TMA 680: Goals for the Course

Very generally, my goals in this class align with what everyone else wants to learn about, based on what we discussed yesterday: technical aspects of filming, including editing, sound, lenses, design language, etc.  Becoming proficient (to the degree possible during a 6-week term) in Adobe Premiere will be the means by which I accomplish some of these technical goals.  The Doc Mode activities we did last term in TMA 668 were very helpful in shaping my approach to filming and editing; with that said, my videos were pretty obviously made by an amateur.  My biggest struggle with filming last semester was in not knowing how to carry out some of the ideas I had.  Part of that might have been due to grandiose, un-film-able ideas that just didn’t work in the time frame we had, but I think a lot of it was due to my lack of technical expertise. 

To what end do I want to acquire/use these skills?  Personally, I find a lot of value in using these tools to document my own life and that of my family.  With regard to teaching, this class is just what I need to develop certain curriculum for my English and film classes.  Creating filming assignments with students in mind (and then performing those assignments myself) will essentially take care of my lesson planning for my Film Studies class, which I’ll be teaching for the first time this fall.  The class is going to revolve around film language and its relation to literature (since it counts as an English elective).  My plan is for students to do three projects—draft a storyboard, write a screenplay, and create a film—and at the end of the semester they’ll choose whichever of those three best fits their learning styles/preferences and delve deeper into it for a final project.  I want my students to be able to see the relationship between those three aspects of making a film (along with others), but first, I need to better see how all of these pieces fit together.  If I can finish this term with these projects planned—after finding out what works and what doesn’t work—I’ll consider my goals met. 

Final Project

When brainstorming ideas that would become Cover Band, I wanted to be less authoritative and subjective than I was in the previous Doc Mode assignment (which utilized the Autobiographical Mode) and give more voice to the other subjects involved.  The result is a short film that toes the line between Participatory and Observational documentary. 

According to Fox, “the participatory mode emphasizes the relationship between producer and subject,” the former being “seen and/or heard” (233).  The subject also “has some agency in shaping the course of the project; thus, if the power imbalance is not eliminated, this mode at least calls attention to it and the subjective positioning of the maker.”  Nichols describes the Participatory Mode thusly: “What happens in front of the camera becomes an index of the nature of the interaction between filmmaker and subject.  This mode inflects the ‘I speak about them to you’ formulation into something that is often closer to ‘I speak with them for us (me and you)’ as the filmmaker’s interactions give us a distinctive window onto a particular portion of our world” (179, 180). 

On the other hand, “in the observational mode, the camera ‘watches’ subjects; their uninterrupted actions and interactions are the focus.  The subject is not an active agent in his or her representation, but rather is documented and watched” (Fox 232).  “Many filmmakers [choose] to abandon all of the forms of control over the staging, arrangement, or composition of a scene made possible by the poetic and expository modes.  Instead, they [choose] to observe lived experience spontaneously” (Nichols 172). 

Despite any apparent incongruities in these two modes, they converge in the masked interview, which Nichols describes as a construct that allows the filmmaker to give the appearance of “the immediate, intimate, and personal as it occurs” (177).  He continues: “In this case the filmmaker works in a more participatory way with his subjects to establish the general subject of a scene and then films it in an observational manner.”  I used masked interviews to give shape to the archival footage I included and to connect it to the recent show the band played.  By allowing each member of the band to speak, I hoped to give the impression of an “I-speak-with-them-for-us” feel.  In fact, I wanted my involvement in the production (the “I”) to be downplayed as much as possible—hence the lack of any voiceover.  True, the title card says my name, but I did not want my interviews to take precedence over anyone else’s interviews (I do not know whether I was able to accomplish that, considering the film starts and ends with me). 

The footage that is most strongly observational is of the concerts.  The first concert shown took place in early 2006, and to be honest, I am not even sure who (possibly plural) recorded it.  While the quality of it is seriously lacking (partly due to our lighting), the cameraman probably did a better job of unobtrusively recording the event than in any other concert footage we have.  For one, we see the crowd.  It helps that we have a crowd at that show, but in watching this footage, we really get a sense of the portability of the camera, which is more stationary in both the footage of the 90s show and the show from last week.  In the former, I did not know we were being filmed, at least not until the next week, when someone forwarded me Youtube links to a few of the songs we played.  I do not believe the camera’s presence in last week’s show influenced our performance—I am always that stiff when I play.

As I have implied, one concern of mine while making this film is representation/indexicality of footage.  With the broad topic of the documentary idea in mind, I wanted to create something that represented not just my memory of an event but the memories of the other participants.  Recognizing the imbalance of power in this production, I made it a point to include others’ memories of certain shows as well as their thoughts on what it is like to play in a cover band.  Unfortunately, I was not able to include the voices of all those involved in past cover band shows.  I would have liked to include Bronco recounting his memories of playing fake guitar; I would have liked to include parts of the first cover show that didn’t make the cut.  More background information surely would have enriched the story of Darc Kontinent, and nothing was really said about any of the shows we did as Roy’s House Band (including the part they played in Rusty’s marriage).  Knowing that I would be speaking for others who would not be given the opportunity to speak for themselves (due to time constraints), I wanted to create something containing a high degree of indexicality; in other words, when anyone other than me who was involved in these shows sees Cover Band, I would like them to think, “that’s just how I remembered that event” or “that’s exactly what it’s like to play in a cover band.”   

Doc Mode Activity 3: Autobiographical Mode

My Doc Mode Activity #3—titled “Roy’s House Band”—utilizes the Autobiographical mode of documentary in several ways.  First, I appear in front of the camera and disclose my involvement in the subject of the film.  While I don’t exactly bare my personal or emotional self (yet), I expose my subpar guitar playing.  The means by which I made this is also similar to other Autobiographical documentarians, who, according to Fox, “dismantle notions of documentary production as an endeavor requiring access to specialized equipment and extensive financial support, instead redefining the process as one of maximizing whatever tools are at one’s disposal and remembering that the personal can be both engaging and politically powerful route to documentary representation” (44). 

Admittedly, my documentary has no political pretensions, nor is it necessarily engaging to anyone outside of the band or our families.  That’s because it is incomplete at this point (anyone that watches until the end of the 7:30 will notice that Gavin’s interview ends without any real closure in the video as a whole).  My intention for this project is to utilize the Essayistic Mode (encompassing the Autobiographical) to tell a story about performing in front of people.  What is it that entices people to play music publicly (and in my case, play music that is not my own)? 

I categorize what I have so far as “Autobiographical” simply because I include the personal but have yet to integrate a historical or social aspect to my story (which may take quite a long time to put together).  At its current state, the video closes the gap between photographer and subject; however, it does not yet close the “space between filmmaker and audience” (Fox 41).  I need to make some broader strokes, implicating others in the need to perform, before this becomes anything but self-indulgent. 

Online Response #8: The Essayistic Mode

Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster perfectly captures Fox’s description of the Essayistic mode as it “[integrates] personal experience, history, and social critique with taut, kinetic progression toward a synthesizing claim” (44).  It is in the claim (begin watching at 7:00) that Bell interweaves his own family’s experience with steroids with news and entertainment media that displays mixed messages of winning at all costs yet doing so without cheating.  Says Bell, as he watches his completely juiced brother win another weightlifting contest: “I was raised to believe that cheaters never prosper, but in America it seems like cheaters always prosper.”  Cut to a clip of George W. Bush discouraging the shortcut that is steroid use and instead promoting the virtues of hard work (despite an arguable awareness of rampant steroid use in his own locker room when he owned the Texas Rangers).  Bell continues: “There is a clash in America between doing the right thing and being the best.”  Cut to an excerpt from Patton, mixed with actuality footage of Carl Lewis, Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, and Barry Bonds.  Back to Bell: “In a culture where second place is the first loser (quick shot of Al Gore), the real heroes are the ones who win at all costs (Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, Hulk Hogan, and, finally, Arnold Schwartzenegger in his inaugural address as governor of California).  Bell closes like so: “This is America.  We are the greatest country in the world.  You could call us a nation on steroids.  But what are those long-term side effects?  For me and my brothers, steroids are not the problem.  They’re just another side effect of being American.”   

The integration of personal experience, history, and social critique progressing towards a synthesizing claim is equally apparent in Ross McElwee’s Six O’Clock News.  The personal is revealed in the film’s opening shot: his first child has just been born, and he is concerned about keeping him safe in an increasingly dangerous world.  The historical and societal aspects of the film frame his question.  In his own words, McElwee imagined “he would go out and investigate how other people had dealt with personal tragedy.”  Those to be interviewed were the victims seen on the six o’clock news, or at least those whose story struck a nerve with him.  More so than Bell in Bigger, Stronger, Faster, McElwee tends to wander into “a tangentially related concept, personal anecdote, or new approach, providing a serpentine, unexpected, and present tense realness to the journey” (44), which is not a bad thing.  In fact, Steve Johnson of The Chicago Tribune characterizes the effectiveness of McElwee’s approach in a review: “Ross McElwee's new film is a deceptive little instrument. It seems slack, intimate and good natured, but its maker's puzzled narration and the film's haphazard journey obscure an editing that is military bed sheet taut in service to an elegant structure and ambitious theme.”

Online Response #7: The Autobiographical Mode

“This film is a start for me on the journey to understand who my dad is and why he’s done the things he has.  And through the process, I hope to better understand myself,” says Scott Christopherson at the beginning of Only the Pizza Man Knows.  The title, one learns, alludes to Christopherson’s failure to meet the goal of the film, at least concerning his father.  He never truly finds out why his father has managed money poorly or what led to his nervous breakdown.  As he reflects on his experience creating the documentary, though, it is evident that he is satisfied with his personal goal: “I think I’m clear about what I am;” “I may never understand the challenges and trials life can bring, but I think I’m better prepared to take responsibilities for them.”  This statement of self-reflexivity demonstrates Only the Pizza Man’s use of critical rhetoric, which, according to Nichols, “[stresses] the ambiguous motives and uncertain impulses that surround human action” (108). 

Christopherson, admitting he still doesn't have all the answers he was looking for while editing Only the Pizza Man Knows

The motives that govern human action always circle back to the filmmaker in the Autobiographical mode of documentary.  For Christopherson, it’s a matter of looking at his (then) current practices and how they are possibly shaping him to become like his father—something he hopes to avoid, despite his newfound appreciation for his father.  In Convert, the crux of the story isn’t so much about his subjects’ decisions to leave the church (or remain in it in a very conflicted state) as it is about Christopherson’s role in their conversion and whether he caused more harm than good.  Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street, on one level, is the story of one woman’s struggle through an unhappy marriage; however, regarding ambiguous motives of human action, it is more a story about digging into one’s family history at the risk of discovering secrets that might better be left hidden (contrast this with Berliner’s Nobody’s Business in which he explicitly asks his father to open up about the events that led to his parents’ divorce).  Should Block read his mother’s journals or not?  That her story has already been (literally) written makes the conflict primarily his.  In Tajiri’s History and Memory the history of Japanese-American internment during WWII is centered around the filmmaker’s struggle to remember (and, consequently, preserve) an event that she did not experience herself. 

            The delicate nature of “baring oneself to a public” (Fox 41) invites questions about the appropriateness/ethics of the Autobiographical mode.  Why would someone want to air dirty laundry to those willing to watch?  As Fox explains, universals can be found in the personal, thus making the intensely individual story applicable to a larger audience: “At its best, the autobiographical mode not only closes the gap between photographer and subject but also the space between filmmaker and audience—brought together through a subjective familiarity and an invitation to know the ‘I’ behind the camera” (41).