The diversity and variety of the documentary (The history of documentary cinema: a quick survey) Dr. Linda C.H. LAI SM4134

The diversity and variety of the documentary(The history of documentary cinema:

a quick survey)

Dr. Linda C.H. LAI

SM4134

Part I

Precursors? Documentary/ethnographic impulse in Early Cinema

Actualities in early cinema (pre 1905-6)

Travel films (Travelogues)

http://www.youtube.com/user/travelfilmarchive

http://www.travelfilmarchive.com

Edward Curtis’s In the Land of the Headhunters (1914)

…films whose subjects were non-Western, non-urban, and in pre-modern

societies

Reference: http://www.africanfilmny.org/network/news/T01m1reddy.html

“The Emergence of Ethnographic Film Practice: Past Travels and Future Itineraries” by Prerana

Reddy

http://www.travelfilmarchive.com/

http://www.travelfilmarchive.com/

Early cinema and the ethnographic impulse

Selected works from Animalomania

(title originally the name of a book with illustrations by JJ. Grandville published in 1836)

Nanook of the North(1922)

Robert Flaherty

Robert Flaherty…(1920s…)

Documentation + Documentary

Re-staging everyday life episodes + use of film narration

Re-staging the only way to share knowledge

Film as a recording/documenting tool:

Camera position, mise-en-scene, duration of shots, types of shots

Film as a medium of representation of findings:

Organization – the need of a “story”; from summer to winter; long takes; strong sense of

continuity

Further reference:

“How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert Flaherty (1922) athttp://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/23_rf1_2.htm

Jean Rouch’s works in Africa

Berlin, a symphony of a big city

(Germany 1927)

Walter Ruttmann

...an ordinary day in 1927

Organization – narrative – journey

Collecting – categorization – typification

Representation

Song of Ceylon(1934)

Basil Wright

CASE STUDY:Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)

Production:

GPO Film Unit for Ceylon Tea Marketing Board

…begun as an Empire Marketing Board film


Background of production:

Producer: John Grierson

Screenplay: John Grierson, Basil Wright …,

based partly on a book about Ceylon written by traveler Robert Knox in 1680

Music: Walter Leigh

Cast: Lionel Wendt (Narrator)

… …


Basil Wright was sent to Ceylon to film four one-reel travelogues as publicity for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board.

When he was actually there, he was driven by his own “inner impulse” which made him shoot other sites and themes. The idea of Song of Ceylon was not in his mind when he was there until after he returned to London to edit the footage.

• There was no shooting script, but a screenplay afterwards, also with reference to an existing book.

• The editing and sound in the film were done in England. Eight tracks of recorded sound and music and images were combined.

• The film’s narration was taken from Robert Knox’s book (1680), which Wright discovered by chance in a store window.


I. the Buddha• Pilgrims up a mountainside to pray…

II. the Virgin Island (10:54)• Daily life of the people…

III. the Voices of Commerce (~23:00)• Two systems of labors juxtaposed: sound track of British stock

market prices and the arrival and departure times for ships // natives of Ceylon gathering coconuts ad tea leaves by hand

IV.the Apparel of the Gods (29:43)• Religious and cultural life of Ceylon as lived before the arrival of the

British colonizers

The four titles were inserted afterwards.


• The film is often called the world’s finest example of “lyrical documentary.”

• Grierson described the theme of the work,

“Buddhism and the art of life it has to offer, set upon by a Western metropolitan civilization which, in spite of all our skills, has no art of life to offer.”


Keywords…

Interpretation /

narrative composition /

sight and sound craftsmanship /

experimentation of sound /

anthropology and power structure


Bibliography:

http://www.filmreference.com/Film-So-St/Song-of-Ceylon.html Cecil Starr

Screen online:

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/442428/index.html


Comparison:

Laleen Jayamanne A Song of Ceylon (1985, 51 minutes, color)

CASE STUDY:

Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon

A Song of Ceylon (Laleen Jayamanne, 1985, Australia, 51 minutes)

Her work is NOT an ethnographic film, but it engages in issues of ethnography and anthropology in general, critically.

CASE STUDY:


Jayamanne is a Srilankan working overseas.

• The work focuses on gender and the body.

• Trinh T. Minh-ha remarks on the work, “The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and a theatrical ritual… The film engages the viewer in the cinematic body as spectacles…” (in journal Discourse)

CASE STUDY:


Jayamanne’s own Song is based on an anthropological text that deals with the experience of “possession” – “of a body being possessed by other bodies, of the voice being multiplied.”

• Ethnography of class• Cultural hybridization• Found anthropological text• Daily rituals

Bibliography:“Anna Rodrigo Interviews Laleen Jayamanne on A Song of Ceylon” in Toward Cinema and Its Double: cross-cultural. (pp. 65-66)

Song of Ceylon and more...

Producers:

Empire Marketing Board (EMB)a model applied to many British colonies

(Commercial sponsor of film:)

The Ceylon Tea Board

South Africa in first half of 20th C...

African Film Productions Ltd. (AFP)

1st South African-based film production company

AFP documentaries were sponsored by government departments

(Propaganda, tourism, educational...)

The social-political side of documentary film:

Documentary cinema is not just filmmaking.

Historically speaking, it has been the location of power control and government public relations.

Today...

Democratic possibilities of audience input?

Notion of archive?

• Night Mail• (1936)

• John Grierson (producer)

Night Mail

Documentation + DocumentaryJohn Grierson (Britain, 1930s…)

Grierson founded the GPO’s Film Unit in 1933…

Night Mail (released 1936, dir. Harry Watt, Basil Wright)

= “camera truth” “sound archive”

On the British postal system

Ethnography of technology…ethnography of urban sound

Screen on-line:

http://www.screenonline.org.hk/film/id/530415/index.html

Maya Deren

Maya Deren

Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (put together posthumously in 1977)

(her own documentation in writing published 1953)

Visual anthropology: the case of Maya Deren

(Avant-garde filmmaker/experimentation in visual anthropology)

• Apparatus: exploring the material possibilities of the camera

• Reflexivity

• Ritual: union of cultural FORM and CONTENT

Moral commitment to aesthetic sensibility

Visual anthropology: the case of Maya Deren

Filmmaker’s artistic sensibility

“The problem of the filmmaker then becomes not how to make a thing look like itself, so much as how to make it look like what he wants the audience to feel about it. He must discover how to translate his emotion about something into a visual film expression.”

[Legend of Maya Deren, 1942-47, p. 300]

content-as-form + filmmaker’s personal artistic sensibility +

commitment to the morality of form

The activity of documentation involves all of the following three:

Apparatus

Reflexivity

Ritual

Ethnographic filmmaking (Paul Henley, 46)

Surrealist documentary

Land without Bread

Luis Buñuel

Direct cinema

Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman:

Release Date:

– 1967 (USA)

• Titicut Follies is a black and white 1967 documentary film by Frederick

Wiseman about the treatment of patient at Massachusetts Correctional

Institution in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The title is taken from a talent

show put on by the hospital's inmates.

• The film’s release was banned (outside the field of education) in the United

States from 1972-1992 by the Massachusetts Surpreme Judicial Court

because it violated the patients’ rights.

• In 1992, it was allowed to be shown on PBS. The Supreme Judicial Court of

Massachusetts has ordered that "A brief explanation shall be included in the

film that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts

Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966.”

Cinema verite

Chronicle of a summer

Chronique d'un ete (Paris 1961).

Jean Rouch…(1940s…)

use of documentary editorial devices + making “documentary fictions”

Play with boundaries of fact Vs fiction, observer Vs the observed…, and

tradition Vs modernity

Chris Marker

Sans Soleil

Summary

Documentary style

Forgotten Silver

Summary

Creative treatmentAesthetic concern

…always part of documentary filmmaking

Persuasion is a result of the effort to organize information.(Persuasion is a necessary consequence of the maker’s

own interpretation of the material.)

Levels of reality and truthfulness…

Verifiable facts – factual accuracy (the 6 Ws)

Atmosphere, emotional intensity

Attitude

Paradigms (event + context) (cultural phenomena…)

Objective truth to Multiple truths

• Actuality

• Factual truth

• Truth of the sense

• Truth of abstraction

• Truth of thoughts and attitudes

• Truth of character

Documentary impulse and documentary practices pre-exist documentary cinema or the documentary genre.

Documents

The diversity and variety of the documentary (The history of documentary cinema: a quick survey) Dr. Linda C.H. LAI SM4134