NOTES from the FIELD

These "Notes from the Field" offer many interesting reflections on the creation of myths through the craft of filmmaking. I find the relationship of what is left on the editing floor can sometimes be as interesting or even more interesting than what goes into a final cut.
Sometimes this relationship can be revealed creating new myths surrounding the medium. Take "chronicles of a summer" by jean rouch. By showing the documentary to its subject they change this relationship. In essence the short film “sociedad anonima” we as filmmakers took advantage of this relationship by painstaking taking the time to structure the film around this dynamic. So then a film about the “homeless” was flip on its head to raise the question of a deeper truth about the meaning of the word non-fiction in the very medium that pretends to be this: documentary.

There is also the relationship between the author and subject that is very complex. I like the way Jon Marshall talks about the camera being a window. I offer the film Agua Sobre Puente as three little windows to a particular “imagined” reality.

http://current.com/items/88847154_agua_sobre_puente

The 'observer effect' is always a problem with any kind of ethnography, film or otherwise. People are always going to act differently if different people are around. Probably true of Jane Goodall too.

George Harrison brought in Billy Preston during the filming of Let It Be just so 'the boys' would behave themselves in front of company. And it worked.

But what are your options with small groups that are likely to be infected by the bigger world soon anyway? Let them slip quietly into the darkness, or film them while you can?

If only we could get people to stop paying attention to Paris Hilton maybe we could get the reverse effect and she might have a chance to become a real person.

Quite good, i dare say excellent old chap. i'm suddenly overcome with the urge to buy a range rover and some khaki shorts. i don't think the camera or the filmers affect the people enough to say it isn't an accurate rep. of their lives or culture. just watch out for hams...

An impressively thorough examination of the complexities of thinking about how nonfiction films capture anthropological reality--or if they really can do so--and what the reality is that we want to capture. Equally impressive is the way this film manages to make a philosophic dialectic crack along at the pace of a thriller. A masterful effort.... As to the questions explored here, it is sometimes interesting to consider the value that ancient and traditional people placed on news--story-telling--which seemed to have two main functions, prediction and gossip. Of the two, history prizes the latter more. For example, there's Joseph interpreting the Pharoah's dream to predict seven bountiful years followed by seven years of starvation, which was extremely important to the Egyptian people--putting aside whether or not you believe this actually happened--but, if it weren't in the Bible, of little interest to us now because few of us wake up worrying over ancient famines. On the other hand, gossip about the ego problems of those guys chopping one another with axes in The Illiad [ancient Greece's rich and famous] continues to be valued for the understanding it brings us of universal issues in human nature. So then, going back to "NOTES from the FIELD," if anthropological film-making is gossip--about the human condition--then Laura Ling with 200 guys with no pants on in Mato Grosso Province in "A Day with the Tribe" is only worth paying attention to if it reveals more psychological insights than, say, news of the legal problems of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. But if Laura were actually helping you look forward, at the stresses on the Amazon Forest, then if things start to go down as she indicated, you'll say, "oh, I understand what's happening and why, Laura called that one correctly." And in Current's Vanguard Journalism department we tend toward this predictive function of news--giving the public a heads up--because we think it provides society with an immediate, necessary value that they're not getting elsewhere on television... even if later, history won't value our efforts as much as if we'd told tales of upheaval among celebrities.

It was so interesting to hear these filmmakers talk about their contact and filming of all these isolated, yet dying cultures. And I loved the footage of the indigenous man in New Guinea who was given a photograph of himself for the first time and wore it on his forehead. "Friends greeted him by examining his forehead." It doesn't get much better than that.

really interesting.