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In writing a summary of my personal reflections regarding this semester’s learning outcomes, it is helpful to highlight some of the key moments of personal and collaborative breakthroughs. As such, this reflection will feature several links to my own previous blogposts as the basis from which I will retrospectively analyse my personal and cumulative learning process.

Significantly, throughout applying experimental sensibilities to politically themed documentary films, my media skills and collaborative practices were enriched in three key ways.
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How do we make a documentary that is both political and poetic?

As a praxes drawing its epistemological submissions directly from a visual representation of the world, the documentary film provides its practitioners with a unique opportunity to reflectively and reflexively engage with ideological perspectives. Recognising this is fundamental to the creation of an ethical filmmaking practice, as it holds accountable the documentary form itself for the various pedagogies is employs and disseminates through its lens.

From this point, the overarching question of how to insert a political ideology into the documentary image is thus one of a formal concern. Such a point has been recognised by critics who attribute the representational properties of the form as directly responsible for the ‘vague, unformulated, untheorised’ ideological biases manifesting through imagery (Comolli & Narboni 1999, p. 755). Consequently, in order to move against this tendency of inertia it is important to keep within the forefront of our practice a critical understanding of the film form’s indexicalisation of the world. In doing so, we not only enable ourselves the ability to manipulate the formal structure for pragmatic and ideological means, but further yet, for our own artistic and ethical expressions.

Incorporating this view into my practice, throughout this semester I have attempted to produce media forms which apply an experimental sensibility onto such formal properties including: re-appropriated found footage, non-diegetic use of sound and imagery, fragmented spatial and temporal duration, and an associational structure which negates expository or narrative for the more ambiguous qualities of poetic interpretation. In the following reflection, I will critically explore some of the formal experimentations and limitations evidenced by my earlier works. Specifically, I will contrast the experimental approaches adopted by each brief in the context of other students’ media, in an attempt to recognise more integrated filmmaking practices which are as formally experimental as they are thematically political.

https://vimeo.com/163665311

Reflecting on our first Project Brief 3 Tech-No-Logic, I felt my group successfully employed an experimental usage of re-appropriated footage and audio narration. Chiefly, through Tech-No-Logic’s reappropriation of mass media footage and mainstream pop music, we experimentally reconceptualised the expository mode’s inclinations to ‘propose a perspective, advance an argument, [and] recount history’ (Nichols 2001, p. 105). Indeed, we subverted this paradigm and inserted within it our own political commentary- that being, first world society’s misappropriation and unethical dumping of e-waste in peripheral zones, namely West Ghana.

Specifically, through hijacking the sleek visual vernacular typifying large technology brands (i.e. Apple and Microsoft) and re-contextualising them within a subversive and critical framework, Tech-No-Logic was an attempt at poetically reworking the marketing facades of large corporations in order to reveal their promotion of an unethical, technologically dependent, wasteful consumer culture. Indeed, by hijacking the very aesthetics employed for the marketing and promotion of such technologies, this documentary was one attempt at reclaiming the overarching Capitalist expository documentary- new media advertisement- and in place; inserting its own critiques vis-à-vis juxtaposition and montage.

Yet filmmaking is not only a teleological exercise in representing ideology, but a performative process. For example, the inclusion of such factors as subjects’ informed consent are often deemed integral to the process of ensuring the maintenance of subjects’ legal and moral rights over their own representations (Nash 2012, p.320). Further yet, we might argue that a subject’s active participation within a filmmaking practice is fundamental to the resistance of their own oppression and under-representation within an overarching political discourse.

Such a point was brought up early in the semester through our viewing of John Smith’s experimental documentary Blight (1994-6, UK); a film which rhythmically abstracts its working class subjects’ interviews in a formal echoing of the loss experienced by the community’s collective displacement through London’s urban sprawl. Evidently, to make a documentary both political and poetic, it is not only a manipulation of formal stylistics which must occur but a mediated inclusion of the documentary subjects themselves. In this way, Tech-No-Logic was structurally flawed, as its very components (found footage) formally negate the active participation of key subjects- the communities living in West Ghana. Hence, despite ‘no interviews’ being a constraint of Project Brief 3’s criteria, the poetic enunciation of subjects’ voices (metaphorically or literally) remains within the realm of possibility.

This was made evident when viewing other class members’ work. For example, in Ruby and Patrick’s documentary on housing development, despite not actively interviewing members of the neighbourhood, they managed to incorporate a thematically appropriate poem centred on dislocation and loss. By weaving together spoken poetry and cogent imagery; their film was afforded a profound emotional tone, something between pathos and ennui. Hence, through their employment of a literal and figurative understanding of filmic poetics, their documentary was able to formally enunciate a sense of loss without an explicit voice of god narration or interview excerpts. To these ends, this technique can be viewed as both poetic and experimental due to their unique treatment of the overarching limitation: ‘no interviews’.

Consequently, drawing upon Ruby and Patrick’s usage of poetic formal approaches to sound, in Project Brief 4: Flow I sought to more directly integrate formal poetics with political commentary through unconventional treatment of interview/voice over techniques. Chiefly, this was achieved through the direct inclusion, albeit experimental editing of various interview excerpts from our documentary’s subjects; a technique inspired in part by Smith’s Blight (1994-6). Evidently, by broadening our thematic concerns to the level of lived experiences of menstruation, my group was able to collate together a range of anecdotal material in order to represent various differing perceptions within a short time frame.

Perhaps here, it is important to reflect upon my groups’ embodied experiences with the documentary’s topic of periods- a factor which further enabled us to creatively abstract the audio footage without an exploitative paradigm emerging. For example, by sourcing our interview subjects within our own social circles we were able to stylistically manipulate the audio materials without othering or fetishitically conceiving our subjects’ representations. For example, if we did not have pre-established relationships with our interviewees, an experimental treatment of their stories might be viewed as ethically problematic due to the fact that large portions of their statements were intertwined, and thus, to some degree decontextualised. However, such a fact was mitigated due to a deliberate structural approach which negated outright visual fidelity for a more poetic and metaphorical form.

This was achieved through our formal decision to negate literal representation and explicit delineation of our interviewees and their identities (gender, socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity, etc). In place of this, we utilised a mixture of found footage and shot footage which was non-photorealistic, having been placed underneath a silhouette mask of underwear. As such, by formally omitting a visual representation of individuals in favour of an unconventional treatment of subject depiction, Flow focuses instead upon the auditory unification of differing lived experiences through visual poetics- a political approach which seeks to challenge the essentialist conflation of cis-gendered women with menstruation, as much as it does metaphorically associate menstruation with un-stigmatised natural phenomena.

Perhaps it is from this point that we might conclusively, though not definitively, suggest that experimental documentary filmmaking is as much political through its processes as it is due to thematic preoccupations. Indeed, by reimagining a filmmaking practice more tethered to a active participation and performative ethics, media practitioners might move towards a more experiential and experimental understanding of the world we seek to re-present.

References:

Comolli, JL & Narboni, J 1999, ‘Cinema Ideology Criticism’, in L Braudy & M Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism, 5th edn, e-book, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 752-759, viewed 25 May 2016, <https://equella.rmit.edu.au/rmit/file/961f3fcd-b414-1d92-9e11-073af9415e54/1/31259009996666.pdf>.

Nash, K 2012, ‘Telling stories: the narrative study of documentary ethics’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 318-331, viewed 2 June 2016,
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.693765>

Nichols, B 2001, Introduction to Documentary, e-book, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, viewed 30 May 2016, <http://www.rmit.eblib.com.au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=129783&echo=1&userid=kpJFh7oGLWK4Q9L59zwl4Q%3d%3d&tstamp=1464665062&id=9934EC6DC9D5E874F9122EAB0200F2C6A847246C>.

Compiling the visuals have been substantially more difficult than originally thought. This was made evident chiefly through the fact that

a) Much of the stock footage available online of natural phenomena are watermarked or low quality

b) Ruby’s shot footage and the found footage still require some unification in terms of their temporal ordering

c) The projector sequence was anticlimactic

Perhaps most notable of these three in terms of my own learning process is C) the projector debacle. Having borrowed and hauled the necessary camera/tripod gear from the tech department to my home, I set up projecting the found footage onto a white pair of underwear to some dissatisfaction. Immediately evident was the strange sizing of the underwear as a canvas and ill-fitting scale of the projections which seeped onto the white wall behind, resulting in an illegible warped effect. Brainstorming and troubleshooting within minutes, I further devised a cut out of the shape of an underwear silhouette on white paper against a black background. This seemed to work more effectively, with the projections only bleeding slightly onto the black paper and thus, while oddly shaped, still remained mostly visible.

However, upon entering the editing suits and uploading the footage, Haylee and I agreed that the projections seemed blurry and thus were not suited towards our general purpose in creating an aesthetically engaging and beautiful rhetorical film composition. As our documentary’s political undertone necessitates an engaging and de-stigmatising visual apparatus, blurry footage will not do. So we scrapped it fairly brutally. Yet in loyalty to our original idea of the underwear as the site of an ephemeral and natural / cyclical process, I employed my photoshop skills (rusty as they were) to quickly devise a mask through which we could have our imagery appear within. Or in other words, I morphed the shape of the screen itself in order to give the illusion of footage appearing within the boundaries of an underwear. Liam further helped us to apply the texture of  sheet (from Ruby’s footage) to the backdrop, a factor which brought the footage from a strange inanimate 2D style white backdrop, to a more nuanced and flickering canvas.

Additionally, this week has been informative in terms of the amount of imagery required. For instance, some of the feedback we received in class was to cut the audio down to the most interesting statements. In doing so, we created more room for contemplation; a technique which I think enhances our documentary’s poetic approach to rhetoric, as it favours the ambiguous over the explicit, didactic, or expository forms which often characterise more rigorous forms of commentary. As such, we were left with gaps between audio that required footage but lacked any audio cues.

Through editing, we resolved this by employing Ruby’s footage of her hand crushing fruits, speeding their temporal duration and having them reverse in a cyclic play-through reverse play-through pairing. Doing so felt in line with our documentary’s theme of cycles and flow, and afforded the film form a more subtle and spacious emotional landscape.

This week Haylee, Ruby and myself have continued to refine the audio. Having collected together all the necessary interview footage, we found it was easiest to group together excepts of statements from each of our interviewees under specific themes. Doing so helped the editing process yield a rough draft for our documentary. This was specifically helpful in the context of our visuals; as Ruby is still filming some fruit footage, and my collected found footage is still very roughly cut.

Perhaps one of the most challenging things made evident during this process was how to structure the visual imagery to the audio files. Indeed, as we have taken an associational form in terms of our filmmaking structure, the film’s diegetic sound does not literally correspond to any imagery (i.e. the interviewees are unpictured, and their anecdotes are not re-created). As a result, much of our editing so far has been about uniting the material under general thematic or emotional tones. We decided this was a priority as it will be the audio’s rhetoric which guides and probes certain metaphorical imagery. For instance, an interviewee might speak of the pain experienced during menstruation, and thus, the imagery will reference in some metaphorical / associational tone, the concept of pain or discomfort which occurs in nature (such as a bee sting, or a venus fly trap).

As the imagery will be a case of trial and error in order to construct a cohesive and efficative correspondence between sound cues and resulting imagery, we chose specifically to start with drafting an audio instead of footage. The reasoning behind this decision was the observation that it will be our interviewee’s personal accounts / lived experiences which bring the our project its political impetus. Thus, in prioritising the sound first we ensure a substantial basis on which to further enhance our ability to deconstruct the political / social discourse on periods, and people who experience periods, as taboo or ‘other’.

Continuing to gather material for our Project Brief 4 documentary, now under the working title Flow, Haylee, myself, and now Ruby have begun to compile and brainstorm some formal frameworks from which to work off.

Specifically, we have assigned different roles and tasks to each group member in order to more efficiently gather the necessary material while maintaining a consistent and collaborative dynamic. For example, while all three of us have compiled a list of two interview candidates and approved each other’s choice (in line with our desire for a diverse representation of subjects), each of us will separately record the footage. Such a point is slightly risky as despite using the same gear (zoom H4n), depending on the room the candidate is interviewed in as well as the interviewer’s technological proficiency, some of the audio quality may vary. However, we weighed these factors in the decision making process and agreed that in having a familiar interviewer, our subjects might be more emotionally comfortable in sharing specific anecdotes and personal experiences that would otherwise not be in a high-pressure or unfamiliar interviewing situation.

Additionally, I have taken on the role of gathering found footage of natural phenomena and other timelapse sequences. This was decided upon as I have been the group member responsible for suggesting the aesthetic approach of projecting imagery onto an underwear. This stylistic decision, while still in its early stages, appeal to me as a) I have a projector and am familiar with using it in experimental video art and b) I liked the idea of creating a new canvas within the screen itself. Chiefly, by filming a projected sequence of imagery on an underwear, we create the metaphorical association of the site where period occurs (between one’s legs) with the visually striking imagery of natural paradigms (such as tides and flowers blooming and decaying).

It felt justified to further employ a pair of underwear as the canvas; as just as one’s period is an acute moment in the menstrual cycle, so too is it just another part of people’s identity. For example, just as people with their periods don’t wear sanitary pads or tampons all month, so too do tides rise and fall; but the beach doesn’t simply dry up. Evidently also, the silhouette of an underwear is quite striking as it is unique in its shape, and has the ability to signify bodies without necessarily needing to be worn. This is important in the context of our documentary approach as we did not want to focus on embodying the experience of a period through forthright representations of people.

This is largely because we do not have the time or scope to necessarily involve the number of lived experiences that would be necessary in a holistic understanding of the subject matter. For example, we are limited by the interview candidates available to us and as a result, do not want to create a singular or definitive image of what a person who has a period looks like. Indeed, this is the very discourse we are attempting to deconstruct. Further yet, in not providing the images of our interview candidates we reiterate the impossibility of knowing who has their period from those who don’t – a critical choice which reinforces our motivation to challenge the essentialist tendencies surrounding the discourse, marketing, and general social assumption of female bodies and gender identity.

Finally, Ruby has been tasked with filming the footage of fruits. This is largely attributed to the fact that she has a camera and was keen on experimenting over the weekend with various fruits. Hence, in employing imagery akin to that of a vagina such as the pomegranate and the papaya, the formal justification behind Ruby’s footage will be to further associate the experience of mensuration with the daily happenings of plants; as fruits are after all, their reproductive organs. Additionally, it enables us to “show” the bodily function without delving into a literal representation; something we decided to move from as a result of both the formal constraints of the brief as well as the implications (i.e. not being able to screen this publicly as well as the difficulty in finding such footage with the necessary consent; both factors which present more ethical issues than they do help illustrate our argument).

Consequently, the next week will be spent compiling our individual tasks together in class in the beginning stages of drafting a formal composition for Flow.

Pictured above: A mood board I created and showed during our in-studio pitch

This week Haylee and I pitched our concept for Project Brief 4: ‘What do we want?’ documentary. Originally interested in the tampon tax, over Week 8 we decided to take a more general approach to theme; as we felt that a documentary on the tampon tax would be difficult to experiment with formally due to the necessary expository which would have to occur. Specifically, we would have to outline the legislation and potentially feature a range of vox pops in order to gather a consensus on the lived experiences of people with periods; something we felt was quite limiting in regards to potential for stylistic experimentation.

However, as we continued this discussion we arrived at the overarching theme of periods; and the ways in which they are stigmatised in public discourse as unsanitary, unpleasant, dirty, and in some cases; shameful. Readily, this sort of sentiment is central to upholding such legislation as the tampon tax; which view sanitary pads and tampons as luxury consumer products rather than necessary  for individuals’ health. Hence, by incorporating a broader subject choice of the societal conception of periods, we can engage a range of potential sources outside of Australia for our documentary. Specifically, it is our goal to deconstruct the (il)logic of the perception which views a natural process of the female body’s reproductive cycle as ‘dirty’ or unnatural.

We seek to do this through an associational form which employs natural footage such as insects, plants, and other conventionally beautiful imagery. Compounding this imagery, we hope to feature a range of voice overs from people with their periods in an anecdotal format. In drawing on the experiences from a range of demographics (age, sexuality, gender identity, socio-economic situations), our documentary attempts to provide a hollistic perspective on the fact that while some women have their periods, not all women do (such as transwomen); and further yet, not cis-gendered women do not have a monopoly over the bodily function, as transmen also may have their periods.

Subsequently, by approaching interview candidates from our own social circles and including a range of voices, our documentary will foreground a more universal and intersectional understanding of the roles and implications of being a person with a period in contemporary society.

FOUND FOOTAGE:

https://vimeo.com/163665311
SHOT FOOTAGE:

Approaching the due date for Project Brief 3, Haylee, Daniel and I have worked in unison to complete the necessary editing processes.

Specifically, we decided to head down to the editing suite to record overlapping voices for our shot footage documentary, Sign City. Chiefly, we decided to use voice overs in place of city soundscapes as it more closely replicated our original formal intention with the documentary itself; specifically, the pervasiveness and often repetitious quality of public signage. By employing our voices and editing them to an overlapping and increasingly overwhelming soundtrack, the documentary’s visuals were thus reiterated; a factor which enabled us to overcome the obstacle of some of the sign’s text being too long to read in the montage sequence.

In terms of our found footage documentary, I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday (after of class) re-editing the overarching structure. Having shown Tech-No-Logic to both Paul Ritchard and Van Rudd in Wednesday’s class, the advice given was largely one of appraisal. Specifically, Van Rudd praised the humorous undertone afforded by the films ‘whitewashed’ imagery and ‘middle-class’, if not slightly glib instrumental soundtrack.

Furthermore, the recent addition of ending the documentary with the Microsoft logo was well received as it enhanced what both Ritchard and Rudd noted as the sarcastic and ironic commentary on technology’s often sleek presentation in marketing footage. The only suggestion made by Ritchard was to include the diegetic sound footage from the new reel footage of the West Ghana junkyard, in order to further engage audiences into an immersive and empathic viewership of the subjects. However, Rudd contradicted this point as he highlighted the aggressive and sardonic tone achieved through the stark juxtaposition of pop music with images of extreme poverty.

As a consequence of this, I decided to insert specific newsreel footage of American news anchors reporting the e-waste situation West Ghana. I found that by disrupting the continuity and emotional tone of the pop music with sudden news segments, the documentary’s argument was elucidated more obviously. For example, prior the the news anchor footage, the sudden change to bleak imagery was stark but not immediately obvious in its argumentative impetus. As the film form is temporally limited to a few minutes, it thus became imperative to create a more explicit expository in order to enunciate the political commentary of the appropriated imagery more profoundly.

In retrospect of this week, I have substantially augmented my original understanding and application of political commentary in the documentary form. Specifically, through employing found footage and re-contextualising it in a subversive way, I learned that expository is sometimes necessary. Such expository might take the form in a voice over literally reading the diegetic text;  other times it might be an inclusion of such informational transmitters such as news anchors; ideologically inclined as they might be. Hence, by appropriating both marketing material (tech ads) and institutional media (news) in a deconstruction of hegemonic narratives of technology and its benefits in a Capitalist system, the documentary form is elevated to a platform of education and empowerment, both in its message and in its practice.

In this tutorial, Haylee, Daniel, and myself gathered in the editing suites to resume the drafting process of both our found footage and shot footage documentaries for Project Brief 3.

Having compiled the necessary advertisement imagery from the previous editing session, this tutorial was spent fine tuning some of the pacing and montage structuring. For example, some feedback given by Daniel and Haylee was to slow the montage / mash up imagery at the beginning in order to create a sense of anticipation without exhausting the audience from the outset. In lengthening some of the shots of technology-amidst-all-its-glib-glory and marrying it to the sweeping, candy sweet soundscapes of Coldplay’s Paradise (an Apple favourite band, one assumes), the general effect of satire is subtly achieved without being too explicit, as it mirrors the structure of many technology ads without bordering on blunt stroke mockery.

Further yet, as our documentary shifts in tone towards the end; highlighting the environmental and social pitfalls of large scale mass produced technology, by slowing the pace of the opening sequence, the attempted impact of the tonal shift is corroborated. The sticking point remains however, between maintaining the ‘energized’ quality (according to Liam) of our formal structure and slowing the pacing down in order to more acutely juxtapose the following imagery.

This class was perhaps the breaking (through) point of the documentary editing process for my group.

Having screened our initial found footage documentary in class, we found that our initial approach was, to be blunt, frankly ineffective. In attempting to appropriate and hijack the catharsis of watching iconic movie moment punchlines with intrusive sounds of technology, many ideas were promptly discarded.

Editing mostly at home, one of the most apparent problems with this structure was its lack of momentum. Indeed, having first compiled a range of movie moments and roughly editing them in somewhat of a fluid succession, the viewing made evident quickly an awkward pacing and tediousness. So, having wrestled with this structurally unbalanced approach, I attempted to hone in on one scene, and eventually arrived at the idea of using a dinner table scene from Alan Ball’s American Beauty (1999, USA).

In this, I appropriated the notification sounds prevelant in iPhones, Facebook, and other well known technological hardware/software interfaces, and weaved them into the scene in order the create a Brechtian alienation and emotional aggravation. The idea being that through watching the scene, audiences are positioned to reflect on the frustrating aspects of having their viewership constantly interrupted, and in addition, to bring an awareness to the common cultural motif of sitting down to a family dinner and inevitably having technology choke the flow of conversation- be it argument or pleasantries.

The in class screening yielded some obvious problems with this approach. Firstly, there was the general issue of people having not scene the film and hence not being causally engaged or invested in seeing Kevin Spacey’s character deliver his iconic spiel. Further yet, the scene seemed quite bizarre as a standalone decontextualised documentary. Chiefly, there was the lack of a fluid argument being delivered in which an audience upon immediate and unmitigated viewing, would be able to understand.

This was made apparent when most class members failed in an ability to respond or counter our argument.

As such, taking into considerations this feedback in class, Daniel and I went to the editing suites to brainstorm and deliberate our approach for the found footage documentary.

During this time, we really brought things back to basics and wrestled with our primary problem: what are we trying to say? The process was fairly tedious as we continued to circle around thematic concerns – technology, human connection, alienation, social networking, social media, and so forth – without any concise arguments. Yet, somehow in the paralysis of this brainstorming ambiguity, something clearly bifurcated from the cacophony as we settled upon the central idea: Technology is overrated.

In grounding our structure in a neatly delineated if somewhat ostensibly basic argument, the editing process was made a lot more manageable. Mostly, I spent the rest of the tutorial compiling advertisement imagery from technology (chiefly, phone and skype ads), hijacking the formal structure of a Microsoft Superbowl ad on the benefits of technology. We discussed with Liam some of the reasons behind the continued problems and failure of our original documentary idea, finally arriving at the conclusion that the documentary form / causal structure was trying too much to replicate / indexicalise audience’s experiences of intrusive technology, but in doing so, sort of projected a hollowed re-presentation of the argument rather than actually making a new one through manipulating audience’s aesthetic associations.

The latter is by far a much more pragmatic and wise formal approach as it breeds its tension from the context audiences bring with them, rather than needlessly having to create a context in which to then attempt some narrative or argumentative tension. Specifically as this task is limited to 3 minutes; time is the money, and it’s a more effective use of time to shorthand one’s argument through appropriating audiences’ aesthetic linguistics.

At the end of the editing session, the skeletons of a rough draft emerged. What remains is the fleshing process now. Thankfully however, our idea has reincarnated into a more lucid and achievable form, one that makes clear its perspectives.