Cheryl Dunye's film, The Watermelon Woman, combines elements from both narrative film-making and elements from the traditional documentary. The film follows Dunye (as a film-maker and as a character) and ventures on the journey of finding the Watermelon Woman. Whereas most of the film follows Dunye as a character throughout her life as she goes through the process of filming her finds, a few of the scenes are filmed as if the film was an actual documentary. The film is based primarily around the character Cheryl's life and adventure in finding the Watermelon Woman than it is about learning about the Watermelon Woman.
Dunye films her mother in a traditional documentary setting to ask her questions about the Watermelon Woman, which her mother recognizes more or less. She tells Cheryl that she's seen the woman's face before but hasn't heard the name. The scene follows in a documentary fashion without establishing the character of her mother aside from the fact that she is her mother, and Cheryl's life outside of the process isn't necessarily shown as it is with other scenes. The way Cheryl poses questions to her mother and remains behind the camera is most like an expository documentary style where images and interviews and intertwined with a rich, sonorous male voice that leaves the
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Many of the scenes are filmed in front of a camera as the "filmmakers" pose and answer questions regarding their research before it transitions into their story outside of the film-making process. The Conspiracy is a mockumentary but doesn't necessarily make fun of the documentary process as other mockumentaries do, and neither does The Watermelon Woman. Both of these films, The Watermelon Woman and The Conspiracy, allow for easy understanding from any type of audience, and they both offer plots and storytelling-patterns that flow in ways able to be comprehended by any type of
Pearson UK (n.d.) stated “Evidence suggests that children who read for enjoyment every day not only perform better in reading tests than those who don’t, but also develop a broader vocabulary, increased general knowledge and a better understanding of other cultures. In fact, reading for pleasure is more likely to determine whether a child does well at school than their social or economic background.”
I realized that sometimes it is fine for things to just be, and I don’t know why. Much of the film has to do with how we think, and what we do in private. Collectively, through these moral and ethical acts (or lack thereof) we can impact the public. Also, by sharing these thoughts and concepts with the public in the documentary, it can affect our thoughts and actions in our private lives; I know it has, at least for myself. One of the earliest topics in the film that I took note of was the ethics of certain matters, in a way that I had never considered before.
The film The Weather Underground was a great way to educate the population about a part of history not many people know about. The film was a documentary by Sam Green and Bill Siegle. The directors used many strategies and elements to make the film effective for the purpose of a documentary, which would be to inform their audience. They used elements like flashbacks of images and news reports, and interviews from now and then along with audio to accomplish their task. They strategically arranged the placement of all of these elements to bring out the viewers emotions and draw them into the piece.
The film opens with Agnes “Apple” Bailey is cutting her long hair with scissors as she prepares for what is coming. She is a teenager living with her abusive mom in a poor motel- and she is going to escape to find her father. Her one clue to a parentage is the one letter he once sent her. The actress Rosario Dawson plays Apple’s mother. Rosario Dawson gives the role a dramatic edge and slowly turns her performance up to eleven as the story progresses.
Have you ever gotten so mad at your parents that you would consider harming them? In 1892, a woman named Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her father, and her stepmother. However, she was found innocent because of the reason that there was not enough evidence that she committed the murders. In fact, there was no evidence that anyone performed the murders. I do think that Lizzie borden murdered her father and stepmother because Lizzie borden was an odd person who would most likely do this odd action. I believe Lizzie borden killed her parents because she had a somewhat bad relationship with her stepmother, her father's decision in living was not how it should have been, and she was a weird person.
	Aside from the audio and visual points, there are various camera angles used. When everyone is circled around the boiling pot the camera man uses a stedicam shot to circle around and show everyone’s face. When the viewer is seeing a girl take off her clothes the camera technician uses a zoom shot. This holds true when the governor approaches the gathering.
bell hooks is trying to convince her readers that the display of black female bodies in Beyonce’s Lemonade does not aid in shifting or masking the sexist narratives and construction of black female identity (page 3).
Cholodenko actually based this movie on snippets of her life and experiences she’s had. The first drafts of this film started back in 2004, Cholodenko at the time was single and started to see all her friends get married and have kids, including some lesbian couples who used sperm donners both friends and anonymous. When she moved out to Los Angeles later that year, things changed. Cholodenko met Wendy Melvoin, whom she eventually married, and Stuart Blumberg, whom she co-wrote the film with. Due to these events, eventually the story that was originally going to feature a family’s white-water rafting trip morphed into the simple and grounded yet powerful story that ended up in the
Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South by Victoria E. Bynum begins by simply questioning the reader; asking who these “unruly women” would have been in the antebellum South, and what they could have possibly done to mark them in this deviant and disorderly light. Whenever you think of Southern Women during this time a vision of lovely refined yet quieted and weak women come to mind. It’s a time where women were inferior to men in almost every aspect. Women were expected to stay at home raising children. Women were expected to remain in the house, in the private world of home and family. White men wanted control over all dependents in his household; including their wife, children, slaves, and servants. Bynum
The story of Mary Rowlandson tells of a much more difficult experience than that of Hannah Duston. Mary Rowlandson narrates her own story so you know of everything she feels and thinks throughout it. However, “The Duston Family” is told by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne paints a picture of the person he thought Hannah Duston was, but, does not know what she was thinking nor feeling when she was going through her journey. This makes it much harder to understand the things she does.
This movie has eight characters, six old women and their bus drive and a middle-aged women named Michelle. The fact that the cast are not actors makes it even more amazing. I love each of these women in the movie. Each one has their own personality which comes out beautifully in the film. They story began with when all the actress are traveling together in come country side of Quebec, Canada. All the sudden their bus breaks down and leaves six old women, Michelle and their bus driver in the woods of an isolated countryside. They find an abandoned cottage in the woods and to survive, they feast on wild raspberries, frog legs, and fish. In addition to that, they share their past experiences to kill time and survive in the woods.
long shots. high-angle shots, and a lot of fun. spherical camera lens. These particular devices provide a glimpse at the realities of the oppression, poverty and despair of many of the American people during this time. From the start of the film it is apparent what time frame it is taking place in and the differences in the social stratification through the lack of colors.
Cinema verite is a “fly on the wall” documentary style that attempts to capture the essence of reality by holding to the tenet that actual situations produce a different kind of cinematic truth than contrived ones by being unobtrusive and watching the situation. Stephan Mamber describes the essential element of Cinema Verite as the act of filming people real people in uncontrolled situations. Here the people are not actors and the situations are not scripted. This leads to a situation in which, as Wiseman highlights in “You start with Bromide”, instead of allowing the story to dictate the footage, the footage is allowed to dictate what narrative can come out of it. High School (Wiseman, 1968) employs the use of cinema verite to capture essence of reality through the theme of
In the film Capturing Reality there is a discussion about how nonfiction documentaries have this very real and raw feelings to them that cannot be captured in fiction films as well. While this is true, there is still the aspect of seeing maybe a stunt or a scene in a fiction film and the viewer understanding what might have had to go into that scene for it to be shot. That thought of thinking about how the scene was captured in the element of documentary that all films have. In reality at some point there had to be a team to design a scene where someone jumped off a tall structure. It is not like in a painting where an artist can paint the scene but no one having actually completed the scene in reality.
One of the integral things that must be addressed when making a film is the ethics involved. Ethics are a constant issue that have to be carefully considered when filmmaking. This difficult decision-making is highly prevalent in that of documentaries, because of the difficulties associated in filming ‘real people’ or “social actors, (Nichols, 2001).” More importantly, the issues faced by a filmmaker differ between each of the documentary modes. Each particular documentary mode poses different formal choices that must be made in order to operate in an ethical fashion. Two films that have been made both display examples of how ethics must be considered when embarking on a documentary are Etre at Avoir [To Be and to Have], (2001) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). These films have been made in different documentary modes, highlighting that there is not one mode which is easier or has fewer ethical issues associated with it. Additionally, what must be considered is how these style choices in these different modes affect the power relationships between the filmmaker, the subject and its audience, (Nichols, 2001).