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). 

Doc Mode Activity 2: Performative Mode

During the last week of school, I gave my students an assignment to create a short, flash fiction-type story with a clear conflict (or conflicts), with one condition: it had to be set entirely in the classroom because we were going to film it (logistically, it afforded us enough time to shoot sufficient footage for a 2-minute movie, and it also narrowed the students' scope considerably).  I gave each student a 12-panel storyboard and one and a half class periods to finish it; at the end of that time, each class voted on the storyboard they would most like to film. 

Though the results for each class vary greatly, each movie fits nicely into the Performative mode of documentary.  I gave students a general direction to go, but they came up with the conflict they wanted to enact or perform.  With the help of their storyboard, they filmed everything while I stayed in the background and observed.  My only involvement in this movie was a quick edit of the footage due to a lack of time remaining in the school year.

The movie above has a fairly simple storyline: with the teacher absent in the classroom, a bored Student A wads up his assignment and throws it at Student B.  Student B tries to retaliate, but instead of connecting with Student A, he accidentally hits Student C.  Student C does the same thing, hitting a sleeping Student D, who, now awakened, has no idea where this paper ball came from.  He throws it at Student E, which incites a class-wide paper fight.  When the teacher finally comes back in the classroom, he is incredulous about what is happening; after a short pause when the whole class is figuring out how much trouble they are in, a student throws his paper ball at the teacher, setting off a firestorm of paper-throwing. 

As described by Fox, the students in this video “are not representing [selves], but rather [are] performing a concept, event, or identity” (40).  They are social actors, “trying on and inhabiting personas not their own” (39).  The concept they are performing is familiar to any teacher: fear over what is happening when he or she is not present in the classroom.  Teachers are discouraged from leaving their classes alone and unsupervised, but circumstances make situations like this inevitable—a teacher may have to step outside of the classroom to speak to a parent, go to a meeting, or use the restroom.  In most cases, they do not return to a classroom like this.  Even in the best classes, though, one gets the feeling that something was going on during that few-minute interval.   

The featured students in this movie were certainly performing an identity not their own.  There are students in this class who would start a paper fight, but they were not performing this role here.  Because of the limitations I established—the story had to take place in a classroom, and we only had one class period to film it—students came up with a realistic hypothetical of what could happen in circumstances they face almost daily. 

Online Response #6: The Reflexive Mode

Chronicle of a Summer is at its most reflexive in the last ten minutes of the film as Rouch and Morin have a discussion with their subjects, who have just seen themselves on film.  Says Rouch: “You’ve just seen yourself on screen.  Edgar and I would like your opinion.” 

            While the cast has trouble agreeing on anything, their responses point towards an understanding of the constructed nature of documentary.  Speaking of the discussion between Angelo and Landry, one subject says, “It’s all unnatural, it’s completely phony.”  Another subject says of the entire film, “Looking at it, I found the film extremely painful.  When it’s not totally boring, it’s at the cost of total decency.”  Mary-Lou adds, “In order to get a sparkle of truth, the character has to be alone and on the verge of breaking down”—a reference, most likely, to her appearances they chose to put in the film. 

            In their argument of what (or what’s not) true, the subjects of Chronicle of a Summer admit to a feeling of alienation in seeing the way they are presented on screen.  The ending, in turn, has an alienating effect on the audience, at least in the sense that their understanding of the way things are is upended as soon as the subjects begin to question their representation and the film as a whole.  Nichols explains the intentionality of alienation in the Reflexive mode, as it “separates us from prevailing assumptions” (199).  It “[induces] an ‘aha!’ effect, where we grasp a principle or structure at work that helps account for how we understand and represent the world” (199). 

            With a little editing, Chronicle of a Summer very well could have turned out as a Participatory doc.  That the majority of the film appears as it does—a documentary belonging to a more recognizable mode—invites the audience to consider what subjects of other documentaries would say about the way they are presented if given the chance.   For example, what would Paul from Salesman say about his scenes in the film?  What opinion would any characters from Harlan County USA have of their portrayal, be they strikers, union brass, or corporate men? 

            In Chronicle of a Summer, like other Reflexive documentaries, “it is only as the film unfolds” that we notice the jarring techniques that produce alienation effects (198, 199).  Similarly in Land without Bread, it is only after the accumulation of insults dealt by the narrator that the audience realizes the film is inviting them to question elements, such as the objective Voice-of-God narration, of the Expository mode.  The focus on formal reflexivity—as seen in all of the Reflexive docs we have watched in class—is subtler than a purely political reflexive performance.  Though belonging to a different medium—theater—Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror begs us to question our assumptions about race, as she performs blackness and Jewishness.  Its alienating effect is apparent from the beginning.  For another example of outright alienation as a means of questioning our assumptions, see Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing.

Online Response #5: The Participatory Mode

Nichols and Barnouw agree on some commonalities of the Participatory mode.  Says Nichols: “If there is a truth here it is the truth of a form of interaction that would not exist were it not for the camera.  In this sense it is the opposite of the observational premise that what we see is what we would have seen had we been there” (184).  Using different terminology, Barnouw explains the difference between direct cinema and cinema verite (espoused by Rouch), the former more associated with the Observational mode, the latter with Participatory: “The direct cinema documentarist took his camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinema verite tried to precipitate one.  The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the Rouch cinema verite artist was often an avowed participant.”

Filmmaker as “avowed participant” seems to function along a spectrum of provocation in Participatory documentaries, as each filmmaker uses certain tactics to precipitate conflict.  On one end of the spectrum is Michael Moore, who is not above catching people on camera under false pretenses in order to generate a response.  Though some audience members may respond to this method differently, I felt uncomfortable, as if I were watching NBC’s To Catch a Predator.   It speaks volumes about the entrapment-like nature of this method that I feel more pity for the guilty party than I feel vindicated by the filmmaker. 

Alan Berliner is no less a provocateur than Michael Moore—Nobody’s Business exists simply because he continued to prod his father for answers to family questions that had long haunted him—but his methods seem more personal and less sensational.  Oscar Berliner’s choice to be filmed is never in question, and the overall feel of the documentary is that of father and son having a conversation that could be taking place in the living room or at the dinner table.  It’s a film, though, which is the whole point—the audience is not under the impression of taking a glimpse of a day in the life of Oscar Berliner, a la Observational mode.  The medium by which Alan Berliner evokes these stories is meant to preserve them—something his ancestors (including his father) hadn’t done. 

Like Nobody’s Business, Dear Zachary is another documentary in which the filmmaker does not hide his personal relationship to the subject.  The director, Kurt Kuenne, created this film as a tribute to his friend, Andrew Bagby, who appeared in many of his home movies when they were teenagers.  The story of Bagby’s tragic end (no spoilers) might have been relegated to the news, but Kuenne’s film, containing plenty of archival footage, an autobiographical voiceover, and interviews with Bagby’s family (whom he knows well), served to personalize the injustice in a way that a more Expository treatment wouldn’t have.    

Doc Mode Activity 1: Observational Mode

Documentarian’s Statement:

Even before any consideration of this footage as an Observational piece, I asked the subject, Michael Anderson, an art teacher at Diamond Fork Jr. High School, if I could film him in the process of doing something he does best: art, which in this case was a charcoal drawing.  As part of the Process Exercise, I asked him if I could film him drawing something that would take about five minutes to complete; he didn’t need to explain what he was doing nor acknowledge my presence as I was filming.  In this regard, I hoped to achieve a feeling of “lived experience spontaneously,” as Michael created something “in front of the camera without overt intervention” from me (Nichols 172).    

            I believe this clip captures the feel of the Observational mode, which is not to say that what you see is the whole story.  For one, Michael would not have done this charcoal drawing had I not asked him to.  I did not just walk into his classroom and capture something he was already doing.  On a very small level, this was an “event staged to become part of the historical record” (177).  Granted, I set out to film someone performing a process, not to film a so-called event. 

            This clip engages the Observational mode most strongly in its “sense of the duration of actual events” (176).  Nichols explains that Observational documentaries “break with the dramatic pace of mainstream fiction films and the sometimes hurried, montage assembly of images that support expository or poetic documentaries” (176).  Though they appear to represent time accurately, Observational documentaries often take liberties with editing that consequently make a longer process appear much shorter.  Wiseman, for example, presented his observation of the making of a 30-second commercial as taking 25 minutes, when it actually took hours and hours (176).  Despite inevitable editing, Observational documentarians “try to preserve some of the qualities of the rushes in their films” to maintain the vitality absent in Hollywood films and documentaries that utilize other modes.  Though I edited a lot of the camera movement out for obvious reasons, I purposely left the movement at 1:13 in to achieve the unedited feel.

            As I edited this film from its original length—approximately 6:30 to less than 2:00—I still wanted the viewer to believe the process was unfolding in real time.  Anyone watching the clip closely will notice the progress we do not get to see, as each successive shot reveals something drawn that was not there before, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  To a certain extent, audiences expect to see just the important parts of processes; otherwise, they would need to sit through hours and hours of footage (imagine a fishing or cooking show unedited).
           Better editors make sequences like this appear much more seamless, as evidenced in this clip from the Maysles’ Salesman.  Like my clip, this one lasts approximately two minutes (begin around 9:00 and continue until 11:30).  The way this scene is edited gives the impression of a beginning, middle, and end, but common sense tells us not even the best of salesmen could pull this off in that amount of time.  Successful Observational documentaries portray their processes and events as lived experiences through deft editing.