For this weeks exploration I decided to explore the audio documentary. Since Kyla Brettle showed us some examples of her work in our lectorial this week, I found it very interesting how much more powerful it was to just listen to the content and imagine the situation, rather than both see and hear it simultaneously. I saw the power of audio, as it allows the audience to really, truly create the links in their head, they aren’t as guided by the director and are more free to make up their own mind.
The first audio documentary was simply anthropological observations ad historical recordings of daily life and civilisations, much like the “first films shot by Edison and the Lumière brothers — no edits or narration or stories.” (Carrier, 2014) The first incident of this was in 1890, when “an anthropologist named Jesse Walter Fewkes used a phonograph to record the songs and speech of the Passamaquoddy Indians of eastern Maine. For many decades this was the extent of audio documentary — recording oral history and music.” (Carrier, 2014)
Some examples from 1890 (Carrier, 2014):
Snake Dance:
Mr. Phonograph:
Kyla Brettle is a prolific producer of audio documentaries, such as ‘Trauma’ which, “In a kaleidoscopic style shifting between observational and experiential forms of documentary, Mark Fitzgerald, the Director of Emergency Services takes us into the heart of his department – a place where dramatic, life-changing events occur with relentless regularity against a background of routine order. As staff and patients share their experiences of either unexpectedly arriving at the hospital or coming home from it every day, documentary maker Kyla Brettle seeks to discover what place the big questions about life, society and human nature have in an environment that by definition strives to maintain the mechanics of life from one moment to the next.” (ABC, 2013)
“Why radio? Why documentary? Answer: No other medium can provide me with more freedom of creation and investigation. It meets my urgent interest in reality and the desire for a ‘musical’ expression. The material (der Werkstoff) is sound. And sound always surrounds us. And: I’m not so much interested in the description of stable situations, but in processes. Our medium is not space, but time; our stories are not glued to the ground, but have motion, life … That’s why!” – Helmut Kopetzky, German author, Self-portrait