Assignments for CINE540 Documentary Form

Assignment One:

First paper on the assigned question/prompt – 8 to 10 pages.

1. Bill Nichols says that, “Documentary form may also incorporate concepts of character development and subjectivity, continuity or montage editing, and the invocation of off-screen space. Like fiction, documentary can also suggest that its perceptions and values belong to its characters, or adhere to the historical world itself: the film merely reveals what we could have seen around us had we, too, looked with a patient, discerning eye.”1
1. How do these narrative film conventions (off-screen space, character, etc.) potentially jeopardize documentary “reality”?
2. In the selected clip from Iraq in Fragments (James Longley, 2006) utilize narrative film conventions?
3. Compare the selected clip from Iraq in Fragments to the selected clip from Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) – what is the possible implications/connotations here? And does invocation of a narrative film change the content of the non-fiction film Iraq in Fragments.

2. Roland Barthes says that the historian “intends to ‘absent himself’[sic],”2 and by doing such conveys a sense of “objectivity.” Discuss Barthes’s ideas regarding historical discourse and the reality effect in relation to The Road to Guantánamo (Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom, 2006).
1. What are the implications of the historian “absenting themselves”? And as the filmmaker-cum-historian do the filmmakers “absent themselves”?
2. Can we draw any parallels here to what we sometimes call “Hollywood” or “Invisible Style”?
3. Does The Road to Guantánamo “tell itself”?
4. Documentaries (depending on their subject matter and form) might in some fashion be considered a “form of historical discourse” – what sort of problems might we encounter if a documentary is presented analogously to traditional historical discourse?
5. What problems might we face if a documentary appears to “tell itself”?
6. What happens if the documentary replicates the “invisible style”?

3. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight set out to establish a distinction between drama-documentary and mock-documentaries. How might we situate Peter Watkins’s work Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971) within these sub-genres of documentary?

Drama-documentary	Mock-documentary
Limited or no critique of factual discourse	Critique of factual discourse
Doesn’t encourage reflexivity (w/in audience)	Latent reflexivity (audience reception)
Closer to the documentary genre – it conceals	Closer to the documentary genre – it reveals

1. What is meant by “latent reflexivity”?
2. Roscoe and Hight observe that the closer to documentary mock-documentaries get “the greater is the subversion or deconstruction of the relationship between documentary aesthetics and factual discourse.”3 Does Watkins’s work sit closer to drama-documentary or mock-documentary?

1 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 6.

2 Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 131.

3 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, “A Cousin for the Drama-documentary: Situating the Mock-documentary,” in Faking It: mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2001), 53.

Assignment Two:

Second paper on the assigned question/prompt – 8 to 10 pages. Select one of the prompts below.

1. Bill Nichols states that: “The presence (and absence) of the filmmaker in the image, in off-screen space, in the acoustic folds of voice-on and voice-off, in the titles and graphics constitutes an ethics, and a politics, of considerable importance to the viewer.”1 There is a distinct difference between the presence/absence of Hara in Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974, (Kazuo Hara, 1974 [Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974]) and Yuki Yukite shingun (Kazuo Hara, 1987 [The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On]) – compare the use of spatial arrangements in these films:
1. In The Emperor’s Naked Army Hara is in close proximity to real violence, but notably doesn’t step in:

• What are the ethical implications here?
• What does this say about the space that is shared with the characters?

2. In Extreme Private Eros Hara is in close proximity (and sometimes even within the visible frame) what’s the difference here relative to The Emperor’s Naked Army?

• What are the ethical implications here?
• What does this say about the space that is shared with the characters?

3. Space – the distance between the camera (crew) and the subject – conveys information about the relationship between filmmaker and subject. For instance “distance suggests a self-conscious or queasy intrusiveness …” 2 How does space generate meaning in Hara’s films?

2. Towards the beginning of Nicholas de Villiers’s article, “How Much Does It Cost for Cinema to Tell the Truth of Sex? Cinéma Vérité and Sexography,” he posits a series of questions: “how does realist, documentary and cinema vérité filmmaking modulate and complicate the situation of speaking about sex with an eye to the truth? How is desire implicated in looking and listening to a subject talk about sex? Or, to put it in a more Foucauldian way, how does the cinema participate in a new spiral of power and pleasure?” 3 Discuss this power/knowledge dynamic in relation to the selected clips from Not Angels but Angels (Wiktor Grodecki, 1994), and Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (Gough Lewis, 2002)

1. Do these films evoke desire, or does it reveal ‘truth’? Or do they do both?
2. Is our desire implicated? Is the filmmaker’s desire implicated?
3. What sort of power relationship is established between filmmaker and subject, between spectator and subject?

3. Implicitly informed by Michel Foucault no doubt, Bill Nichols notes that (in documentary film, as elsewhere) representations of the body tend to manifest as prophylactic managements of the body. “The body is the battle site of contending values and their representation. Images of the stable, fixed, and secure serve as a kind of talisman, warding off the mutable, vulnerable, and malleable qualities of the body.” 4 Continuing with this discussion of how the representations of bodies might generate meaning, he establishes a tri-axis formation – 1) narrative, 2) indexical, and 3) mythical – where “the body gains full dimensionality as a socially meaningful entity.”5 Discuss this in relation to the selected clip from Good-bye CP.
   1. Does the clip work against this policing of the body, or is it complicit?
   2. Who is served by representations of the disabled body/mind? The disabled subject or the (able-bodied?) spectator?
   3. Does any of the screened material construct a socially meaningful entity?
4. In both Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1988) and Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, (Isaac Julien, 1996) looking is very important, if not central to the subject of the documentary narrative. Compare the function of “looking” in these films.

1. How does Julien deal with the subject of looking in the form of the documentary?
2. In Fanon the subject of looking largely speaks to power relations between the colonizer’s look and the colonized who is to-be-looked-at. How does Julien’s film deal with this power dynamic? Does he empower the colonized subject?
3. In Looking for Langston looking largely addresses questions of desire and the gaze. How does the film evoke “looking” in the form of the film?
4. Bill Nichols discusses the concept of excess, which by its very definition “forfeits any claim to autonomy” and exists only as contingent to “a dominant system.” 6 Nichols posits that “history” is the “excess” of documentary film. First, what do you suppose Nichols means here? How is history the excess of documentary film?

1. By this standard how might we assess Péter Forgács’s film Free Fall, (1997)? Are they “excessive” in the sense that they touch what typically falls outside the parameters of documentary film?
2. Nichols writes: “Always referred to but never captured, history, as excess, rebukes those laws set to contain it; it contests, qualifies, resists, and refuses them.” Does Forgács buck the trend; does he some how manage to “capture” excess here?
1. In Trinh T. Minh-ha’s chapter, “Totalizing Quest for Meaning,” she outlines some of the cinematic forms that lend the currency of “reality” to film:

• Long takes
• Wide angle
• Hand-held camera (i.e., an independent free-moving camera)

She specifically states, “Real time is thought to be more ‘truthful’ than filmic time, hence the long take … and minimal or no editing” are given preference. Close-ups are condemned for being “partial” (in all senses of the word) and the wide angle shot is perceived as “more objective because it includes more in the frame,” capturing events in context. Hand-held cameras are also given preference because they can be “integrated into the milieu,” while permitting the filmmaker to avail him/herself of the potential of penetrating into worlds. 7 Given these observations, how does Reassemblage respond to these tropes of the (ethnographic) documentary form?

1. In what ways does Reassemablage confirm the ‘reality’ of what is being shown?
2. In what ways does Reassemblage question the ‘reality’ of what is being shown?
3. In what ways does Reassemblage use the conventions of ‘reality,’ only to undermine the whole convention?
4. If it is useful to your discussion, consider comparing the selected clip from Reassemblage to Powaqqatsi; does the latter film present the same sort of “metacommentary” that is made evident in Reassemblage?

1 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 77.

2 Nichols, 94.

3 Nicholas de Villiers, “How Much Does It Cost for Cinema to Tell the Truth of Sex? Cinéma Vérité and Sexography,” Sexualities vol. 10, no. 3 (2007), 342.

4 Nichols, 238.

5 Nichols, 243.

6 Jonathan Kahana, “Cinema and the Ethics of Listening: Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon,” Film Quarterly vol. 59, no. 2 (Winter 2005-2006), 24.

7 Nichols, 142.

8 Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 34.

Assignment Three:

There are two parts to this Assignment:

Part 1: Write a research paper (5 pages) that supports/contextualizes your treatment/script (part two). Give particular attention to the form. How does your particular form alter/change/impact the content? What mode(s) will you employ? Contextualize your treatment using scholarly references. It also might be advantageous to reference other films (i.e., specific cinematic strategies) that might be in some way comparable to your proposed strategy.

Part 2: Using the provided source material create a written treatment/script for a documentary. Use the provided template to create a script for your selected source material. There are two columns – one for text/dialogue, and another for visual material. Feel free to edit the original source material (e.g., re-order the text/dialogue, cut text/dialogue out, add voice-over, add “expert” testimony, add archival material), feel free to manipulate the material any way.

Source material:

1. Segment from Barefoot Gen
2. Segment from Maus (see electronic reserves)
3. Segment from On Orientalism: Edward Said
4. Segment from Recovering Reality: A Conversation with Errol Morris
5. Segment from Susan Boyle - Singer - Britains Got Talent 2009
6. Segment from Miss America 2009 - taken from NBC's The Today Show

EXAMPLE:

• Original Source Material Barefoot Gen
• Part One - Research
• Part Two - Treatment