Category Archives: Thoughts

They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Nanook of the North and ethnography

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.

  1. 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. ↩
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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

The trouble with The Trouble with Merle

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.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Reflections on assessment two

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.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Hybrid documentary and hornet stings

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.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Notes on Notes on Blindness

“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.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Always test your footage!

I made a real rookie mistake this weekend.

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.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

First-pass editing tip

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.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Revisiting Eraserhead

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.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Home from the Hill

Is there anything better than discovering a new filmmaker?

This week we watched Home from the Hill (1987), by British documentarian Molly Dineen. I’m not sure why Dineen isn’t very well known around the world, because I really loved the film and it looks like she’s been doing good and interesting work for decades. I was shocked to discover that her most-watched film, Geri, has been marked as seen by only 22 people on Letterboxd. I feel like there’s an untouched gold mine of material just waiting for me to discover it — if I can find her films anywhere, that is.

Home from the Hill follows Hilary Hook, a cartoonishly old-school British gentleman (think the Major from Fawlty Towers) as he moves back to England after a lifetime abroad in “the colonies”. His 1930s-era views clash spectacularly with the reality of modern British urban life, but he remains an incredibly charming and sympathetic character even as he’s pining for the days when he had (African) domestic servants and a wife who waited on his every desire.

I think the film works so well because Dineen embeds herself so deeply into Hook’s life that we get to see moments that another filmmaker would never be able to capture. Dineen had such great access because she was dating Hook’s son (who was often present when they were filming), so she was more like a member of the family hanging around with a camera and sound person, rather than a traditional and scary film crew. This gave her access to the minutia of Hook’s life, small moments like trying to figure out how to use an automatic can opener, or idly staring out of windows — unguarded moments where Hook has to confront his inability to function in British society.

The question of informed consent is interesting in this case — Hook obviously had a high level of direct involvement in this film. In a video interview we watched this week, Dineen herself said that she likes to keep her subjects involved through the entire process of making the film, so they can protest at any time if they feel like they’ve been misrepresented or don’t like how things are turning out. Informed consent is a continually ongoing process for Dineen, which negates a lot of potential problems — I can’t imagine Dineen being sued by any of her subjects, since she keeps them so involved through the process. This also sets up the subject to feel like the filmmaker is on their “side”, which may encourage them to speak more freely or be more welcoming to the filmmaker into their world.

I wonder if the fact that Hook and Dineen were essentially family played into the consent aspect at all — and if Hook would have given the same access to another filmmaker. Did he trust Dineen to treat him more fairly than other people would? Did he know how antiquated his views were, and how he was likely to be perceived by 1980s British audiences (or 21st century audiences)?

Regardless, the film feels like it is as much Hook’s film as it is Dineen’s — his personality drives the entire film, and you definitely get the feeling that he often “performs” for the camera, verbalising his thoughts and commentating his own actions.

Dineen has also made documentaries about a train station, the London Zoo, and British farmers, among many other subjects. These are not inherently interesting topics, but Dineen has a knack for finding compelling characters who can sustain an hour or more of screen time, much like how Frederick Wiseman’s films sound incomprehensibly boring on paper but once you watch them they are absolutely transfixing. I’d love to know how much preparation she puts into identifying and pre-interviewing people to decide whether it’s worth making a film with them, or if she just turns up on the day and tries to build tension and interest in the editing room.

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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Case studies in objectivity

For the past three years I’ve been a part of the feature film programming panel for the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, which means I get to watch dozens and dozens of documentaries through the year hoping to find some that might fit HRAFF’s mission to screen challenging, high-quality films dealing with human rights-related subject matter. It can often be brutal viewing, but it’s also given me incredibly deep exposure to all kinds of films from around the world, and a continually growing love for the documentary form.

After seeing such a wide variety of films, the idea of “objectivity” has become particularly interesting to me, because objectivity is usually a flexible concept in the sorts of films that would expect to be screened at a human rights film festival. The conventional wisdom is that true objectivity cannot possibly exist (since by turning on a camera or making a cut you are creating a perspective), but that filmmakers should strive for objectivity and fairness anyway. I guess this comes from the pre-Maysles idea that documentary films should be educational, and thus should attempt to convey everything as accurately and true-to-life as possible, e.g. by presenting both sides of an issue, or by attempting to be a comprehensive as possible when depicting an event, or by being a fly on the wall and not influencing anything, etc.

But now, there is a whole world of “activist films” that intentionally choose to have no respect for the entire notion of objectivity: think An Inconvenient Truth, Chasing Asylum, 13th. These films’ goal is not to be comprehensive or show both sides of an issue, but to convince an audience to think or behave a certain way. They understand that every single film ever made is subjective, even the ones that try to be objective, so you might as well just go all the way and embrace subjectivity and the ability to manipulate your material to make it as convincing as possible.

While we’ve been discussing the ethical concerns of documentary filmmaking in class, I’ve found myself applying these discussions to some of the films I’ve watched for HRAFF, and there are a few that I’ve found particularly interesting in this context, so I thought I’d do a couple of case studies around the notion of objectivity and the role of the filmmaker in participating in (or instigating) the actions captured in their film.

The White World According to Daliborek

Daliborek is a forty-something Czech man who lives with his mother, makes YouTube videos that get single-digit views, traces drawings of pornography off the television, and makes really terrible heavy metal music in his spare time. He’s also a hateful, neo-Nazi skinhead. The film is a portrait of Daliborek and his extremist views, but told with an eye to the banal, ordinary details of Daliborek’s life. The film doesn’t seem to challenge his views, and instead subtly shows their ridiculousness by having such an utterly pathetic character profess them.

The director has participated in workshops with Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), and as a result there is an air of performativity and theatricality to many parts of the film. It can often be difficult to identify which events occurred naturally and which were influenced by the filmmakers, but there is a moment towards the end of the film where the line is completely obliterated. Daliborek and his family travel to the Auschwitz concentration camp (at the suggestion of his mother’s boyfriend, but again it’s debatable whether this was devised by the filmmakers), and take a guided tour during which they are introduced to a Holocaust survivor who recounts her experiences during the war. Daliborek begins peppering her with questions about the veracity of her story, denying that it would be possible for that many people to be killed, and other such ridiculous neo-Nazi talking points. The poor woman is incredibly distressed, but Daliborek continues until the film’s director actually steps out from behind the camera, into frame, and begins arguing with Daliborek. Even in such a theatrical documentary, it’s still jarring to see a filmmaker literally walk into frame and shatter the illusion of objectivity.

In press materials for the film all the director says about his actions is “I had to, it was unbearable” — referring to the act of standing by and watching while the subject of his documentary, someone who was only at Auschwitz because he brought him there, began to accost a Holocaust survivor. But I wonder why that was the moment he chose to finally step in and put a stop to Daliborek’s antics, and not when he was recording racist videos to upload to YouTube, or laughing with his family about killing “gypsies”. When the director brought Daliborek to Auschwitz, what did he expect would happen? Did a part of him hope that Daliborek would act in this way so the documentary would be more compelling? Because that’s certainly what happened — the documentary is fascinating and the ending in particular had me staring at my TV in disbelief.

A Woman Captured

The origin of this film is somewhat difficult to ascertain. The opening titles state that the director was travelling through Hungary when she was introduced to a woman, Marish, who worked as a “domestic slave” — she lives with a middle-class family and cooks, cleans and does other work around the house for them, without payment and withstanding constant abuse, and without the ability to look for other work or an improved living situation. The filmmaker, shocked at the discovery that domestic slaves even exist in modern Hungary, asked to film her and was allowed to spend months observing. (The fact that the “host” family even allowed their slave to be filmed shows how little they cared about the legality of keeping a slave.)

From the very beginning, it feels like the filmmaker is attempting to convince Marish that her situation is not normal and she should try to escape. She asks Marish leading questions about the morality of keeping a slave, asks her about her life before moving in with her host family, and even helps her make arrangements for her eventual life outside (such as driving her to a job interview, and of course filming it). There’s never any suggestion that the filmmaker is anything but an interested party — the film is really just her documenting her efforts to save Marish, it doesn’t pretend to be objective in any way and the filmmaker’s voice is very much present in the film. It’s a fascinating choice, and it works really well — the film is one of the most cathartically emotional and powerful I’ve seen in many years.

Would either A Woman Captured or The White World According to Daliborek have worked without such obvious intervention from their directors? Possibly, but I don’t think they would have been anywhere near as successful at achieving their aims.

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