose of the story or the point is found in the mess of writing itself; thoughts, stream of consciousness, ideas, something growing out of the document as it appears and then rearranges.
Maybe there’s a bing bang bongo film-making, but there’s also another way of doing it.
