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.”