Perhaps most striking about Pawel Powlikowski’s piece on documentary cinema is the cynical accuracy with which he predicts the rise in popularity of reality television, it is bizare to note that documentary movements like cinema verité, once reverred as paragons of integrety in filmmaking, may now find their place in the lowest common denominator of popular television, being as they are, cost effective to produce and easy to engage with. Furthermore, is bares noting that Powlikowski firmly states that the purpose of documentary film as he sees it, is not to neatly catagorise or resolve subject matter but to disturb and intrigue audiences, displaying the paradoxes, ambiguities and conflicts which exist between situations and characters, it would indeed prove valuable to bear this in mind as the course progresses, as my natural tendency would be to attempt to shape the footage I have collected into a rigidly predetermined brief, ignoring all that which does not support the contention I had hoped to establish.

An aspect of the documentary medium which has proven persistently fascinating to me has been the scope which is created within the genre to pluck individual stories and their unique eccentrities from a broader issue or contention. For me, ‘End of the Line’ serves as particularly poignant and effective example of such a notion. Indeed while the film’s creators make it clear in their treatment that they are working to juxtapose the desolate, isolated landscape of the film’s setting and the lonely lifestyle of its residents with the percieved tranquility and conviviality of small town life, it is the small vignettes which are created by the film’s interviewees which prove most notable. Indeed, getting the impression from the film’s treatment that the group entered the project with a somewhat evolved vision of the film’s findings proved quite frustrating to me, as I was left to wonder what other quirks and anecdotes the film’s cast might have come up with had some kind of overarching contention not been imposed. From a pragmatic point of view, it makes sense to shoot footage with a clear idea of one’s goals and purposes in mind, however were the task to have been completed without any time constraints, it would be interesting to observe themes and connections emerging organically between the film’s subjects (certainly however, one might say the group had ‘achieved what they set out to do’). With regard to the technical aspects of the piece, I thought the film was beautifully shot and the soundscape it featured was complex and captivating without being overpowering or distracting.