One of this week’s topic is on non-narrative, so I’m going to talk about the documentaries and experimental film which are both non-narratives.
Experimental film are very unique compared to the mainstream cinema. I’ve recently watched two of them: La Jetée and Ballet Mechanique. Among the two, I prefer the former, La Jetée. Time-travel theme suits my taste and I love the narratives. Every shot is a still image that it reminds me of how we read comic books. It’s like the same technique, the same depending on the viewers’ imagination. An illusion of documentary was created in the movie through this demonstration of slices of frozen time. As images appear one by one on the screen, it felt like these events had happened before and that we were watching slides, explaining by someone who knew the story.
The Wizard of Oz is like the textbook for a typical mainstream movie. So I’d like to call experimental films the “non-Oz”. I didn’t quite understand the Ballet Mechanique, which gave me tension when I was watching it (due to the music, perhaps). The explanation in one of the readings for the week on enlightened me. It mentioned the mechanic feeling it expressed and how unnatural it would seem for the last shot of the woman. I suppose I did feel it a bit strange during the last shot after the mechanic impression the film had given me.
There are three forms for “non-Oz”: narrative, abstract and association. Ballet Mechanique is abstract, whereas La Jetée has a narrative form; and so doesThe Wizard of Oz. By comparing the three, I noticed that motifs and variations are significant in any type of films. In The Wizard of Oz, one of the motifs is the routine it follows every time Dorothy meets a new friend. “We’re off to see the wizard” song is always played. The film varies when we see different characters like the “evil wizard”. The mechanics of a girl’s smile is a motif in Ballet Mechanique, while the last shot is definitely a variation. In La Jetée, I get the sense that meeting the girl for the man is a repetition, but there’s a slight change every time he time travels. Motifs are easy to follow so that the audiences can understand, however, variations develops the film in creativity and to more profound meanings.
Except for experimental films, documentary is another type of film which presents real people, real story to the audiences. This may sounds objective, but some documentaries, with the manipulation of the director’s editing and selection, the production can be subjective. (In any case, filmmakers are just the people who communicate with film language, which makes it inevitable for them to add opinions even if they try to be objective.) Meanwhile, what can we make of the films like The Schindler’s List and The Imitation Game? Those stories really happened and the people involved actually did exist, except that the characters are actors. Those aren’t documentaries, but not completely fictions. The argument is brought up in Bordwell and Thompson’s book: Film Art: An Introduction and I think that we can call them non-fictions, just like how they divide genres in literature.
Grizzly Man, one of the documentaries I watched this week, is a great example for a compilation type of documentary. The German director, Werner Herzog, collected Treadwell’s footages shot when he was living among the bears(archival sources), and he also added clips of interviews with Treadwell’s friends and family. As for the form of this documentary, I am not quite sure. It is a narrative because we basically follows Treadwell’s everyday life with the bears until his tragic death. The director communicate with us a story of a man who believed that he was one of the Grizzly Bears, and who genuinely loved the bears and would die for them. However, the film is not entirely made up of Treadwell’s story. Due to those added materials, I can’t be 100% sure that it has a narrative form.
