Week 10: Things to consider

Week 10: Things to consider

Below are some quotations from the Godmilow & Morris interviews to which to respond.  Both of them are highly provocative interviews, so there are a lot of quotations and a lot to talk about!

Godmilow & Shapiro, ‘How real is the reality in documentary film?’

•  Do you agree with Godmilow that ‘to change peoples’ minds or ways of seeing is always there at the basis of all non-fiction’ (82)?

•  Godmilow claims that documentaries should ‘put their materials and techniques in the service of ideas not in the service of sentiment or compassion-producing identification’ (83).  Why does she say this?  Doesn’t the latter description sound a lot like Dear Zachary?

•  Godmilow claims that ‘The real contract, the more hidden one, enables the viewer to feel: “thank God that's not me”’ (83).  Do you think that this is an accurate depiction of the contract between most documentaries and their viewers?  If so, is it a problematic one?

•  ‘The documentary films that I most respect don't come to closure and don’t produce audiences of compassionate spectators of the dilemmas of others.  They don’t produce identification with heroics or sympathy for victims, both of which are dominant strains in the American documentary tradition.’  (85)

•  ‘Today, you can’t get a feature documentary about the cartoonist, R. Crumb, distributed if it simply examines Crumb’s art.  You have to psychologize the artist and visit with the bizarrely distorted members of his family “to understand” what his art is all about… that’s what makes Crumb sexy, and a minor box-office hit.  In moments like the present when everybody is quite fearful of social disorder, it is sensational stories about deranged parents who keep their children tied to a chair in a basement for seven years that are consumable.’ (87)

•  ‘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.’ (87)

•  ‘Even in the first scrap of motion picture film ever shot – Lumiere’s Workers Leaving the Factory, a forty-five-second “documentary” shot of about 100 workers leaving his family plant in 1895 – you can see clearly that Lumiere had his workers collect just inside the factory gates and wait there until he got his camera rolling. It's also pretty clear that he had instructed the workers not to acknowledge the camera, to just keep walking past it as if it wasn't there.’ (92)

•  ‘Now here [The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl] is a classic case where oral history produces bad historical documentary, and where reenactment would have made a much more interesting and honest piece of history.’ (98)

Errol Morris (Cunningham, Art of the Documentary)

•  ‘Morris has taken the uninspired talking-head interview and transformed it.’ (48)  ‘“It’s the difference between faux first-person and the true first-person,” says Morris.  “The Interrotron inaugurates the birth of true first-person cinema”’ (49).

•  (Morris:) ‘When The Thin Blue Line came out, the use of reenactments was considered heretical’ (50).

•  ‘The Thin Blue Line is unusual.  It may even be unique.  It’s not telling the story about a murder case, it’s not about an investigation.  It is an investigation!’ (52)

•  ‘Interviews often take the form of a set of questions that people ask, and they already know the answers that they’re looking for.  They are not investigative.  And I try very, very hard t0 make the interviews that I do something other than about the things that I want to hear, or expect t0 hear, or think I’m going to hear.’  (53)

•  ‘I’ve been accused of having created reality television with [The Thin Blue Line]…  What’s interesting is, in The Thin Blue Line the reenactments are never purported to show you what really happened.  They weren’t a way of illustrating reality.  They were telling you something quite different: that reality often is ineluctable.  That it’s very hard to grab ahold of.’  (56)

•  ‘The Thin Blue Line is a reminder – and I like it as such – it’s a reminder that the claims of cinema verité are spurious.’

‘Why?’

‘It shows that style does not guarantee truth.

‘…  Gates of Heaven was very much a reaction to verité…  [I thought] instead of not staging anything, I’ll stage everything!

‘…  Style is not truth.  Just because you pick a certain style does not mean that you somehow have solved the Cartesian riddle of what’s out there.’  (57-8)

•  ‘I believe the movie [The Fog of War] was fair to him [Robert McNamara].  Maybe it didn't describe him, in every way, the way he wanted to be described.  But the movie was not unfair, and he realizes that…  By the very nature that it does involve one man, I saw the movie as a collaboration.  Not that I allowed him to completely push me around, but that somehow I was trying not to create a brief against him for some imagined war crimes tribunal, but I was trying to uncover how he saw the world.’  (62)

•  Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control ‘took literally years to edit and, at one point I gave up on it, completely, because I just could not edit it!…  the presumption with every single film that I’ve made is that it’s going to be in theaters.  And, given that fact, it’s essential that it works for people who are actually paying money to see it, actually going to see it in a theater.’  (65, 68)

•  ‘I’m very suspicious of documentaries that you can describe with a topic sentence’ (69).

•  ‘To me, whether it’s a feature-length film or it’s a 30-second commercial, you are trying to create a kind of mental landscape, a fantasy world’  (74).