21L.015
INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA STUDIES
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- "TELLING STORIES": FROM CINEMA-VERITE
TO MONDO VIDEO
- 10 April 1997
- Martin Roberts
- 2. THE VIDEO PANOPTICON: COPS
- Top
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- Bentham's Panopticon
- Cops vs. Aquí Agora
- complicity vs. extension
- no sensationalized commentary; only introductory/concluding voice-overs
of cops themselves > in control of interpretation as well
- only successful arrests are shown: no botched/failed interventions
- > anti-climactic > banality
- Ideology
- Entertainment
- Consolidation
- Deterrence
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- 1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF DOCUMENTARY
- Top
QUESTIONS
- What is (a) documentary?
- What is documentary for? Whom is it addressed to?
- What is the nature of authenticity in documentary?
- What is the relationship between fact and fiction, truth
and fabrication in a documentary?
- What is the relationship between documentary and legal and/or
ethical questions?
ANSWERS
- A documentary is defined less by what it is than by what it
does: i.e., not by being "non-fictional" as opposed to
"fictional" (many documentaries include staged footage).
- Rather than a genre, documentary may best be defined as a mode
of film-making, whose aim is that of documenting some aspect of the world,
often with the goal of serving as an agent of change (social, political,
etc.) in the world.
- CATEGORIES
- ethnographic (culture)
- historiographic (politics and society)
- ecological (nature)
- (industrial)
OVERVIEW
- Film
- Lumière shorts
- Flaherty, Nanook of the North
- Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
- Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will
- Grierson
- Direct Cinema: Leacock
- Cinéma-vérité /: Rouch, Chronicle of
a Summer (1960)
- Wiseman
- "Third Cinema"
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- Ecological Documentary
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- Télé-vérité
- The Loud Family (US)
- The Family (UK)
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- The Reality Effect
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- Reality TV
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- Home movies
- America's Funniest Home Videos
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- Staged documentary
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- 3. INTERROGATIONS: ERROL MORRIS'S INTERROTRON
STORIES
- Top
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- The Interrotron
- two-way mirrors and surveillance
- the trope of interrogation: police; courtroom; military (violence)
- scrutinizing of testimony (camera movt.)
- TV/Courtroom (cf. Court TV, court-room dramas)
- Direct address ("What do you think?")
- You, the jury: who's telling the truth?
- Camera as lie-detector? Bladerunner, Sex, Lies and Videotape,True
Lies, Secrets and Lies, Liar Liar...
Carnival
"Etymologists have argued at length about the origin of the word
carnival. Some claim a derivation from the phrase carne levare,
'the solace of the flesh'; others claim a relation with carne vale,
'a farewell to flesh'; yet others claim origins in the expression carne
aval, 'down with flesh!' It has been agreed virtually beyond doubt,
however, that the word originally derives from the phrase carnem levare,
'the putting away or removal of flesh' (as food) in the season immediately
preceding Lent, on the eve of Ash Wednesday."
-- Mikita Brottman, "Carnivalising the Taboo: The Mondo Film and
the Opened Body," CineAction 38 (September 1995), spec. issue
on "Murder In America:" 25-37
- the world turned upside down: the grotesque, death, laughter
- P.T. Barnum, Coney Island, Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museums
- Mondo movies
- National Inquirer / Weekly World News
- True Stories
- Interrotron Stories
- "Violent Death as a Leisure Pursuit
- There are, of course, a number of moral issues at stake here. Its voyeuristic
carnivalisation of violent and tragic deaths has driven the Mondo film
underground, to be anathemised by popular and 'art' film critics alike.
The presentation of violent deaths for public amusement is nothing new,
as any glance at the history of punishment will reveal, from Roman games
and 'satyr plays' to crucifixion, torture and public executions. However,
recent developments in the televisual media, by allowing us a permanent
public testament of all kinds of private tragedies, have placed the issue
in an entirely different arena. Video recording and personal VCR players
allow the viewer to experience death in private, again and again, at different
speeds, and from a variety of angles, exactly as it happened in reality.
Mondo is the most stigmatised of genres because it essentially makes the
violent death of the human body into a leisure pursuit" [Brottman,
33-34]
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- "Horror and Laughter
- Bakhtin points out that one of the most significant features of the
carnival is the way in which, at carnival, death becomes comic, as in the
Rabelaisian mocking of death. Rabelaisian carnival presents a number of
examples of the grotesque or clownish portrayal of death, and the
image of death itself takes on humorous aspects. ... Films like Death
Scenes and The Killing of America help us to understand how
cerain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to the reflex
of laughter. Folkloric laughter liberates the consciousness from the confines
of its own discourse, and hence creates freedom. 'Seriousness burdens us
with hopeless situations, but laughter lifts us above them and liberates
us from them. Laughter does not encumber man, it liberates him' [Bakhtin]"
[Brottman, 35-36]
mroberts@mit.edu