In my final post I would just like to express how much this class really opened my eyes, and redefined documentary media for me. My previous experiences with documentaries were solely narrative based pieces such as Fahrenheit 911 (Michael Moore). From the direct cinema of Wiseman and Brakhage, to the home video presentation of Tarnation, my conceptions have been dramatically widened. Originally I thought all documentaries were trying to prove or create an intended message through a directly constructed diagesis. However, I found that the less explicit documentaries such as Titicut Follies and The Act of seeing with one’s Own Eyes were far more powerful, and made me much more inquisitive into what they had captured. It is almost as if mainstream documentaries, with narration and interviews, do all the thinking for you; They constitute their audience as passive viewers. Not only is the thinking done for the audience, but this type of documentary constructs point of views to follow.
The bias that mainstream documentaries present seem to go against the majority of the films that were presented this semester. In general, the main qualifier of all the material presented in class (with a few exceptions such as Outfoxed) is that all the films really tried to represent reality. For example, while there was a narration in Grizzly Man, it really felt like Herzog tried to give Treadwell the benefit of the doubt, but Treadwell’s insanity was inescapable and came through in the majority of the footage. I’m sure that with some extensive editing and certain omissions, Herzog could have portrayed Treadwell as a hero or as brave, but he didn’t, and I feel like his representation of Treadwell was far more accurate and authentic. Examples such as this definitely highlight just how much power editing has over what we take from the screen. Through this course I was constantly questioning what the main goal of a documentary should be, and I really believe that they should ultimately try to accurately represent reality. Truly, capturing reality on film would be to capture raw, uninterrupted footage. However, editing is definitely needed to condense material together, but there are ways to make its impact on reality less obvious. For example, adding elements such as music with politically or emotionally loaded lyrics can create a bias by overlaying the songs impact on top of the accompanied footage. Music can influence how the audience comprehends the composition of the footage. Bias should really be avoided at all costs in this genre of film to truly qualify as a documentary. Objectivity should be the goal of any documentary film maker.
It is getting harder and harder to locate reality in the media, and documentaries are no exception. At least pieces of fiction are identifiable as false; documentaries can be very misleading since the public conception is that they constitute reality. The majority of documentaries give the guise of reality when in matter of fact they could tilt their footage to come to a fabricated conclusion. One should hope that documentaries stay true to their purpose, rather than negatively impacting the public’s conception of reality.
In closing I would like to thank John Reed for an interesting course which finally broke some of the conventional moulds that many MIT classes fall into all too often.
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