The reflections consist of three questions:
1) What is the main point of the reading?
2) What information did you find surprising? Why?
3) What did you find confusing? Why?
Sunday, October 18, 2015
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Jessie AlchehOctober 17, 2015 at 5:14 PM
ReplyDeleteWhat I found surprising about the Chanan piece was the fact that Zapruder's footage was highly revered for being simple and minimal. Even though his technique was considered amateur, the content of his films was quality rich. The raw nature of his filming could be taken as the equivalent to shooting from the hip in photography because Zapruder took the approach of filming where he was and not changing the camera angle. However, as I read further, one part of the piece that struck me related to the fact that truth is objective to what the lens sees, but is subjective to the partial point of view. What I am considering is that if Zapruder was spontaneous and somewhat sporadic in his filming could he be thought to obtain more of a level of objectivity if he was not manipulating the camera angle?
What I found confusing was Chanan's explanation of the notion that what appears on the screen is a sign and not a reality. What is perplexing to me is that in my head realities are created whether it be in photography, or film through the simple fact of taking bits and pieces from what is in the real world and creating something new from it. Is the sign that what which visually sparks the idea of a reality in the person interpreting the documentary? What is the actual way in which semiotics works as a process in terms of a documentary?
It is a representation of reality, usable bits of history, if you will. For example, an image of you, Jessie Acheh in a video is not you but a representation of you.The meaning in the video comes from the interrelationships of images that create an understanding of reality/truths.
DeleteAs I understood it, this reading explored the central question of documentary’s claim to reality; not only in a theoretical sense, but as a practical concern throughout history. I thought that this notion to explore the semiotics of the documentary image was really interesting, and at times a bit confusing. One of the things I found confusing was the difference between an image in film and an image in documentary. Don’t they both use the same basic medium through which to convey their message? Essentially, shouldn’t the image itself be the same? I thought that the techniques and images were the same between documentary and film but the distinction came in the interpretations of these images and what they are both trying to convey.
ReplyDeleteOne piece of the reading that I found surprising was the iconic and indexical aspects to each cinematographic image. I had never previously thought to use this specific language to describe the phenomenon we all experience when watching a film. This notion was really interesting to use when Chanan talked about the use of film in court. Chanan notes that “in some extreme cases, the indexical content fails to limit the interpretation of the image and the iconic and ideological values that accrue to it.” How can these two aspects of index and icon work best with one another so that neither hinders the other?
In a court of law, the opposing lawyers work a case to best present the interests of their client(s). The Rodney King case was especially illustrative of Chanan's notion that images have both indexical and iconic value. The icon, as we seen in the King case, evoked multiple interpretations--mostly favorable to the LAPD.
DeleteMichael Chanan’s chapter the Rules of Evidence in his book The Politics of Documentary is focused on documentary censorship and control of film, specifically documentary throughout history. Certain films were considered more dangerous when viewed by the uneducated, and impressionable audiences. i.e. international films, 1953 french film Les statues meurent aussi by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. I found it interesting that at the time this book was written, Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first documentary in nearly 50 years to win the top award at the Cannes Film Festival, despite the U.S.’s attempts to keep the film from commercial distribution. It was also interesting that the UK documentary The Connection posed as a real documentary, won eight international television awards and was screened on fourteen television stations all around the world, when in reality it was only pretending to pretend. This mixing “fact with fakery” goes back to the censorship board in the beginning of film creation considering it a dangerous medium when viewed by “the uneducated.” I also found the exploration of semiotics in documentary work a bit confusing. As Chanan stated, "it depends on what the viewer is looking for" but I wonder how semiotics actually works in documentary.
ReplyDeleteThink of semiotics in film as a way of seeing things in a manifold of relationships. An image, while noted for its indexicality, is also iconic and as such evokes a host of meanings. For example, I can show an image of my right hand that can be verified as my right hand due to fingerprints in my military record. An image of my right hand also can evoke images of testifying to tell the truth in court, of a hand I raise to speak in a meeting, a hand I extend to a dance partner, and on and on.
DeleteChanan’s pitch for the reader is that manipulating material for documentary is ok as long as it’s done with transparency. He writes, “Reconstruction is allowed in well-defined circumstances, it must not ‘distort reality’ and must be clearly labeled on the screen” (46). His belief is that documentary can only approximate the real. To demonstrate this, he cites examples of mimetic filming methods, such as the non-narrated footage taken of the Kennedy assassination, and highly narrated pieces that turn out to be more like fiction, such as the controversial film The Connection. Chanan shows how the Zapruder method is limited, explaining the negative space left out of the shot. According to Chanan, subjectivity prevents the inclusion of other possible vantage points. Terms such as “mimetic” and “verisimilitude of the image,” when describing Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination, work in contrast to terms such as “distortion,” and “relativism.” While the mimetic or recording-without-distortion film “shows us everything,” it also, according to Chanan, “shows us nothing.” Chanan wants the reader to consider the balance between docudrama and docusoap Griersonianism practiced in films like The Connection and Zapruder authenticity.
ReplyDeleteI find the coexistence of these two truths confusing: the absence of authorial voice is admired and the strong hand of a dramatic narrator awarded. According to Chanan, “The mock documentary only pretends to pretend,” but a documentary such as The Challenge pretends to be true, and turns itself into a mockery, and worse, a danger to the field (44). Chanan does not chide these filmmakers, but instead uses this story to make his point about the danger of viewing truth telling and relativism in dichotomy. Relativism is simply the consideration of all possibilities for truth. While radical relativism poses an ethical danger to philosophers, the relativism of film serves a purpose because it makes possible the consideration of multiple subjectivities. The hand of the narrator shows when multiple subjectivities are considered, and the camera becomes, according to Chanan, a machine of objectivity.
As Mrs. Caudill states in Barret's documentary, Stranger with a Camera, "The camera never lies. But it never tells the whole truth" (2001). Further, while the image may have indexical/veridical qualities, the graphic image "evokes a host of secondary meanings"(Chanan p. 52)..
DeleteThis excerpt from Chanan's book takes on the intersection of the real and fiction aspects of documentary. This is already something we have discussed in class and like many other facets of documentary we have talked about the lines between the real and fiction in documentary are kind of blurred. Chanan takes the position that documentarians should be allowed to kind of manipulate truth as long as it is known to the viewer that something is being manipulated. This then raises the question of how transparent the documentarian must be because there are probably nuances that documentarians can argue to say that they were transparent when really, in the eyes of the public, it is not readily transparent that something was being manipulated. I think this really comes down to the fact that the viewer must view documentary, as well as all other forms of media and academia, with their own critical lens to determine what is reality and what is fiction in documentaries. This then does create a problem when looking at different kinds of viewers, because while the educated viewer may have more background information on subjects and be able to research and form their own opinions, the majority of the public in general may not be able to do this.
ReplyDeleteI really found interesting and surprising the fact that Chanan takes on an almost Kantian view of the "real" in documentary. My favorite sentence in this article is "By the time we have described the real it has moved on fractionally and we must follow it across the diminishing gap without ever seizing it." I feel like Chanan is admitting that documentary films can never be an exact representation of the real and that as viewers we must accept this. But by following the Kantian logic this is based off of we can never fully know the reality of anything so we "must abandon it as 'full presence.'
If doc is never a representation of the real, then what is it? It's certainly not reality. In fact, using a previous example from "The intimacy of strangers" we can know that what we see in the video is not the actual people but representations of them. There is an indexical/veridical quality to the images we see. How the audience interprets them is open to a host of meanings, despite the authors/producers best intentions.
DeleteChanan’s piece mainly focuses on documentary film images and the role that censorship, power and other societal structures play in the semiotics of documentary film. Chanan highlights how media regulation greatly influences the work of documentaries and this occurs not only in totalitarian societies but also in democratic ones. Chanan offers numerous examples of this censorship and regulation. He highlights an example of a French film that was banned because of its criticism of colonialism. Chanan notes that if these colonial criticisms were demonstrated in an academic journal they would not have been censored. However film was a type of outlet that was more widely circulated and therefore could reach the “uneducated.” This implies that the uneducated are more susceptible to persuasion. Chanan points out that documentary film is often times seen as a threat to power and system of hegemony. I found surprising the amount of power and influence that indirect government control and economic pressures had on documentary film. At one point Chanan offers an example of a documentary film director who stated that, “if we had indulged in real social criticism to any extent, we would immediately have been without sponsorship and our whole experiment, which was artistically a fine one, would have finished… so we compromised (pg.40). This illustrates how documentary images are shaped by numerous external sources simultaneously at play. This is particularly surprising because it raises so many questions regarding how much control documentary film makers ultimately have in making a documentary film.
ReplyDeleteIssues that threaten power, are difficult to avoid. Even if a filmmaker determine to fund the entire project, the power brokers who impact distribution, publicity and audiences may think differently.
DeleteChanan's main purpose in writing this piece was to highlight the element of truth in documentary film, and its relation to censorship, governments, media control, and even the viewers. There were many parts to this article that struck me as being quite surprising, with most of them pertaining to censorship and the amount of time and effort it took in order to make censorship illegal in various countries, but I must cite Chanan's example of the French documentary that was critical of colonialism as the most profound. Chanan's notion that the material contained within said documentary would have been fine in an academic journal, yet was censored for being in documentary film format (a medium more accessible to the "uneducated") amazed me.
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