The main theme of this chapter is the relationship between the director's motives and how they affect the audience. In the section about entitled "compound visions," MacDougall, introduces the idea of two premises, the first one being the perspectives of the film maker and the audience are different; no viewer usually has the same view as the director. One can then assume that the true meaning and purpose of the film as the director intended it, is never completely absorbed by the audience. As noted by MacDougall, the director and audience are affected differently by the film, "For the filmmaker, the film is an extract from all the footage shot for it, and a reminder of all the events that produced it. It reduces the experience onto a very small canvas. For the spectator, by contrast, by contrast, the film is not small but large: it opens onto a wider landscape." (page 27) The second premise mentioned is that film making is a form of expression or even extension of the filmmaker. The purpose of the film is closely attached to the filmmaker and the relationship of the filmmaker and the subject is that they are "apart" of each other; "in these moments, the subject's existence and the filmmakers are closely interwoven. To speak of the film subject at all is to speak of this shared space, willed with such intensity into the camera." (page30)
MacDougall makes a really interesting point on page 29, stating that "...the act of making a film is a way of pointing out something to oneself and to other, an active shaping of experience." This was one of the most profound statements in the reading for me because it is consistent with how we as the audience absorb what we see-creating assumptions and ideas based on what we take for the truth, after that he continues to break down how our knowledge is either transposed or displaced as we make sense of what we are viewing. It is through the motives of the filmmaker that our experiences when viewing are dependent on. How can we be sure that the footage we are seeing as close to the truth and "real" life as it can be?
Continuing to the section "the stars grow old," MacDougall examines that films can have consequences due to revisiting and "interpreting the reality to reflect my own perceptions" (page 37), no matter how hard you try to make something real and unbiased, there will always be someone who gets offended. Along with the discussions we've been having in class, it raises the question of why continue to use film? Can we depend on the filmmaker to give an accurate account of their subject while knowing that they are ultimately editing raw footage to get their point across?
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7 comments:
I found this chapter very interesting, but I also did find the section "The Stars Grow Old" interesting as well. MacDougall brought up another good point. He brings up Rouch's works and compares the differences. Rouch made a film in 1951 having to do with a hippopotamus. It starts off showing a loving, affectionate relationship between a man and a hippopotamus but then switches to shots of violent acts with this ani mal.We can all assume that this transition caused the viewer to have a negative reaction but the thing is is that Rouch had his own reason for creating such a film; maybe for shock value but either way the audience is impacted by the chosen scenes, not exactly the same feeling as Rouch would have felt, which is the whole point.
At the end of your post you asked why continue to use film? This was the theme from the reading that stood out the most to me. MacDougal writes "Indeed, in articulating their shots and sequences, films take on much of the clumsiness of language...Does the mixture of photography, movement, and editing make film any more thruthful than writing?" (MacDougal, Pg. 27) If this truly is the case why use film? Macdougal points out different reasons why film, just like every other form of documentation, is imperfect. as you explain in your post, film will never look the same to one person as it does to another, much less to a director and a member of the audience. The message that a director intends may be lost on the audience, but each viewer may understand something completely different, and just as relevent. Film is in this way like literature. An author may write something was a specific intention but that intent may never be fully understood by any reader, and the readers may in fact get something completely different from the text. I dont think that this makes the mediums of literature or film any less important or useful, it gives them the dimensionality to mean any number of things. The possibility for these two mediums to be interpreted in any possible way makes it possible to gain huge amounts of meaning from those who read the literature or watch the film. Film is an incredibly useful tool in anthropology, and I hope that people are not discouraged by its fallacies.
I like the analogy of film being a form of literature. It accounts for the biased presentation as well as the way the individual experiances it.
I found this reading to be really intresting. To go back to the original post, you mentioned that the filmmaker sees what has been left out and this forever effects the way they see their film. Right alongside that idea in the reading was the idea of the filmmaker choseing images that are representative of the subject, moments that capture the essense of the subject, and how by filtering through and selecting images, the film begins to look less like life and more like film. MacDougall expresses greif, to use the word he uses, over loosing entire dimensions of the subject due to legnth requirements. It seems that even in making a documentary the filmmaker is caught in the inescapable confines of film and images that are representitive of larger ideas.
~Lindsay
I believe that MacDougall's idea that the filmmaker views his film and sees what he "left out" is describing the fact that he is aware of the back story that prefaces the events the viewer is seeing. Because the viewer is absorbing the film as a whole, what is seen is believed absolute truth. This is also affected by the fact that "throughout the viewing of a film, it remains incomplete; but once it is over, it is gone, to be grasped in it's entirety only in memory." For the filmmaker, this memory may be blurred with the events that occurred outside of the window of film. He may be able to look back on his film in an "objective" manner, disregarding the way others may see things. This is the reason that the filmmaker cannot have the opportunity to see the film as the majority of viewers do until a large quantity of time has passed. This premise was the one that stood out to me most, and evidently to you.
In this chapter, MacDougall brings up a lot of different points. The main point, however, was the most interesting to me because it is so true. The director cant always get across what he wants to say to the audience, depending on how he shot it the audience can be horrified while the director intended it to be heart-warming. Even in our class this happened with the fighting dogs, our views were completely different, and who knows what the director himself intended.
I think that this article makes a good point that everyone no matter what will have a bias towards a film. It's very tough for a director to convey their exact message across to an audience. I personally think that it's not completely impossible for a viewer to take away the exact message the director intended, but it cannot happen with every viewer. The other good point made in this summary is that no matter what, somebody will get offended, even if that was not the authors intent.
I think it's important to remember that perfection is impossible as far as documentation goes. Especially in movies, nobody claimed perfection as far as I know. MacDougall even says this. It's about getting as close to perfection as one can get.
I also believe that the audiences interpretation has more effect on the meaning of the movie than MacDougall or this blog lets on.
And... I completely agree that someone will ALWAYS get offended, despite the filmmaker's intentions.
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