Today we pitched our documentary project to the class. My group — Alice, Anna, Izzi and Zitni — and I all agreed early on in the process that we’ve made several “documentary portraits” already and we wanted to tackle something slightly different, like picking a topic or issue and finding interviewees who would fit into that topic.
Coming up with ideas is my biggest weakness, honestly. I’m pretty confident with my ability to use camera equipment and translate my creative vision to the screen (though I have a lot more to learn there, too!), and I think I’m a good collaborator in that I can develop other peoples’ ideas, but I don’t have a large social network of acquaintances and have struggled in the past to think of interesting subjects to make films about from scratch. (And yes, I recognise that having ideas is fundamental to being a filmmaker…)
Anyway, as a group we came up with the idea of talking to female drivers. At first we were going to base our film around a single driver for the female-only ride-sharing service Shebah, but with help from Rohan we decided that it might be more interesting to compare a Shebah driver to other professional female drivers (taxi and Uber), and see if they have common experiences or outlooks in their life and work.
We have collaborated well so far to develop that initial nugget into a fully-fledged idea — something that could conceivably be turned into an actual film. We’ve got a central question, a structure and some ideas for the visual style we hope to achieve. The biggest question mark is whether we can find not one but three interview subjects who: 1) are willing to be interviewed, 2) are available during our filming schedule, 3) are comfortable on camera, and 4) have something interesting to say. But our initial enquiries have been positive, and I think we’ll benefit from the fact that professional drivers are generally quite personable because they communicate with people all day.
I’m a little anxious that the success or failure of our film lies entirely in the hands of people who we’ve never met, but I want to get out of the comfort zone of only interviewing people I know personally. Here goes!
This week we watched a film that has been on my watchlist for years: Nanook of the North, one of the first feature-length documentaries (then called “actualities”), and an early example of the ethnographic film. I was already aware before watching it that the film had been reevaluated in light of the fact that Robert J. Flaherty, its director, was not merely following Nanook to observe him and in actual fact many of the scenes were contrived or wholly made-up for the purposes of filming (and Nanook was, in fact, a man named Allakariallak).
The worst of these is a scene in which Nanook is surprised and delighted by a gramophone record being played by a white trader (and which Nanook tries to bite), when in fact Allakariallak had seen gramophones before and was only acting. This scene is not only inaccurate, it actively encourages the stereotype that Inuit people were stupid and backwards. And there are, apparently, many other instances of scenes being concocted by Flaherty, like Nanook hunting with spears and knives when in fact by the 1910s and 20s his people were using guns for hunting.
My Criterion Collection DVD of the film has an extended 1960 interview with Flaherty’s wife and editor, Frances, who not only goes along with the fiction that they were accurately capturing the traditions and practices of Inuit peoples (whom she called “Eskimos”), she goes even further to “confirm” things that absolutely aren’t true (like that Nanook died of starvation soon after filming).
Strangely, I think if the film were made today no one would bat an eyelid that Nanook was portrayed by an actor and his demonstration of hunting methods was a re-creation. We live in a post-Errol Morris/Werner Herzog world where it’s relatively common knowledge that documentary is not, and can never be, a truly accurate representation of “the real”, and people are generally pretty forgiving of a filmmaker who deliberately instigates actions to appear in film (just ask Joshua Oppenheimer and The Act of Killing).
I see Flaherty’s actions in filming Nanook as similar to an ethnomusicologist recording the traditional folk songs of a culture at risk of being lost, or an anthropologist preserving the conversations of people using a dead language. Those people may be asked to “perform” those songs or their language in order for it to be recorded, and it wouldn’t be preserved through natural observation alone, but I don’t think that necessarily invalidates the resultant recording. I like the idea of “taxidermy” from this week’s reading1 — a genuine dead animal looks deflated and gross, so to accurately show the way the animal looked in life one must “enhance” its appearance artificially.
Flaherty was just 60 or 70 years ahead of his time. The benefit that our society gets from being able to see Nanook of the North and its portrayal of Inuit culture overrides, in my opinion, the “dishonesty” Flaherty displayed in order to capture it, although I wish he hadn’t gone out of his way to portray Nanook/Allakariallak and his people as regressive.
Tobing Rony, F. (1996), “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North”, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, Durham : Duke University Press, pp. 99–126. ↩
What a strange old bird this week’s film, The Trouble with Merle, is. Director Maree Delofski begins with the premise that Merle Oberon, classical-era Hollywood starlet of apparently disputed origin, is claimed by the people of Tasmania as a “favourite daughter”, despite major question marks over their ability to call her Tasmanian. It’s also about the strange way stories about Merle have persisted for decades after her death.
It’s told as a first-person investigation, narrated by the director and ostensibly following her process as she pieces together the “facts” of the Tasmanian story, its status as a fiction concocted by Hollywood studio fixers to quell questions about Merle’s Indian features, and how the story has been passed down through generations of Tasmanians to become a kind of mutually-agreed local fact. She also follows other threads of investigation to figure out the true story of her birth and childhood.
This framing device is quite clearly artificial and the narration is clunky in transitioning from story beat to story beat, so I don’t know if this film needed to be told in the way it was… but having said that, I do think there’s a story worth investigating at the centre of this film: why do so many people in Tasmania have “memories” or family stories about Merle Oberon if she was not, and had never been, from Tasmania?
Unfortunately, there are some significant blind spots and errors in judgment from all involved.
Firstly, I felt quite uncomfortable with the language used to describe Merle and her supposed Tasmanian back story. There was a lot of talk about her facial features, and how certain races look and act in certain ways, how her status as a person of mixed race was lower than that of ‘regular’ Australians, and how she was eventually rescued and taken in by white people. Even the language I’ve used in this post — the people of Tasmania “claim” her — is indicative of the kind of language used to discuss Merle’s personhood in the film, and it’s disappointing that Merle herself has absolutely no presence or agency in anything these people do or say about her. This was true during her lifetime, and it’s true even in death as people tell “her” story.
With modern eyes and ears, of course, this all reflects very poorly on the Tasmanians portrayed in the film. The film is only 15 years old, but I think it’s certainly true that society had a different and less nuanced view of matters of race at the turn of the century.
Should Delofski have done more to reckon with the blatant racism displayed by her interviewees? Does a filmmaker have an obligation to portray people fairly (and by “fairly” I mean true to what their real thoughts and opinions are), even if what they are saying is racist and will reflect poorly on them? Is it only the filmmaker’s job to make sure their views are portrayed accurately, and the fallout is up to the interviewee to deal with, or should the filmmaker protect people from themselves?
It’s a difficult question to grapple with, but ultimately I don’t think Delofski erred by allowing her interviewees to express their morally questionable thoughts. She really shouldn’t be held responsible for the regressive opinions of Tasmanians. But she did err by failing to address it in her narration or in the context of the story itself, which she had ample opportunity to do.
I think the race question was just a huge blind spot for Delofski (she also doesn’t mention at all why it was important for Oberon to have a made-up story about her origin so she could work in Hollywood), and perhaps she didn’t even realise that it would be an issue for audiences. But I think that just demonstrates why it’s so important to be vigilant about issues like this, so your film doesn’t become a relic within 15 years of release.
I asked Heather to recount her experiences in Egypt during the 2011 revolution for the TFPDT editing exercise. She spoke for 17 minutes in total, and the biggest challenge was to cut that material down to two minutes while maintaining narrative coherence and the structural integrity of her sentences. She warned me beforehand that she’s not a natural storyteller, so I had to occasionally chime in and remind her to speak in terms of what she saw or felt, and to paint a picture of what she experienced, so it took quite a bit of cajoling to get enough material to use. It also made it challenging to edit down, because I almost had to manually shape fragments of her story into a succinct, coherent whole.
Being in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution or walking down a deserted street and being stopped by a van full of men wielding machetes are the kinds of experiences that a natural storyteller could turn into quite compelling first-person narratives, but Heather was almost embarrassed by the idea that I was asking her about what happened. She’s naturally very modest and I think she didn’t want to come across as if she was big-noting herself for being close to a major world event, which is an impulse I understand, but she told the story with a lot of self-deprecation — which certainly doesn’t help the process of making a documentary about her experiences!
But having said all that, there were some major advantages in filming Heather for this exercise — she had a selection of photos she took while in Egypt that could be used for cutaways, and there’s obviously a wealth of archival material about the Egyptian revolution that I could use to illustrate what she was talking about. The major disadvantage is that I couldn’t think of any relevant B-roll footage to shoot. It would have been easier if she was talking about a hobby or something like that, so I could film her participating in that hobby, but since she was speaking about an experience in the past it was difficult to think of anything to film in the present.
Ultimately, there were pluses and minuses to this first assessment exercise and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into something a bit more in-depth.
In January, 2011, Heather arrived in Egypt for a month-long holiday with friends. Half way through her stay, on January 25, thousands of people descended on Tahrir Square and demanded political change, eventually leading to the toppling of Hosni Mubarak and what we now call the Egyptian revolution.
In this edit I kept everything Heather said in chronological order, and took out anything irrelevant or unnecessary to the main thrust of the story. This resulted in a huge number of cuts in my timeline, and I struggled to find enough cutaways and archival material to cover them all.
This is the edit that most closely resembles the conversation as we had it, but it’s also very plain and not at all dynamic. It accurately reflects how she now talks about her experiences in Egypt, with a mixture of humour and modesty that doesn’t do her story any favours but does help her come across as a friendly and likeable person. I decided to leave in the anecdote about setting up an Abbey Road photo shoot in front of riot police because it’s a good story (and has an accompanying photo), but it undercuts any sense of danger or tension in the story. I also decided to take out the story about being approached by the van, partly for time and partly because it didn’t seem to match up with the tone of this edit.
Heather had a habit of idly looking out the window while she was talking, so her eyeline kept moving to the left of screen instead of into the empty space of the frame, so half way through the interview I had to move myself further to the right and ask her to try to look at me when she was speaking. I think this embarrassed her (for “doing it wrong”, even though I assured her it was my fault for not setting up the interview properly), and as a result she speaks really quietly from when she starts to talk about going to Pete’s aunt’s house for dinner. This was a nightmare to edit around, because I felt it was necessary to set up that part of the story (to give a sense of time/place), but it’s so obviously different from all the speech around it that it sticks out like a sore thumb and draws attention to the fact that it’s from a later part of the conversation.
I also left a few jump cuts in the interview, but only at points where she’s moving to a new conversation or topic from what came before. I was hoping that this would feel natural (and signal to the audience a move to a new topic) but I’m not sure it really works as I’d hoped it would.
To cut down the amount of setting up required, I begin this edit with an explanatory title. Just having 15 seconds of titles saved me almost a minute of interview time I could spend elsewhere, so I tried to take advantage of that and go deeper into the incident with the van.
This edit has more (and longer) sequences that are allowed to play through without any cuts, so it feels more like Heather is telling her story and I’m not piecing it together in the edit. It feels more “real” and accurate than the first cut, because there are fewer obvious places where I’ve used B-roll cutaways to hide an edit (which signals to an audience that words have been rearranged). Seeing Heather speak for more extended stretches I think also helps identify with her, because you see her face a lot more in this cut than the first one. There are also more “ums”, “ahs” and laughs in this one, which encourages identification and a more organic feel.
I decided to use music underneath the section where she talks about being approached by the van. I think this subtly changes the tone enough to make it clear that Heather found the incident scary, even though she’s talking about it with humour in the present. Finding the right song was difficult (and in fact I selected this song mainly because it works for the third edit), but for a royalty free song it ticks the right boxes in terms of mood. I struggle with audio mixing, so I’m worried that the music might be too low in the mix, but any louder and it starts to make Heather more difficult to hear (particularly with headphones).
My working title for this was the “in media res” cut. After hearing Heather in the interview talk about being approached by the van, I immediately wondered if it would be possible to start the video there, and then later go back and explain the context of the Egyptian revolution.
This is by far the most dynamic of the three edits, with extensive manipulation of cinematic style (prominent music, more incendiary looking archival footage), but I also think it’s fair to say it’s the most dishonest. The tone in which Heather’s words are translated to the screen is very different to the tone she used when speaking them, and I used style choices to change her story into something more in line with what I was expecting when I asked to interview her about her experiences in Egypt. This edit suits my needs as a filmmaker, but doesn’t reflect Heather’s retelling of her own story. (But then again, I think an argument could be made that this edit more accurately reflects Heather’s actual experience, regardless of how modestly she speaks about it now.)
The fact that you don’t see Heather’s face until almost 30 seconds into the video undermines relatability and identification, but in its place this edit offers a more visceral, subjective experience. I also didn’t colour grade this cut, so the colour temperature of the interview is slightly cooler than the previous two versions.
The introduction works quite well, as does the first transition into Heather speaking about the context of why she was in Cairo, but I don’t think it quite works when transitioning back to the incident with the van to finish off that part of the story. Had Heather spoken more in a present-tense, first-person point of view I think I could have pulled it off, but I don’t think it’s the right fit for the material I had.
This cut uses some B-roll I shot with Heather walking down the street at night (I was hoping for an association with walking down a dark street), but it’s not really relevant enough to look suitable. I should have shot her walking down a deserted back street and asked her to act a bit more like it was a reenactment (perhaps even wait until a van drove past), but she was very uncomfortable even with the amount of filming I was already asking her to do, so I didn’t want to push my luck.
Credits
Photographs supplied by Heather Scott, used with permission.
Our class discussion of Notes on Blindness centred around the idea of hybrid documentary, and the relationship between nonfiction filmmaking and “the real”. All documentary films incorporate some level of fiction or subjectivity, and some nonfiction films choose to incorporate much more than others, just as fiction films can use the formal language of nonfiction for their own purposes.
I imagine a spectrum, where one side is “fiction” and the other is “nonfiction”, and every film ever made could be plotted at some point along the axis. An observational documentary like Woodstock (1970) sits further towards nonfiction than, say, any of the films by Werner Herzog, who is quite clear about where he sees himself in terms of striving for objectivity:
But even the film furthest along on the nonfiction side, i.e. the most nonfiction film ever made (if there is such a thing), still couldn’t fairly be considered objective truth, because by definition filmmaking involves some level of subjectivity and cannot possibly tell the whole story.
“In the summer of 1983, just days before the birth of his first son, writer and theologian John Hull went blind. In order to make sense of the upheaval in his life, he began keeping a diary…”
I really can’t believe how great this studio has been for exposing me to new and interesting documentaries. Notes on Blindness is another one that I wasn’t familiar with, but ended up really loving (and taking a lot from). The film was constructed from hours and hours of journalistic/confessional monologues Hull recorded onto cassette tape over the span of years, with archival footage and recreations using actors among the techniques used to visualise the material.
Notes on Blindness relies so heavily on its source material that at first glance the film may seem secondary to it, like it’s just the visual accompaniment to a story told primary through sound. But while it’s somewhat true that the film’s primary vector is sound, and it would absolutely work as a podcast or extended audio documentary, I think the fact that it is a film is quite important to the experience. There’s a scene where Hull describes his appreciation for rain, the sound of which gives him a sense of his surroundings when he’s out in the world, and how he wishes that he could make it rain inside so he could achieve the same experience indoors. What follows is a really beautiful and poetic sequence of shots of the inside of a house — tables, chairs, a piano — being drenched with rain, giving the viewer not only a satisfying visualisation of Hull’s inner desires, but also a indelible cinematic image. The film is full of moments like these, where the material is elevated by its presentation in a film as opposed to being experienced solely through sound.
The film got me thinking about the idea of a director who finds a cache of pre-existing material and decides to make a film about it, as directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney did with Notes on Blindness. I can’t think of too many films that fit this bill, but they range from the important and historic (German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, 2015), to the philosophical (Grizzly Man, 2005), to the weird and quirky (Shut Up Little Man!, 2011).
One film that strikes me as similar to Notes on Blindness is Finding Vivian Maier, which describes filmmaker John Maloof’s chance discovery of hundreds of photographs taken by an unknown but talented New York street photographer named Vivian Maier.
I hated Finding Vivian Maier, and now having seen Notes on Blindness and thought about the implications of making a film based on archival material, I think I finally understand why: Maier was deceased by the time Maloof discovered her photographs in an estate auction, and consequently she has zero agency in the telling of her own story. We discover through the course of the film that Maier was essentially a recluse, and never shared her photographs with the public or even members of her own family. But Maloof not only shows her photographs publicly, he interviews dozens of people who knew Maier about her life and why she kept her work so secret, which I think flies in the face of how she would have wanted her story told (if at all). Obviously Maier lost control of her life and work once she died, and Maloof was completely within his legal rights to make his film, but it never sat right with me that the director knew how reclusive his subject was and decided to make a major documentary film about her anyway.
Notes on Blindness, on the other hand, incorporates the participation of Hull himself and never feels exploitative. Hull made his audio tapes in order for them to be heard, in some way or another, by other people, and the film feels like an extension of Hull’s personal investigation into the experience of blindness and its effect on how he sees the world. Vivian Maier specifically chose not to show anyone her photographs, but then John Maloof came along and decided to do it for her.
I think I’d rather be a Peter Middleton or James Spinney than a John Maloof.
Filming my interview for Assessment 2, I sat down ahead of time with my camera and set the white balance, focus, aperture and shutter speed — all the things we went through in our in-class camera exercise. Everything looked good, I recorded a little 10-second test video and played it back on the camera, and it looked perfect… so, we got stuck into the interview.
But when I dumped the footage to my computer, it looked like this:
I did a bit of googling and found out that the green blocks are sections of the video where image data is missing, through some kind of codec error/mismatch. I’m still not 100% sure exactly what caused the problem in the first place, but had I dumped the test footage to my laptop first I would have noticed it and been able to fix it.
So, the lesson: always dump some test footage to your laptop and make sure it works before filming anything.
Luckily I was interviewing a subject I have easy access to, so I was able to ask her to come back the next day and re-record the interview. I changed the recording format to AVCHD on the camera, and this time it worked fine — no green blocks in sight.
I’m just glad I made this mistake now, with a subject I have easy access to, rather than later in semester with a subject I couldn’t ask to come back and re-record an entire interview.
I’m posting this here so I remember it for the future:
Today Rohan shared with us a tip for whittling down raw footage into something usable:
Dump all of your footage in the timeline, and watch through it once
Every time you come across something that definitely won’t be needed in the final version (your questions, irrelevant answers, coughs, etc.), place a cut before and a cut after it
Leave the unneeded sections on the first video track, and drag everything else up onto track two as you go
After doing this for the entire video, drag to select all of the video on track two (that is, the “longlist” of usable material) and move it to a new timeline
Repeat the same process on the new timeline
This way, you progressively cut down your footage to only what you can use within two full viewings. I think this will save me a lot of time.
My only experience with interviewing someone on camera came in my first semester at RMIT, when I made a little two-minute portrait of my brother and his ridiculous collection of novelty erasers.
I thought it was worth a revisit to see how it stands up considering everything I’ve learned over the past two years.
The first thing that stands out is the lighting of the interview — it’s way too bright and too unnaturally yellow, to the point where the halo of light surrounding the subject blends him into the background. I was going for an Errol Morris / Willy Wonka “clean white room” aesthetic, but my home-made lighting rig was too heavy-handed for the task. If I was to work on this film again, I think it could easily be saved with a bit of a colour grade, but that’s a process I’m still not very familiar with.
Secondly, my zooms/pans on the still photos of the erasers are too drastic — distractingly so. I think less is more in this regard, and if I had my time again I’d only enlarge the photos 3-5% in the faux zooms instead of the 10% I did.
In terms of the edit, and how I constructed a coherent string of sentences from what the subject said in his interview, I’m actually still pretty pleased with that. My memory of the interview was that he rambled a lot (which was 100% my fault, I wasn’t sure what “angle” I was going for and so I wasn’t able to properly direct his answers so he gave me what I wanted), but I managed to whittle it down to something usable in the end. The J-cuts and hiding audio edits with cutaway footage works well, and other than the forced inclusion of archival footage (which I hated at the time and still hate now), the cutaways are all pretty good.
All in all, it’s definitely the work of a first-semester student, but two years later I’m still mostly happy with how it turned out.
