Category Archives: Thoughts

They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

Documentary ethics and The Wolfpack

What do documentary filmmakers owe their subjects?

Should subjects expect their actions/views/opinions to be accurately represented? What if the subject lies about something? Should the filmmaker include the lie, include it with additional context/contradiction, or remove it entirely? What if the lie is the story (e.g. The Thin Blue Line)?

Should the subject get final approval over which of their statements (and how much of said statements) make it into the final cut? Or should filmmakers be able to use anything they capture on camera?

The article The Wolfpack and the ethics of documentary filmmaking1 has really got my brain working overtime trying to untangle all these knots.

Documentary filmmaking seems like an odd kind of collaboration.

On one side you have the subject/s, whose story is being told and should therefore have the right to tell the story how they like. On the other side you have the filmmaker, the person who has decided to make a film in the first place and should therefore control the shape of the final product. Without the filmmaker you have no film, but without the subject you have no film either.

In some ways it’s a weird kind of adversarial collaboration, because if the filmmaker goes too far to appease the subject and doesn’t approach the story with a critical eye, they leave themselves open to manipulation from the subject. But by the same token, if the filmmaker completely disregards the subject’s wishes and treats the subject as nothing more than a source of information, the subject could pull out of the project and deny the filmmaker access to a crucial perspective.

These ideas were ruminating in my head as I watched The Wolfpack, which concerns a group of siblings holed up in a New York City apartment for essentially their entire lives without any contact with the outside world. The kids and the filmmaker each had a vested interest in this story being made: the kids were obsessed with movies and wanted to get into the entertainment industry (and saw a film about them as a potential avenue towards this goal), and the filmmaker had stumbled upon an incredibly rare and interesting situation to make a film about. The filmmaker — Crystal Moselle — was in a precarious position, because her ability to tell this story was entirely dependent on her continued access to the Angulo family and their apartment, so if she did anything the kids didn’t like they could have asked her to leave and never come back, leaving her without anything to film. Moselle has complete power over the finished product of the film, but the kids control her ability to create that final product.

The Wolfpack strikes me as more of a willing collaboration than many documentaries: Moselle seemed happy to allow the Angulo kids to drive the story, to talk about only what they wanted to talk about, to leave certain areas of potential interest unexplored. The resulting film is as much the Angulos’ film as it is Moselle’s, at least in my estimation. It’s very different in tone and style compared to, say, Senna, which is about Ayrton Senna but obviously had no involvement from him, since he had passed away years earlier. The ethical concerns in that case are much different to in the case of The Wolfpack, though no less important and interesting to think about.

After watching the film I went looking for some interviews with Moselle, because I was really interested in how she found this incredibly unique story. In an interview with Flicks from around the time the film played at MIFF, she answered this question:

FLICKS: I’M SURE THIS IS A FAMILIAR QUESTION BY NOW, BUT IT HAS TO BE ASKED – HOW DID YOU MEET THESE KIDS?

CRYSTAL MOSELLE: I was just walking down the street in New York City and they ran past me. And something about them just really intrigued me.

As a filmmaker I find inspiration from characters, usually people that I just see around. And so I went after them. I just instinctively ran. I don’t even know why.

The director literally passed some interesting looking kids on the street in NYC and approached them — that illustrates the kind of attitude you need to have as a documentary maker. You need to be willing to break or ignore social boundaries and investigate things other people would never investigate. It’s a lot like being a journalist: you need to be comfortable picking up a phone or walking up to a stranger and just asking them questions. I really want to be the kind of person who can do that — I often find myself on a tram noticing someone and wondering what their story is — but I need to get over the social anxiety that stops me from doing it.

  1. Thomas, S. (2015), ‘The Wolfpack and the ethics of documentary filmmaking’, Pursuit, <https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-wolfpack-and-the-ethics-of-documentary-filmmaking> ↩
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They Film People Don't They, Thoughts

TFPDT Week 1: What am I doing here?

Through my degree so far I’ve discovered that my talents — such that they are — most certainly do not lie in the narrative fiction side of filmmaking. For one thing, I struggle to come up with creative ideas for stories and characters. That seems like a major area that a filmmaker should generally be across. But I’m also rubbish with devising/setting up shots, and my technical camera skills are nowhere near as good as most other people I’ve worked with. Stanley Kubrick I am not.

But I have realised that I harbour ambitions of working as a writer, journalist, radio producer or documentary maker (in audio or film) — creative fields that align with my interests but also align with some of the skills that I do already possess. In previous studios I’ve dipped my toe into short subject documentary and audio narrative nonfiction, both of which I really enjoyed, and the They Film People, Don’t They studio seems like one that would help me further develop those skills (and, hopefully, the technical side of camera work and sound recording too).

Also, after being a part of the Room With a View studio last year, I decided that one of my goals for 2018 is to work more on audio production and radio narrative nonfiction, so if I’m able to work in audio this semester I would be stoked.

The other major aspect of the studio that appeals to me is the question of ethics in documentary making. I was going through my ratings of documentaries on Letterboxd and noticed that many of the ones near the top (i.e., my favourite docs) deal with complex moral subject matter or have interesting ethical concerns related to their production: Hoop Dreams, Night and Fog, The Fog of War (and, let’s be honest, all of Errol Morris’s films), The Act of Killing, The Work, the Paradise Lost films… I think I tend to gravitate towards films that pose questions about consent/conflicts of interest or somehow blur the line between fact and fiction. I’d like to delve deeper into questions around what “actuality” is, and how different filmmakers deal with (or don’t deal with) these ethical concerns.

So at the very least, I hope one thing I’ll draw from this studio is a deeper understanding of the films I love to watch, and the critical faculties to better understand the documentary making process.

In summary, what I want to learn from this studio:

  • Film production processes and best practices
  • Camera work / cinematography skills
  • Tips for finding subjects and the interview process
  • Audio storytelling
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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

Richard Brody, professional writer

Given that we’ve been thinking and talking so much about editing this week, I thought I’d share something I came across on Facebook:

Note that the highlighted section is A SINGLE SENTENCE. There are so many ideas packed into this sentence that I had to read it three or four times just to parse all of its clauses. I love Richard Brody’s reviews, and obviously he would put more care into something he planned to publish than he would a quick Facebook post, but it was kind of shocking (and strangely reassuring) to see writing like this from an award-winning film critic.

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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

Person to Person / My Friend Dahmer

PERSON TO PERSON ★★★½

Dustin Guy Defa’s breezy second feature follows a group of characters all navigating an inflection point in their lives during the course of one autumn day in New York City.

Claire (Abbi Jacobson), on her first day as a journalist for a pulpy tabloid, shadows the morally ambiguous and unlucky-in-love Phil (Michael Cera) as he investigates a death. Across town, vinyl record collector Bene (Bene Coopersmith) is given a lead on a rare and valuable copy of Charlie Parker’s Bird Blows the Blues, but soon discovers that the seller may not have been entirely truthful in his description of the item. Ray (George Sample III) is trying to piece back together the relationship he ruined by posting naked pictures of his girlfriend online in a depressive haze. Wendy (Tavi Gevinson), skeptical of her best friend’s new boyfriend, questions not only her own sexuality but her place in the world.

Though events are incited by a death, nothing quite that dramatic occurs during the course of the film — unless you count a low-speed bicycle chase as dramatic. Each of these characters — and other faces drifting in and out of each storyline — must decide how they define themselves and what’s important in their lives: does Claire have the moral constitution to risk failure and confront a grieving widow in the pursuit of a story? Is Wendy ready to shake her tendency for critical self-evaluation and just experience life? Can Ray sufficiently humiliate himself to convince his girlfriend of his contrition? Does Bene’s shirt make him seem too fancy?

These New York stories are nothing new, nor do they have much grand to say, but they exude an effortless charm as each quirky personality meanders in and out of the film. The vignettes are uneven — non-actor Coopersmith shines in the film’s best storyline; Gevinson’s too-cool attitude gives Wendy’s verbose dialogue an air of inauthenticity — but taken as a collection, Person to Person proves there’s life in the talky American indie yet.

MY FRIEND DAHMER ★★

Based on the graphic novel by John Backderf, who was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in the late 1970s, My Friend Dahmer dramatises the notorious killer’s senior year in high school — when he was just a shy, if disturbed, kid.

Following events from the moment Backderf and his clique, hoping to have a few laughs at his expense, befriend Dahmer and encourage his offbeat behaviour, in some ways the film seems unsure of its own tone. There’s more than enough animal cruelty and psychosexual fantasy to satisfy the horror and serial killer buffs, but the flared costumes and colourful production design make That 70s Show seem subtle, and Anne Heche, playing Jeffrey’s mentally unstable mother, seems like something straight out of a Kristen Wiig sketch on SNL.

The decision to concentrate on Dahmer’s adolescence — when he is first exploring his cruel and unusual fascinations with death and anatomy, but before he commits his first murder — is a strange one. Portraying Dahmer as an awkward, somewhat socially frustrated teenager (expressed through Ross Lynch’s stooped, wooden performance), the film edges toward humanising a serial killer and offers up a number of factors that could have contributed to the monster Dahmer would eventually become: humiliating schoolyard hazing, family breakdown, a manic-depressive mother, alcoholism. But it seems less interested in any kind of in-depth character study and more taken by a prurient fascination with the disturbed childhood of a man who would admit to raping and killing 17 men and boys.

If Backderf — and, by extension, Meyers — weren’t trying to humanise Dahmer with an empathetic portrayal, the obvious question is: what’s the point of telling a story about Jeffrey Dahmer and concentrating on what is surely the least interesting part of his life?

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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

The Work / Call Me By Your Name

I love Melbourne in winter, when the air is so cold it stings your eyes and the Melbourne International Film Festival takes over the city centre.

The best thing I can do for my creative practice is to write as often as possible, so in that spirit I’ve decided to start jotting down capsule reviews for some of the things I see at MIFF this year. I’m not going to place limits on myself, so I may write about films I loved, films I hated, films I anticipated, films that surprised me… whatever piques my interest and presents something I think worth talking about. And I may not keep it up past this first entry, so we’ll see how I go.

THE WORK ★★★★½

Twice a year, New Folsom Prison allows members of the public to enter its walls to participate in a four-day group therapy session with inmates facilitated by former prisoners and counsellors. Prisoners begin the four-day intensive with a pact to leave prison rules and gang politics at the door, and the outsider participants find themselves thrust into the world’s most intense psychotherapy session, where white, black, Asian and Native American gang members down their arms and lay bare their most intimate insecurities and anxieties to one another, hoping to find some kind of remedy for the failures, betrayals and mistakes that landed them in prison.

The Work promises a “rare look inside the cinder-block walls” of a prison, but once the outsiders start divulging their own stories it slowly becomes clear that what the film actually offers is a deep dive into the darkest recesses of the human mind — and a slow realisation that the blackest of those recesses might not belong to any of the prisoners.

A genuinely bracing work of up-close filmmaking, The Work will hit you square in the chest and send a shiver down your spine — and make you think about how precariously balanced the line between functioning member of society and lifelong criminal really is.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME ★★★★½

“Is it better to speak or die?”

This question lies at the heart and soul of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a sumptuous and beautiful romance story set in the summer of 1983. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is enjoying another quiet summer in northern Italy as any 17-year-old son of rich Americans would do: lounging by the pool, eating apricots, reading, playing piano and cavorting with the local girls. Oliver (Armie Hammer), a statuesque doctoral student hired by Elio’s father to assist him in his research, arrives to their estate and suddenly awakens in Elio a budding lust that he struggles to understand, much less act upon.

As the sunny days meander by, the two men dance around one another, slowly and tentatively giving in to the desire that dare not speak its name. Theirs is an attraction that at first confuses Elio and, given the era, poses questions of acceptance and decorum. Is it better to speak or die? Speak and risk everything, or don’t speak and condemn yourself to a life without anything worth risking.

Their lust is expressed not through sex (at least, not on screen) but through fleeting moments of tenderness spent in secret on the banks of a crystal clear river, or hidden in the forgotten rooms of the sprawling estate. Call Me By Your Name is overflowing with sensuality, and Guadagnino’s wandering frame contrasts the quiet stillness of the landscape with the raging desire lurking just beneath the surface of his two leads.

The director’s choice to shoot on a single, unchanged lens — placing the camera between the characters in intimate moments, never giving too much context  — resists allowing the two men to truly give themselves to one another, and delicately balances the viewer at the explosive centre of their sexual tension. Call Me By Your Name is, if nothing else, surely one of the sexiest films to come out of Italy since the days of Fellini.

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Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

W2 exercise: referentiality and Baby Driver

Last week we pitched a 300-word critical review, to be written over the weekend and then workshopped in class. This is mine.

No film exists in a vacuum. All but the most experimental filmmakers weave a fabric of archetypes, narrative patterns and cultural touchstones into something that is — hopefully — new. The internet has opened up entire worlds of art for young practitioners to draw from in their own work, from vintage rock albums and arcane literature to obscure films that previous generations of artists could have enjoyed only rarely at repertory cinemas. As a result, we live in a time where there is no single dominant vector of influence, and never before has mass culture been so vast and varied in its sources of inspiration.

Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has made a career of invoking pop cultural history in his work, from Spaced’s litany of direct visual references to cinema history, to Scott Pilgrim vs The World aping the aesthetic of video games, to the “Three Flavours” trilogy’s collage of zombie/cop/sci-fi tropes. It’s as if Wright is attempting to personify Quentin Tarantino’s famous quip that “when people ask me if I went to film school I tell them no, I went to films.”

With Baby Driver, Wright has distilled referentiality into an art form of its own, where any deeper symbolic meaning is cast aside in favour of allusions, references, cameos and easter eggs. For audiences, the experience is a two-hour long game of spot-the-reference as much as it is anything else, and in this way the film is tailor-made for a generation of viewers raised with the history of human culture mere clicks away.

Wright is careful to ensure that the film is a high-octane thrill ride no matter how familiar the viewer is with the history of cinema, but there is a strange pleasure to be found in recognising the main character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), as a sort of millennial echo of Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver (whose director, Walter Hill, has a voice cameo in Baby Driver), or noting that the construction of scenes in which Doc (Kevin Spacey) briefs his criminal underlings on the plans for their next job, are reminiscent of another heist-gone-wrong film: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

By under-serving deeper meaning and symbolism, Baby Driver opens itself up to the accusations that it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. But when the sound and fury is this enjoyable, does it matter?

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Thoughts

Terry Gross’s ground rules for interviewing

Terry Gross was on the Longform podcast this week, and she discussed the ground rules she lays down for her subjects before their interview:

  • This isn’t live and isn’t airing today, so avoid saying “yesterday”, “today”, “last week”, etc. Go for absolute dates and times if you can.
  • If you get half way through an answer and misspeak or think of a better way to get across what you mean, stop yourself and start the answer again. Just start with a full sentence for the purposes of editing.
  • If I get too personal, stop me and we can move on to something else.
  • If I get a fact wrong, feel free to interrupt and correct me. I can then fix the mistake and it won’t go to air.

She says that these ground rules aid in making the guest comfortable and alleviates some of the pressure they might feel, especially if they’re able to take do-overs.

Equally, it makes clear that the guest has no control over the edit or what happens to the audio after the interview is over.

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Media 1, Thoughts

My weekly media moment

In our Workshop this week we were encouraged to consider a “weekly media moment” – an interesting or instructive encounter we had with some form of media. Last night I went to see a conversation between Ben Birchall and Starlee Kine at the Wheeler Centre on all things podcasting and storytelling.

I don’t know why but a lot of American podcast hosts are in town at the moment. PJ Vogt (of Reply All) appeared at the Sydney Writers Festival over the weekend, and Hrishikesh Hirway (of Song Exploder) will also be at the Wheeler Centre in a couple of weeks. Perhaps they’re on some kind of podcast host field trip, I’m not sure.

Starlee is a journalist, writer and radio producer with whom I first became familiar through her work with This American Life, where she worked as a story producer for over a decade. She’s something of a confessional storyteller: her radio stories generally revolve around events in her own life, and as such have an irresistibly charming personal touch to them. I find this kind of personal memoir to be among the absolute best form of media when done right, but unfortunately it’s very difficult to do right and can often result in boring, interminable waffling from people I don’t care about.

Last year Starlee wrote and produced the first season of her new podcast Mystery Show, which for many reasons I consider to be the best podcast ever made. It’s a complete reinvention of the form, differentiating itself from the accepted “formats” in common use, and Starlee’s personality and open, conversational nature give rise to some incredible conversations from unlikely places.

To hear her speak was wonderfully compelling. Among other topics she described the process she follows to create, develop and execute her ideas into finished form, which is something radio producers rarely do for competitive reasons. The thing that surprised me most was that Mystery Show existed as a pilot episode for two years while she searched for a platform that would take on the show. (Presumably This American Life passed on it to make Serial – probably a sound decision.)

I’d never really considered that creating a podcast pilot and trying to sell it (as a TV producer might do) could be one way to get a podcast idea off the ground. I’ve created a couple of podcasts in the past but they were small exercises between me and my friends, not intended to be treated too seriously, and we just kept pumping out episodes as quickly as we could make them.

Obviously in Australia there are no large-scale podcast networks like PRX or Radiotopia, which makes it difficult for Australians to sell podcast ideas (other than to Radio National), but since Science Vs made it to Gimlet Media last year it’s not out of the realm of possibility that an Australian podcast might again be picked up in the U.S.

Now I just need an idea…

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Media 1, Thoughts

Werner Herzog teaches filmmaking

The online education provider Masterclass has just announced that it has (somehow) convinced German filmmaker Werner Herzog to create a five-hour video seminar series on filmmaking. You can pre-enroll for the course now to get early access for US$90, which sounds pretty reasonable for five hours of listening to Herzog speak in his amazing German accent. I’ll definitely be signing up.

I can’t even imagine what he’ll be talking about, but if it’s anything like his list of advice for filmmakers it’s going to be amazing.

Werner Herzog’s Advice for Filmmakers

1. Always take the initiative.
2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.
3. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
4. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
5. Learn to live with your mistakes.
6. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern.
7. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.
8. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
9. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.
10. Thwart institutional cowardice.
11. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
12. Take your fate into your own hands.
13. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.
14. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory.
15. Walk straight ahead, never detour.
16. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver.
17. Don’t be fearful of rejection.
18. Develop your own voice.
19. Day one is the point of no return.
20. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.
21. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
22. Guerrilla tactics are best.
23. Take revenge if need be.
24. Get used to the bear behind you.

 

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