How these films deploy visual archives reflects the epochal shift in subject formation that I have just described. While classic documentary filmmakers of the “Third Cinema” moment (e.g. Fernando E. Solanas [1936-] and Patricio Guzmán [1941-]) constructed their films using material from the sociohistorical archive, today’s filmmakers construct their documentaries using intimate, everyday archives, particularly those of the family. Specifically in the case of Argentine documentaries, directors often use techniques like dissociation and fragmentation to pose an aesthetic challenge to the totalizing, humanitarian narrative of their parents’ generation.
What, then, can these children of the disappeared salvage of their parents and their times?
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In his book There’s No Place Like Home Video (2002), James M. Moran ascribes five basic functions to the domestic mode in film and video production: to represent the everyday, to construct a liminal space in which to explore and negotiate one’s identity in both personal and collective terms, to offer a material vehicle for articulating generational continuities, to construct an image of home that situates us in the world, and to offer a narrative format for communicating personal stories that cover the whole life cycle and its major rituals. We observe all of these characteristics in the documentaries I have mentioned, even though in the vast majority they do not manifest fully. For example, as I have already explained, articulating intergenerational structural continuities proves impossible. Furthermore, narratives take on hybrid formats marked by irony and fragmented intertextuality, and identity can never be integrally restored. The functions of the domestic that Moran mentions, then, act as narrative impulses in these films, yet never find adequate resolution: the narratives are instead best characterized by suspicion, anger, and …show more content…
In the final assessment, then, what happens to the representation of daily life? I contend that these films recover the familiar and the domestic to make them quotidian.
The historical processes of the last forty years have torn lives asunder and introduced profound existential crises into people’s lives. Despite all that has happened, the quotidian is the only sphere that remains intact, that has not been displaced. The everyday persists in spite of all. The question, then, is how to restore to the everyday a familiarity that puts subjects at ease. This is the dynamic, the motivation at work in these films.
A phenomenological approach might hold that the quotidian—the everyday—is the most immediate and spontaneous space in which people exist. The quotidian is the realm in which being manifests as ontic reality, the space in which human beings recognize their existence as real. From this perspective, it becomes clear that what happens in the “world” does not destroy the realm of the everyday. The less “world” a subject possesses, the more he or she will cling to that which is immutable: the
No Place Like Home is a travel account based on historical research. Here Younge gives a new perception on race relations in America. In this book Younge through his conversation with civil rights activists tries to explore the history. He visits schools, universities, military establishment and tracks long lost cousins. It is also a journey towards self discovery.
For many people, the childhood house they grew up in has countless memories, both good and bad. However, the concept of home is not confined to a single house or location-- instead, home is mostly made by the people in it. Although this can sometimes be forgotten, the home matters far more than the house. The experiences someone goes through in their home serve as lessons that over time begin to shape their view of the world and themselves. In Jeannette Walls’
“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can convey emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.” The written word and the moving image have always had their entwining roots deeply entrenched in similar narrative codes, both functioning at the level of implication, connotation and referentiality. But ever since the advent of cinema, they have been pitted against each other over formal and cultural peculiarities – hence engaging in a relationship deemed “overtly compatible, secretly hostile” (Bluestone 2).
The depiction of human nature and the argument concerning the way humans act and what stimulates their actions has always been the focus of art. In particular, the film directors have been often seeking for answers concerning the ways the human nature should be shown in the movies and the perception of the concept. With respect to the issue of human nature, both Cider House Rules and Children Of Men, raise the problem of the human nature and seek to reveal what are the internal drivers leading an individual trough life. In both cases, the films perform the function of an eye opener on the issues that deal with what goes on in the modern society and how are the human actions associated with their souls and beliefs. In the marginal situations
When you hear obesity, do you imagine malnutrition or simply an individual who “eats too much?” Well, these health threatening issues go hand and hand. Learning that a large number of obese individuals are low income, it can be concluded that a lack of funds results in cheaper, more fattening and unhealthy food purchases, which ultimately can develop into malnutrition and unsafe weight gain. The eye-opening film, A Place At The Table, provides viewers with a true representation of how the issues of hunger and malnutrition in the United States affect individuals on a daily basis. Throughout this movie, the filmmakers, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, examine the lives of three individuals who suffer from hunger and and lack of nutrition.
Fed Up is a documentary made in 2014 that is based on the issues caused by the American food industry. Fed Up, uncovers America’s true secrets about the food people consume every day. More specifically, it reveals the affect sugar has on people’s bodies. As a result, the amount of sugar in food, the bodies consent of glucose, and the satisfying taste it brings, too much sugar could cause certain sicknesses causing the body to not work the way it supposed to. To start off, the amount of sugar put in America’s food is predominately high.
The documentary “Chasing Zero” reflects on the importance of quality care and patient safety. From the video, a child presents with jaundice, but the hospital fails to recognize immediate treatment. As a result, the child develops further complications such Kernicterus, which results in brain damage from jaundice (Quality and Safety Education for Nurses, 2014). Unfortunately, there were many devastating instances such as this, which could have been greatly prevented.
This scene establishes the ongoing theme of differentiation between the lifestyles
In the wildly popular Mexican film, Los olvidados (1950), Spanish director Luis Buñuel exposes the harsh realities of life in Mexico during the 1950’s. Luis Buñuel’s work on Los olvidados portrays a societal loss for all hope due to crime and violence as an infinitely vicious cycle, coupled with addressing the lack of reform for dilapidated living conditions throughout Mexico. In Los olvidados, Buñuel follows Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) a neglected bastard, and El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) the leader of a gang of homeless children loitering in vacant lots. For Pedro, and the rest of the cast, a series of unfortunate outcomes have been strung together though common ignorance and a lack of self-control. Luis Buñuel’s use of focal length, editing, and dialogue
Every now and then the art world is struck by a wave of change that leaves a strong impression, which can last for a long time. Visual arts saw the rise of impressionism and cubism, surrealism and realism took literature to an opposite direction, and film has evolved over the years through cultural and artistic development such as expressionism, auteurism and film noir (House, p.61). The 1940s and post World War II gave rise to a new style of American film, these films appeared pessimistic and dark in mood, theme, and subject. The world created within these films were portrayed as corrupt, hopeless, lacked human sympathy, and “a world where women with a past and men with no future spent eternal nights in one-room walk-ups surrounded by the
This essay will discuss how the film uses these two techniques, in reference to the film, and to what ideological and political ends are the techniques used in the films with specific references from the film to support the argument. A Man with a Movie Camera is based around one man who travels around the city to capture various moments and everyday
The neo-colonial cultural hegemony serves as an imperative urge for the indigenous people to rewrite their own history because, as Teshome H. Gaberial puts, “official history tends to arrest the future by means of the past.” (“Third Aesthetics”, 53) In expounding the situation, personal narration turns to be politically significant to rescue the missing part from the official history. In spite of minor and oscillating nature of popular memory, the all-embracing strategy provides valuable perspectives to be archived and survived. In this respect, both of the selected films, The Hour of the Furnaces and The Pearl Button present a subjective narration in documentary film in order to unveil the perspective neglected by the grand history.
In “Aesthetic of Astonishment” essay, Gunning argues how people first saw cinema, and how they are amazed with the moving picture for the first time, and were not only amazed by the technological aspect, but also the experience of how the introduction of movies have changed the way people perceive the reality in a completely different way. Gunning states that “The astonishment derives from a magical metamorphosis rather than a seamless reproduction of reality”(118). He uses the myth of how the sacred audience run out the theater in terror when they first saw the Lumiere Brother Arrival of the train. However, Gunning does not really care how hysterical their reaction is, even saying that he have doubts on what actually happened that day, as for him it the significance lied on the incidence--that is, the triggering of the audience’s reaction and its subsequence results, and not the actual reactions and their extent. It is this incident, due to the confusion of the audience’s cognition caused by new technology, that serves as a significant milestone in film history which triggered in the industry and the fascination with film, which to this day allows cinema to manipulate and
Documentary filmmakers strive to capture the real in their documentary films – a convention used by both fiction and non-fiction films to immerse their audiences into the issue. There are a few common methods used by filmmakers to capture the real, all stemming from Dziga Vertov’s theory of Kino Pravda, which explores the idea of truth in films. Realism is important to filmmaking as it helps question the relation of a film to reality. More often than not, our disbelief are suspended the moment we are exposed to a documentary, and we believe what we see much more easily than when watching, say, a movie or television program. A documentary’s main concern is to present a film taken from reality, and to show that reality to audiences as closely as possible.
Although documentary reflexivity and the blurring of boundaries between the documentary genre and fiction were arguably present in Brazilian cinema from the outset—from the docudramatic travelogues of filmmaker-adventurer Silvino Santos (1886–1970) in the 1920s to Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s (1928-) urban chronicles of Rio in the 1950s, and the genre-bending work of the 1970s, such as Orlando Senna (1940-) and Jorge Bodanzky’s (1942-) Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema, 1974), Aloysio Raulino’s (1947–2013) Tarumã (1975), or Glauber Rocha’s (1939–1981) own Di-Glauber (or Di Cavalcanti, 1977)—I would argue that it is only in the 1980s, with Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra, that reflexivity becomes the dominant mode of documentary filmmaking. The historical experience of struggle and traumatic loss provides Coutinho a matrix for seeking formal