What do we need to address in the documentary unit, AKA "how do I get marks?"
- Using micro elements
- Addressing the difference between reality and fiction
- Using explicit examples from Stories We Tell
- Present a substantiated opinion backed up with evidence
What is a documentary?
- A documentary is a genre of film that attempts to documents reality through presenting true stories
- A type of film that is used to inform people, to provide people with information that is unfamiliar, and present the audience with an experience that is not typical of the average person
- A true story told creatively, but still presenting a certain degree of authenticity
- A documentary documents. It is proof that something happened
TrueAuthenticReal Reality
Why? To provide information, and to encode stories and experiences through the medium of film
Documentaries present a particular experience to the spectator, and perhaps lack the escapist potential of narrative cinema. Often documentaries are about a particular subject, and therefore do not have universal appeal
Conventions: the building blocks of genre
Other words for conventions include iconography and paradigms and paradigmatic features
Conventions of documentaries include…
- Interviews/talking heads
- Voiceover
- Use of ‘real’ footage/stock footage/news footage/phone footage/found footage
- Statistics, facts, graphics
- Handheld cinematography
- Low quality footage
- Shakeycam
- Unknown actors/lack of actors
- Recreations of events, usually clearly labelled
- Real, unglamourous locations
- Presenter
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| Metz usually illustrated the idea of the indexical bond through an image of a revolver. However, a nicer and maybe more useful image is this still from a kid opening their new Nintendo 64 on Christmas day in 199x. Why record such a mundane event? And what happens to this event when we record it? For Metz, not only is it made 'real' through the process of recording, it also reinforces the importance of the event and the object being received. This was the most important moment in these kids lives. |
Christian Metz and the indexical bond
- The indexical bond refers to the process of authentication that is constructed through taking a picture. It creates a physical bond, and makes the object real.
- The film semiotician Christian Metz argued that a photo of a revolver isn't just 'a revolver'. It is an ideological statement, literally 'here is a revolver'. The producer has constructed a message, a statement of the importance of the object.
- So the process of filming things makes Stories We Tell important. But, is it real?
Initial discussion
Keywords and descriptions
- Non-chronological
- Memory
- TRUTH
- REALITY
- Stories
- Mediation
- Frustrating
- Depressing
- The score is repetitive, depressing, and even frustrating. The ‘olde-timey’ piano score is often overwhelming, and constructs a sense of depression, and engenders a sense of drama.
- Anchorage - where meaning is ‘weighed down’ for the spectator through the use of film language. The use of depressing music in SWT clearly anchors a sense of melancholy and nostalgia
- The style of the film often constructs an underrated and frequently anticlimactic mode of address. The narrative itself is often straightforward and perhaps even obvious, and plot twists are often delivered in a monotone or deadpan delivery. By relegating the importance of twists and standard narrative convention, Polley gives each extended family an opportunity to tell their own story, even if it completely contradicts someone else’s version of events.
- “My recollections may be faulty, but I’m not going to lie” - Harry
- This line calls in to question the idea of objective truths, with various characters presenting contradictory narratives. However, the version of events which is constructed is somewhat unremarkable. There is no murder, no particularly dramatic events, and Michael even seems to be somewhat happy with Harry sleeping with his wife!
- So why make such an embarrassing and intimate film? To explore the human condition, of what makes us human. The title of the film, stories we tell, suggests that our nature as humans is constructed through the stories that we tell about each other.
- Dianne is the one character that does not have a voice, however, she is the entire focus of the film