Day 2: Chronicling Conflict

Day 2

We looked at different strategies for chronicling conflict, and the camera as a window into struggle.   

In viewing these documentaries, we explored how the films are framed, which in turn shapes how we understand the information and the story.

Some notes on ideas, techniques and themes explored in the films.

Winter Soldier (1972)

• Shot over three days at the Winter Soldier Investigation n 1971 in Detroit.
  
• where Vietnam Vets testified about atrocities they witnessed or participated while in Vietnam 
• Sent to all the networks and news outlets but no one would play it at the time.
  Film begins with intense testimony 
• A Sense of America during the time of the draft
• The style of the shooting reflects a "fly on the wall" cinematic style of the late 60's early 70's where the viewer is made to feel like they are in the environment.  A return to Black and White.
• Gritty but romantic.  The young men move from subjects to characters, as the film vascilates between the testimony and the enviroment of the investigation. with relationships shifting between the various men present as they listen to each others stories.  
• Those asking are also answering. 
  
• We see the veneer of the people while they are telling horrifying stories. Memory is a very tangible, yet ungraspable idea in this film. We see memories and feelings flash across their face but then are hidden quickly. 
  
• Becomes a multi-full document: what happens in Vietnam, what happens in the US, what it means to hate, in all meanings of the term (every aspect of hate and tension is present in the room).These were conversations that were not allowed to happen. Would these be allowed to be made right now? 
• The largest difference is to have this material out in the open. 
• Just the subjects voices and sounds of the environments not manipulated with music.

Key Concept: Film implores us to question the authenticity of the a given narrative, not just privately, but publicly for society to debate and respond to. Would that be allowed now? What is allowed to be disseminated after an event and during an event?

The Battle of Chile, (1976) Patrizio Guzman

• Starts as five young filmmakers chronicling people feelings on different sides of the political divide in the two months right up until the election in Chile 
• Becomes an intense document of the play-by-play of the disintegration of a government 
• Created as a three part epic - the Battle of Chile, becomes about systems of power. 
• The cinematic style changes from the romantic focus on the human face to a film about a place, a time, and forces larger than single individuals. 

Burma VJ (2008) Anders Østergaard

• Undercover activists/ journalists 
• They chronicled all of the events that were happening. 
• They do this at great risks to themselves.
• Self consciousness around the technology and the media. 
  
• A personal perpective, but constructed through a stylized film with recreated sections to support narrative continuity. 
• Music is used throughout to structure our emotional relationship to the material.
• lack of access to subject

Disturbing the Peace - Ai Weiwei 

• Filmmakers set out originally to look into the investigations of the earthquake, they were held all night by police, and the film becomes the story of thems trying to get colleagues out of jail.
• Hard to make something interesting about bureaucracy--the film is not entertainment, it's not made to be entertaining,  but as a chronicle of bureaucracy, as a means of protection, and as evidence. 
• What is the role of the document?
• There is a deep sense of tediousness and endless protocol that they are going through and the viewer in brought in to the center of that experience
• Most of these films are made more as a political tool to get China to repsond, less to entertain theater goers.
• In true post-modern fashion, everyone films each other. The police film Ai Wei Wei and his co-horts, and they film the police and the bureaucrats.    

Feature Film : The Green Wave (2010) dir. Ali Samadi Ahadi

• A truly contemporary film: Created with ten months of the elections and uprisings. Chronicled through crowd sourced cell phone footage, excepts from blogs, interviews and animation. It is a hybrid documentary that both spans a lot of the ideas present in this weeks STI, including collective filmmaking processes (through the footage),  cinema as window or mirror, the resitance to conventional forms, the changing modes of production and distribution, and the access to ones subject. 
• A prescient film as it predicts a movement spreading across the mid-east as well. 

 
Feel free to submit comments and reflections on the notes above.