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 …show more content…
This opens up space for influence of filmmaking in such situations. Similar notions of influence of media are visible in Citizen Four (Poitras, 2014). Even though she gets involved by asking Snowden questions like “how do you feel?” and “are you nervous” she maintains the principles of cinema verite by documenting her encounter with Snowden. What is interesting here then is that she herself is put into a similar situation as Snowden. Having to go to Hong Kong and having an air gapped laptop shows the personal investment of the Poitras in ensuring Snowden’s and her safety. She employs shots of Snowden’s day to day activities and shots of him saying “it’s scary, but at the same time it’s liberating to show that” to show what happens when human existence is reduced to digital traces without much say of those being surveillanced. As Lisa Parks describes it in Cover your Webcam, Poitras uses a long Edward Snowden reflected in a Hong Kong hotel room mirror to privileges the performativity and temporality of speaking, questioning, writing, witnessing, and
This report aims to make light of certain elements of documentary making that are perhaps more susceptible to influence on the director’s part, and once again explore the effect of these decisions on the audience’s reaction to the information presented.
In her defensive she shows how exploiting our personal lives can cause problems and crimes that are not wanted. Sure, it helps us try to catch terrorism but in exchange it also leaves us defenseless against each other. Not everyone you think is on our side is on our side, especially those around
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative Apparatus Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen, (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 198-209.
Cassidy, John. "Why Edward Snowden Is a Hero." The New Yorker. N.p., 10 June 2013. Web. 15 Feb.
Recently in global news, the name Edward Snowden has became quite popular as he snatched millions of people’s attention along with breaking news headlines. Snowden released numerous documents via internet that were private to the NSA; these leaks revealed the dirty work the NSA and government have ...
As a viewer, the documentary’s intention to inform is more completely fulfilled by research conducted beyond the scope of the camera lens. Had I never written this paper, for instance, the reason for all the violence embedded within the subject matter would remain as enigmatic as the documentary itself.
Why Edward Snowden Is a Hero? The New Yorker. N.p., n.d. Web. The Web.
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (N.S.A) subcontractor turned whistle-blower is nothing short of a hero. His controversial decision to release information detailing the highly illegal ‘data mining’ practices of the N.S.A have caused shockwaves throughout the world and have raised important questions concerning how much the government actually monitors its people without their consent or knowledge. Comparable to Mark Felt in the Watergate scandals, Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden joins the rank of infamous whistleblowers who gave up their jobs, livelihood, and forever will live under scrutiny of the public all in the service to the American people. Edward Snowden released information detailing the extent of the N.S.A breaches of American privacy and in doing so, became ostracized by the media and barred from freely reentering America, his home country.
Rascaroli, Laura. "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments." Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49.2 (2008): 24-47. JSTOR. Web. 08 May 2014.
...use of documentary style lighting and discontinuous editing that diverges from the Hollywood “invisible” editing. Through understanding the historical climates these two seemingly similar French cinematic movements were in, the psychology of a generation can be visualized in a way truly unique to the indexicality of the cinematic medium.
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).
The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.
Many modern films revolve around a life-changing event or series of events, or follow a character’s experiences thru a particularly stressful or new situation. The Film School of Rock (Aversano, Nicolaides, Rudin & Linklater, 2003) includes an assortment of these elements, among others, as it focuses on the struggle a rock musician turned substitute teacher encounters as he advances through a rocky stage in his life with the support of his new students.
Movies you might have heard like “The Graduate” starring Dustin Hoffman, “Scarface” movies starring Al Pacino to “In Cold Blood” directed by Richard Brooks. These older movies are “textbooks” for Cinematographers in this day in age because of the extraordinary techniques used for these more recent cinematographers to use as inspirations. Movies like Citizen kane was a textbook to these directors in the movie. In the documentary they talk about how times have changed a lot.
The Web. The Web. 28 Oct. 2015. The "Edward Snowden Biography." Bio.com.