Modern Galleries in London: a Documentary

Galleries in London

by Sofia Reyes and Jacob Dupuis

Title of this Milestone

Documentary

Introduction

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Section 1: Background

History of Documentary

Since the early 1900s, filmmakers have been capturing and telling the stories of real people, places, and events along side fictional ones. The desire to learn or experience something new through film was growing. In 1926, John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker and expert, created the term Documentary, when reviewing the film Moana, by American filmmaker Robert Flaherty. John Grierson was inspired by the works of Flaherty, and went on to create his own films in Scotland and Britain. He inevitably became in charge of the British Empire Marketing Board where he would oversee production of thousands of films produced in the United Kingdom. In 1929 he developed his own film Drifters, which would then be credited as the first British documentary, introducing the storytelling medium to the English. While documentary film is a popular informative method of filmmaking, often the difficulty and work put in to create these films is overlooked by the audience. With the rise of smaller, high quality cameras, and better editing capabilities, documentary is becoming even more widespread than ever and still is a popular field for award-winning productions to develop.

Types of Documentary

Every documentary has its own distinct voice. Like every speaking voice, every cinematic voice has a style or “grain” all its own that acts like a signature or fingerprint. It attests to the individuality of the filmmaker or director or, sometimes, to the determining power of a sponsor or controlling organization. Individual voices lend themselves to an auteur theory of cinema, while shared voices lend themselves to a genre theory of cinema. Genre study considers the qualities that characterize various groupings of filmmakers and films. In documentary film and video, we can identify six modes of representation that function something like sub-genres of the documentary film genre itself: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, performative. These six modes establish a loose framework of affiliation within which individuals may work; they set up conventions that a given film may adopt; and they provide specific expectations viewers anticipate having fulfilled. Each mode possesses examples that we can identify as prototypes or mod- 99 Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:19 AM Page 99 els: they seem to give exemplary expression to the most distinctive qualities of that mode.They cannot be copied, but they can be emulated as other filmmakers, in other voices, set out to represent aspects of the historical world from their own distinct perspectives.
To some extent, each mode of documentary representation arises in part through a growing sense of dissatisfaction among filmmakers with a previous mode. In this sense the modes do convey some sense of a documentary history.The observational mode of representation arose, in part, from the availability of mobile 16mm cameras and magnetic tape recorders in the 1960s. Poetic documentary suddenly seemed too abstract and expository documentary too didactic when it now proved possible to film everyday events with minimal staging or intervention.

Poetic Documentary

'Subjective and Arttistic Expression'

Poetic Mode: emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities,descriptive passages, and formal organization. This mode bears a close proximity to experimental, personal, or avant-garde filmmaking.

Poetic documentary can be compared with the Modernist Avant-garde. This type of documentary sacrifices the conventions of continuity editing and the sense of a very specific location in time and place that follows from it to explore associations and patterns that involve temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions. Social actors seldom take on the full-blooded form of characters with psychological complexity and a fixed view of the world. People more typically function on a par with other objects as raw material that filmmakers select and arrange into associations and patterns of their choosing.

Poetic

The poetic mode is particularly adept at opening up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information, the prosecution of a particular argument or point of view, or the presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution.This mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays of knowledge or acts of persuasion. The rhetorical element remains underdeveloped. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Play of Light: Black, White, Grey (1930), for example, presents various views of one of his own kinetic sculptures to emphasize the gradations of light passing across the film frame rather than to document the material shape of the sculpture itself. The effect of this play of light on the viewer takes on more importance than the object it refers to in the historical world. Similarly, Jean Mitry’s Pacific 231 (1944) is in part a homage to Abel Gance’s La Roue and in part a poetic evocation of the power and speed of a steam locomotive as it gradually builds up speed and hurtles toward its (unspecified) destination.

The editing stresses rhythm and form more than it details the actual workings of a locomotive. The documentary dimension to the poetic mode of representation stems largely from the degree to which modernist films rely on the historical world for their source material. Some avant-garde films such as Oscar Fischinger’s Composition in Blue (1935) use abstract patterns of form or color or animated figures and have minimal relation to a documentary tradition of representing the historical world rather than a world of the artist’s imagining. Poetic documentaries, though, draw on the historical world for their raw material but transform this material in distinctive ways. Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957), for example, uses shots of New York City that provide evidence of how New York looked in the mid-1950s but gives greater priority to how these shots can be selected and arranged to produce a poetic impression of the city as a mass of volume, color, and movement.Thompson’s film continues the tradition of the city symphony film and affirms the poetic potential of documentary to see the historical world anew.

Origin

The poetic mode began in tandem with modernism as a way of representing reality in terms of a series of fragments, subjective impressions, incoherent acts, and loose associations.These qualities were often attributed to the transformations of industrialization generally and the effects of World War I in particular. The modernist event no longer seemed to make sense in traditional narrative, realist terms. Breaking up time and space into multiple perspectives, denying coherence to personalities vulnerable to eruptions from the unconscious, and refusing to provide solutions to insurmountable problems had the sense of an honesty about it even as it created works of art that were puzzling or ambiguous in their effect. Although some films explored more classical conceptions of the poetic as a source of order, wholeness, and unity, this stress on fragmentation and ambiguity remains a prominent feature in many poetic documentaries. The historical footage, freeze frames, slow motion, tinted images, selective moments of color, occasional titles to identify time and place, voices that recite diary entries, and haunting music build a tone and mood far more than they explain the war or describe its course of action.

Examples

• Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, 1928)
• L’Age d’or(Luis Buñuel, 1930)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963)
• San Soleil (Chris Marker,1982)
• The Bridge(1928),
• Song of Ceylon (1934),
• Listen to Britain (1941),
• Night and Fog(1955),
• Koyaanisqatsi (1983).

We get to know none of the social actors in Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929), for example, but we do come to appreciate the lyric impression Ivens creates of a summer shower passing over Amsterdam.

Expository Documentary

Expository documentaries are prominent in today’s documentary culture, but began alongside the poetic documentary in the 1920s as an alternative to the often experimental films that were being produced. Expository documentary looks at an argument and then walks the audience through that argument, providing evidence to support the claims and reasoning. Similarly, Expository films can introduce an audience to a point of view, and explain to them the reason behind that point of view, as nature based expository films often do. These films are typically narrated, providing information about what you are seeing unfold on the screen. The film that is considered often as the first feature-length documentary, "Nanook of the North" (1922) falls into the category of an expository film. Nanook of the North used footage that the filmmaker Robert Flaherty had shot, and then a voice over recorded later to tell the story. This typically is used to create documentaries on historical subjects, as it allows archived footage and photographs to be shown and explained. Nature documentaries by companies such as the BBC, and National Geographic heavily rely on this style, as they can collect footage and then create a story with it after the fact.

Participatory

Coming to bloom in the 60s and 70s shortly after Observational documentaries, participatory functions opposite to that idea. In this, the filmmaker interacts with and is a part of the story at times, often through interviewing subjects. This shift from the passive camera is described by Dr. Patricia Aufderheide as ‘somewhere in between an essay, reportage, and a well told tale’. Participatory films not only tell a story to the audience, but they tell the filmmakers experience as well. This method rose to popularity alongside the invention of synced sound recording with video, and allowed for filmmakers to record direct interactions, eliminating the need for voice overs after the fact. The filmmaker’s role also shifts away from just recording to now directing, interviewing and guiding the story along. The most famous example of this would be the famed The Thin Blue Line (1988), created by American filmmaker Errol Morris. In European film history, one of the first examples of participatory documentary is Chronique d’un été (1961). The french film translating to Chronicle of a Summer, was created with a British professor, French filmmaker and Canadian director. This team of creators open the film discussing their reasoning behind its creation, and then go on to to interview individuals about society and happiness. The film is recognized today for its innovative structure and unique approach to a documentary.

Observational (Cinéma vérité)

general. Observational Mode: emphasizes a direct engagement with the everyday life of subjects as observed by an unobtrusive camera. Examples: High School (1968), Salesman (1969), Primary (1960), the Netsilik Eskimo series (1967–68), Soldier Girls (1980). Participatory Mode: emphasizes the interaction between filmmaker and subject. Filming takes place by means of interviews or other forms of even more direct involvement. Often coupled with archival footage to examine historical issues. Examples: Chronicle of a Summer (1960), Solovky Power (1988), Shoah (1985), The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), Kurt and Courtney (1998) Origin
Examples

Reflexive

Filmmaker does not use outside subjects, only explains how the film was created as it unfolds.

Writing a documentary

Brainstorming a concept
Creating a story

Planning a documentary

Production
Developing a concept into a film

Section 2: Deliverable

Selecting Galleries

google maps

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Filming Process

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Final Video Outline

Serpentine Gallery & Pavilion

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Unit London

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White Cube

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Gallery

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Conclusion

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References

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Attribution of Work

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External Links

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Image Gallery

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