DOCUMENTARY & EVERYDAY URBAN

LIFECLASS #5

GE3106 – DR. SHANNON WALSH

ASSIGNMENT 1FINAL GROUPS &WHAT TO EXPECT NEXT WEEK

CELL PHONE FILMS

Everything you learn on a phone, can be applied to video..

Step 1: Plan

Step 2: Shoot

Step 3: Edit

Step 4: Sound & Output

Step 5: Distribute

FIVE STEPS

TIPS, TECHNIQUES & SOFTWARE• Organizing

• Storytelling

• Access

• Pacing

• Visual Imagery

• Shot compositions

• Audio!

• Watch films

Cell Orientation – always in landscapeLightingAudioSteady

READINGSURBAN SELFPORTRAITSSelf-portrait, autobiography

Subjectivity, witnessing

SELF- PORTRAITAS SOCIO-POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY

ROGER & ME MICHAEL MOORE (1986)

“THE PUBLIC FACE OF NON-FICTION CINEMA”

• Close relationship with hometown of Flint, MI

• Guerrilla style interviews

• Ordinary citizen persona

• Personal witnessing + agit-prop

• Updating socio-political doc making

• Introduces self as character

CRITICISM

• Lack of structure

• Manipulation of chronology of events

• Failure to give coherent socio-political analysis

Bowling for Columbine (2002) – Academy Award

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) -- Palme d’Or

ROGER & ME

Era of Reganomics

• Life-long job security destroyed in US labour market

• Precarity & flexibility, short term contracts

• Without protection, class culture, or collective frameworks

“The solitude and isolation of the autobiographical self becomes a symptom of the social fragmentation characteristic of post-industrial capitalism”

USE OF HUMOR, IRONY & ARCHIVE IMAGES

Talking to everyday people:

Rhonda Britton who sells rabbits for meat

A metaphor for the fate of the working class?

Song “Wouldn’t it be Nice” mixed with the crisis on the cityscape

UNEMPLOYED VS. WORKING CLASS

Fahrenheit 9/11

Confronting upper classes’ lack of social conscience.

Bowling for Columbine

SELF- PORTRAITAS ESSAY FILM

OF TIME & THE CITY (2008)TERENCE DAVIES

EMOTIONAL ORDER, INTIMATE GEOGRAPHY

“We love the place we hate

then hate the place we love.

We leave the place we love

then spend a lifetime trying

to regain it.”

“Cinema is the only art form that can show the passage of time visually’

MEMORY “At the heart of this mediation on the city lies a tension, between urban change as a process that is brutal and unremitting, and the persistence of memory as something that is delicate and filamentary. We weave our memories into a palimpsest of dreams where time and place melt into each other. Memories become maps through places to which we can never return in a world that is changing all about us.” (Gandy 2009)

MUSIC

Popular songs ‘de-privatize his own feelings’… ‘to recreate a remembered past but also, simultaneously, to interrogate and deconstruct that past’.

(Everett, 2004: 167)

SANS SOLEILCHRIS MARKER (1983)"Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place”…

(And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place.)”

SELF- PORTRAITAS SELF-FICTION

MY WINNIPEGGUY MADDIN (2007)

THE CITY AS A TEXT TO BE DECODED

Maddin imitates, copies, & quotes a range of styles, from “German expressionism, Soviet montage, French surrealism, film noir, excessive melodrama, classic horror, trash cinema and even early musicals.”

Self-fiction allowing for a greater depiction of the filmmaker’s inner most worlds.

CITYSCAPE AS MINDSCAPEFantasy worlds, mixing truth and fiction, city-referent replaced by city-character.