Monday, 24 February 2014

Documentary and Documentation Lecture notes

A document is considered a basic theoretical construct. It is everything which may be preserved or represented in order to serve as evidence for some purpose. The classical example provided by Suzanne Briet is an antelope: "An antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document, she rules. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence being used by those who study it. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents since the antelope itself is the primary document.
Challenging early conventions: the1960s 
 Direct Cinema in the US (D.A. Pennebaker, The Maysles Brothers, Fred Wiseman), aimed to present social and political issues in a direct, unmediated way giving the impression that events are recorded exactly as they happened without the involvement of the filmmaker.
Cinéma Vérité (‘cinema truth’, e.g. Jean Rouch): a minimalist style of film making that conveys the sense that the viewer is given direct view of what was actually happening in front of the camera without the artifice usually incorporated in the film-making process. 

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