TMA 273 - Press Pause Play

This beautifully shot film couldn't have come at a better time. Press Pause Play expertly explores the post industrial creative world. The film seamlessly and navigates the complexities of the democratization of media production. It does this by engaging with individuals who have not only found ways to navigate the new age of global connectivity, but have even capitalized on it. These stories are deepened when juxtaposed with industry veterans who have witnessed the crumbling of the media establishment.

The Filmmakers did an excellent job with representing the changes across the gamut of artistic mediums. Though ultimately affected in similar ways, the changes in Film, music, design, and performance arts due to technological advances and the internet are nuanced. The film represented the respective challenges of producing quality material in this creative climate fairly and adequately. An example of this was the discussion  of whether or not the masters of cinema would have made it in the modern system of self-promotion and click obsessed networks. The modern filmmaker needs to ask herself why she is attending film school. It is no longer to learn the craft. The film explains that as far as tradition is concerned, "craft is dead", meaning technology levels the playing field.

I found the film to be near perfection as far as seamless and interesting viewing is concerned. A few moments felt strangely elongated and slow moving, which didn't seem to complement the themes of rapid change. Particularly the scenes shot in Tokyo felt unnecessary and uncomplimentary. 

Ultimately this film or at least the conversation of where the artist should be placed in a culture of endless art, should be on every media conscious persons radar. Even more so for the young budding filmmaker.

TMA 273 - Alan Berliner's The Sweetest Sound

Every once in a while I find a film that explores an idea that is so universal and commonplace that I can't believe someone made a film about it. My disbelief doesn't come out of the notion that the film's premise isn't worth being a film, but rather that I can hardly believe that other filmmakers didn't come up with the idea first. I think that is a great strength of Alan Berliner's. He has a wit strong enough to carry you through films about the most personal and equally universal stories. This knack of his was excellently demonstrated in The Sweetest Sound.

The film was comprised of what could be described as vignettes. These vignettes are constructed by archival footage and interviews of Alan Berliner, the director of the film, as well as 13 other Alan Berliners. These vignettes converge on the singular idea of names. How do names give us identity and shape our personalities. They way the film is constructed mirrors in a way the manner in which all the Alan Berliners congregate for the first time, that being, 13 individuals, arriving to create one body.

The film was fascinating in the way it exposed the commonalities shared amongst the name sharers, ultimately answering questions I didn't know I had. For instance, do people named Jared inherently like the color green, is it something that comes with the name? What baggage do we give others when we name them? These are important questions that the film raised.

Perhaps the film's strongest point was the clever sound design. Shaped around the computer, the noises throughout the film added to the theme of resolving identity amidst a sea of individuals, especially individuals that happen to share your name. The sounds ushered the action along, and emphasized repetition, perhaps one of  the film's more subtle points of consideration.

Oh and of course Alan Berliner - that is the director Alan - got the www.alanberliner.com domain. Evidence of his forward thinking filmmaking.

TMA 273 - An Unreasonable Man

An Unreasonable Man is a fairly dense, intricately composed documentary. Aside from seeming rather run of the mill in its talking head nature, it manages to accomplish a number of things quite well. Perhaps the most important of these being the surprising efficiency in which the filmmakers expose an unprecedentedly successful activist career.

The use of the word ‘efficient’ might be questionable considering the documentary's two hour long run time. In spite of this, I found the film to be quite concise and fast moving, packing in impressive amounts of information. There were very few shots that lingered for more than a couple seconds, often times with talking heads finishing the sentences of the previous speaker. Initially this seemed a bit overwhelming, but it was understandably practical in the sense that it allowed for both supporters and detractors of Ralph to have screen-time and cover plenty of ground.

The filmmakers did a decent job at allowing individuals on both sides of Nader's story to express opinions. However, rarely did they let any negative claim go undefended.

Perhaps due to the rapid pace of editing and dissemination of opinions, the beginning of the film was hard for me. It was hard to discern what the film was really going to be about, besides just Nader in general. For instance it started with a series of individuals greatly opposing Ralph which set a sentiment that was a bit misleading. However, once the film made it past the scenes describing Nader as a youth, the film found its paces was engaging.

The filmmakers used music and subtle sound effects quite well. For example, I noticed the sound of a book closing anytime an excellent counter argument was made to disprove a critique of Nader. It was as though the filmmakers were saying “case closed” or “finished.” Perhaps it was a bit manipulative, but it was an indication or rather a manifestation of the filmmaker’s voice. Additionally I really enjoyed the inclusion of the celebrity interactions with Nader. The polarized moments with Michael Moore and the musicians were interesting considering their drastic loyalty shifts. Lastly, I’m a Bill Murray fan, so seeing him unexpectedly was nice and gave the film greater sense of credibility for me.

Ultimately the film made me question the ways in which I am engaging with my society as a consumer, and wether or not I am participating in democracy. This alone made the film a success for me.

The Documentary Idea

With This In Mind from Jared Jakins on Vimeo

The documentary idea has proven itself to be one of heightened awareness, at least for me, this semester has fortified the sense that documentary has far reaching abilities to perceive and expound. I have found documentary to be sharing in the most unapologetic sense, often unflinching and ever affording of a cathartic experience.

Throughout the various films we engaged with, we have been exposed to a wide gamut of human struggle, such as an artist’s political struggle to remain uncensored in his quest for critical inquiry of his government, the socioeconomic struggles of communities in inner city Chicago battling with pandemic violence, and even physical struggles that saturate our human experiences. The documentary ideas, as explained by Dean Duncan, of being a voice to the voiceless, of exalting the mundane and everyday, and most poignantly, transcendence through tribulation, have created a strong obligation to represent such struggles properly in my attempt to work within the medium.

As a result of these reiterations and realizations, the documentary idea for me is the opportunity for the individual to engage with oneself, with society, and in turn for society to engage with itself. All or any of this, in a manner that allows for the expansion of heart and mind.

My film With This In Mind, employs a heightened sense of awareness and melds many of the doc modes we have studied into a loose essayistic meditation on what it means to make marks on the world and to record the marks that the world makes on us and our communities. It draws respectively on the autobiographical, the reflexive, the poetic, and the essayistic mode to hopefully convey a few ideas and feelings.

Thematically the film is interested in examining three interconnected documentary ideas. First, what is my engagement with recording and documenting my surroundings, secondly how do I engage with my society as a recorder, and lastly, how does community engage with itself concerning the act of creating and recording instances of self-evidence.

The film opens by dwelling on my own personal experiences, with the hope that they can act as a vehicle for a universal concept, experience, or idea. Documentary, building on the traditions of memoir, can turn the personal into access for very diverse ideas and experiences by simply sharing the self, the autobiographical. This is the process of expansion through investigation of the particular, or in my case, a rather singular view.

The choice to include the migrant sheepherders is an attempt to present viewers with a far reaching instance of the need to be remembered.  The marked trees themselves become documents and speak for the voiceless and oppressed. The trees become both traces and recordings of a community's desire to be remembered. They are in a way both the form and the function. The film is effective only if the viewer can, even for a moment, empathize with the experience of the ‘other’. Though the opportunity the film provides is brief, the viewer can experience one of the aforementioned strengths of documentary, the potential for catharsis.

The film concludes by broadening the scope of consideration in the way we leave our marks on the world. It inspects the isolation that we may impose upon ourselves, and perhaps offers solutions to the best and most productive ways of leaving evidence of our existence in the world: that of engaging with community and interpersonal relationships. The film includes the realization that the act of recording and the act of marking, just like the documentary process of gathering and distributing actuality, is in some ways one in the same.

Multi-Modal - Doc Mode Activity 3

Minding the essayistic potential for swift mental travel, I approached this mode activity with the intent to bridge the neighborly autobiographical and essay doc modes. The result is consciously multi-modal, exploiting the loose associations of the essayistic mode, akin to the films of Chris Marker, though clearly not as liberal in movement of ideas. The film centers on reflections of the past and my own experience as a filmmaker and family chronicler, thus utilizing my own life and practices as evidence in an investigation of recording memories. The film could be argued into both modes exclusively, but with sacrifice to the fact that is satisfies the requirement of both, being easily classified as a 'personal-essay'. It is a memoir, using actual footage of the events being contemplated, the meeting place of past and present. 

The Essayistic Mode

The essayistic mode, like a stone thrown into water, starts with a point of insertion then spreads out concentrically, with splashes here and there starting new points of departure and exploration. Fox describes the essayistic mode similarly to how one might hear the form described in the writing tradition. It is the testing or proving of an idea. It begins with a curiosity and is developed across vast interconnections with varying degrees of solidity and personal relation.

The film, Something To Do With The Wall, exemplifies the testing of ideas. The film is concerned with a loose association of generally anything that is concerned with the once Check Point Charlie in Berlin. The film is not concerned with driving a point or argument, but rather simply investigates any sort of anecdotal element of the place. Many of the essayistic moments in the film come from the filmmakers making associations between the wall and themselves, family/parenting, and especially their own son. They explore ideas of 'place' in the anthropological sense, as something humanizing.

Perhaps more strongly an essayistic piece, is Chris Marker's Remembrance Of Things To Come. Marker explores a history of France through the associations between surrealist art, the first and second world wars, and the photography of Denise Bellon. Though these things are indeed connected in history, their connections become more profound through the filmmaker's loose associations. He makes assertions such as surrealist art having prophetic qualities, evident in Bellon's photography, foretelling the imminent second world war.

Marker's film employ a seemingly more flexible mode of exploring and montaging ideas as did McElwee and Levine. As a result, the Marker film's at times are fleeting and abstract, the associations and diversions being minuscule and irrelevant, or grandios and profound.

Autobiographical Mode

            Addressing perhaps one of the more frequently encountered moral or ethical dilemmas concerning the creation of documentary, the autobiographic mode attempts to navigate the problems of how to truthfully represent individuals and their experiences. It approaches this navigation by turning the camera around onto the producer, the filmmaker, bypassing the risks of representing others and their opinions as a third party. In so doing, Fox explains that the "distance between producer and subject is diminished", and the representation of the subject can be uniquely first-person.

This mode naturally positions the filmmaker as a central part of the film not just as creator but as a performer/social actor. The filmmaker becomes an authoritative insider to a historical reality. The filmmaker's existence is scrutinized and offers itself as a gateway for others to investigate larger social or historical questions.  This authority may come from a varying degrees of intimacy with the subject and like a memoir will be interested in doing as Emily Dickenson wrote, by “tell[ing] the whole truth, but tell[ing] it slant.”  An interesting example of this is found in Persepolis. The film’s stylized representation of historical reality presents ‘truth’ told ‘slant’ through the lens of the writer and narrator of the film. The film’s highly subjective voice is validly authoritative due to the inherent autobiographic elements. Or in other words, Marjane Satrapi is undoubtedly the authority on her own life, who has right to challenge a representation of her experiences? 

Another example of the Autobiographical mode can be found in Sadie Benning's A Place Called Lovely. The filmmaker provides specific images and stories from her own youth to express ideas and commentary on larger social issues. For instance, she acts as a sort of case study for many of the social problems she introduces, such as child bullying and homophobia.