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. 

The Reflexive Mode - Doc Mode Activity 2

(Ben, I will email you the password to the video. It has been requested to be kept private.)

The reflexive mode of documentary offers a unique challenge to both filmmaker and audience. It allows  the filmmaker to address contrivance outright and perhaps give a more honest representation of reality. By this I mean that one who admits deceit is more honest than one who denies it or avoids the conversation entirely. The audience is then proffered with the task of discerning what is revealed illusion or simple contrivance due to the lack of illusion. In my film I chose a subject who wanted to create a film with me, one who agreed to play an active part in shaping it and agreeing to be filmed as the subject during the shaping process.

I discovered that making a film in this manner creates potential for great fidelity and simultaneous censorship, it is as Barnouw puts it, "a reckless notion". Though the filming process is rich with actuality, the editing process becomes the invisible  barrier of true and honest delivery of reality. It is therefore important, as Vertov exemplified in Man With A Movie Camera to address and present this portion of the filmmaking process. With the inclusion of this aspect of my film, the film becomes more about itself than anything else, in spite of the amount of self induced or otherwise needed censorship and revision. The result is as Barnouw states "a heightened awareness" by dissolving illusion.

In the case of this film, the subject became increasingly offended with the material being produced of us making the film. Though the film was initiated as making a film about making a film of the subject. With time the subject disliked the informal nature that the film took on as it grew increasingly reflexive. This in turn, through many revisions and layers of filming, and filming the reactions to what was filmed, created a highly sensored self-aware film. The film could no longer truly be about the subject, only the film itself. The film is far more self-aware than it would allow itself to be shown. A strange experience of reflexivity.