This week in Seeing the Unseen we focused on workshopping the completion of Task Two along with wrapping up the first four weeks by linking back to documentary with Bettina Frankham’s A Poetic Approach to Documentary.
In our Wednesday workshop everyone worked in their Task Two pairs to think about the differences between what we notice when we experience a place and what we notice when we go in as filmmakers. As filmmakers we often notice the rhythms, colours, patterns and movements of places that differ from what we notice when we experience a place to do something – buy groceries, catch a train. We focus in on something which creates blind spots everywhere else.
In our second workshop we discussed week four’s reading by unpacking what a poetic approach to documentary is – opening spaces for interpretation because the glue between elements is left looser. We looked at this part of Koyaanisqatsi as an example of a non-narrative poetic documentary and Attenborough’s Galapagos Islands as a more explicit documentary. In Koyaanisqatsi we are asked to contemplate the visual quality of the images, whereas in Galapagos Islands the visuals explicate the voice-over for us, not giving us space for contemplation. We talked about how we’re tempted to make stories even though we’re not given them by the film itself.
In pairs we then unpacked some of the ideas Frankham introduces; relational aesthetics, categorical structure, mosaic structure, non-narrative, narrative and webdoc. The job here was to summarise how Frankham uses the idea, find two extra sources to help expand upon that idea, find an example of that idea and provide a question. The questions which came out these discussions were:
- Would the conceptual artist consider the audience when creating relational art works?
- How do we apply relational aesthetics in making documentary and can these documentaries be narrative?
- Does category have to be explicit?
- What is the purpose of a web documentary?
- What kind of audience would a webdoc attract?
- In mosaic structure how do we make connections so the audience can see the bigger picture?
- Does non-narrative confuse audiences?
- Can noticing be non-narrative?
These will definitely be some questions we respond to next week after we have made a narrative and non-narrative piece with our media that we collected as part of Task Two. So, as a way to understand through doing the task set at the end of the workshop was this Glueing together exercise, where each of you have to construct a narrative and non-narrative out of your raw documents collected in each other’s locations.
These two one minute videos are due in Week 5’s Thursday workshop.