Chronicle of a Summer: Chronique dún été
A Film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in Paris. The summer of 1960. While war rages in Algeria and pre-independence Congo seethes with violence, ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin send two women out into the streets of the city to interview passersby.
Rouch, whose previous groundbreaking films were shot in Africa, and Morin, an academic and writer, were experimenting with a new kind of documentary film about their own society that would reveal the innermost truth of peoples' lives.
From a simple starting question - Are you happy, sir? - CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER delves deeper and deeper into the lives of its characters. They include Marceline, a Holocaust survivor; Angelo, who works grueling shifts in a Renault factory; Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast; and Marilou, a young, beautiful and deeply depressed Italian immigrant. As the film progresses, the light opening scenes give way to intimate revelations and hotly contested political arguments.
CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER is a true landmark in film history. Rouch and Morin were among the first filmmakers to use hand held sync sound 16mm equipment. They also coined the term cinéma vérité to describe their approach, although their practice, placing people in situations and provoking responses, differs from what later came to be called vérité films. Their use of the urban landscape and groundbreaking cinematography (cameraman Raoul Coutard was among the crew members working on the film) deeply affected the French New Wave and much of subsequent documentary practice. The film's self-reflexive structure, in which Rouch and Morin screen the film for the participants to critique it on-screen, as well as their own reactions to the critique, is still, amazingly, contemporary.
More than 40 years later, CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER remains as ambitious, forward-looking and powerful as the day it was first released.
"With CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER Jean Rouch proved that (in his own words) 'you can film anything anywhere.' The film that invented cinéma vérité and cinema-direct is as provocative now as it was forty years ago. Today we take the walking camera, portable sync-sound, and filming the intimacies of everyday life for-granted; in CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER you can see the filmic birth of these techniques. And see workers, deportees, Africans, intellectuals, students, and people on the street live the Parisian life in the summer of 1960." - Steven Feld, Editor of the book Ciné-Ethnography, by Jean Rouch, and Professor of Music and Anthropology, Columbia University "I think the reason why CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER still works today, and is an important film, is that Rouch and Morin made a cinéma-vérité documentary which tries to include the truth of 'fiction.'" - Ellen Freyer, Author of the essay Chronicle of a Summer - Ten Years After, in The Documentary Tradition by Lewis Jacob"What this film engages is humanity itself." - Roland Barthes"The key cinema vérité film." - Brian Winston, Claiming the Real"A seminal work!" - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader"A fascinating piece of work and a seminal film in the history of documentary. Rouch and Morin offer a slice-of-life experience of the Parisian streets, serving as a model for many other filmmakers who would continue to explore the various possibilities of 'cinema verite.'" - Educational Media Reviews Online
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Docu girls- Work hard!
Genius: The Modern View
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 30, 2009
Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.
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David Brooks
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We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers. What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there. The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft. The recent research has been conducted by people like K. Anders Ericsson, the late Benjamin Bloom and others. It’s been summarized in two enjoyable new books: “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle; and “Talent Is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin. If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you’d take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. It wouldn’t have to be a big talent, just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction. Then you would want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits. Maybe the writer was from the same town, had the same ethnic background, or, shared the same birthday — anything to create a sense of affinity. This contact would give the girl a vision of her future self. It would, Coyle emphasizes, give her a glimpse of an enchanted circle she might someday join. It would also help if one of her parents died when she was 12, infusing her with a profound sense of insecurity and fueling a desperate need for success. Armed with this ambition, she would read novels and literary biographies without end. This would give her a core knowledge of her field. She’d be able to chunk Victorian novelists into one group, Magical Realists in another group and Renaissance poets into another. This ability to place information into patterns, or chunks, vastly improves memory skills. She’d be able to see new writing in deeper ways and quickly perceive its inner workings. Then she would practice writing. Her practice would be slow, painstaking and error-focused. According to Colvin, Ben Franklin would take essays from The Spectator magazine and translate them into verse. Then he’d translate his verse back into prose and examine, sentence by sentence, where his essay was inferior to The Spectator’s original.Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a ball. The aim is to focus meticulously on technique. (Try to slow down your golf swing so it takes 90 seconds to finish. See how many errors you detect.) By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance. Then our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges. By now she is redoing problems — how do I get characters into a room — dozens and dozens of times. She is ingraining habits of thought she can call upon in order to understand or solve future problems. The primary trait she possesses is not some mysterious genius. It’s the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine. Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 30, 2009
Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.
Skip to next paragraph
David Brooks
Go to Columnist Page »
The Conversation
David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns. All Conversations »
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (370) »
We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers. What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there. The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft. The recent research has been conducted by people like K. Anders Ericsson, the late Benjamin Bloom and others. It’s been summarized in two enjoyable new books: “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle; and “Talent Is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin. If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you’d take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. It wouldn’t have to be a big talent, just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction. Then you would want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits. Maybe the writer was from the same town, had the same ethnic background, or, shared the same birthday — anything to create a sense of affinity. This contact would give the girl a vision of her future self. It would, Coyle emphasizes, give her a glimpse of an enchanted circle she might someday join. It would also help if one of her parents died when she was 12, infusing her with a profound sense of insecurity and fueling a desperate need for success. Armed with this ambition, she would read novels and literary biographies without end. This would give her a core knowledge of her field. She’d be able to chunk Victorian novelists into one group, Magical Realists in another group and Renaissance poets into another. This ability to place information into patterns, or chunks, vastly improves memory skills. She’d be able to see new writing in deeper ways and quickly perceive its inner workings. Then she would practice writing. Her practice would be slow, painstaking and error-focused. According to Colvin, Ben Franklin would take essays from The Spectator magazine and translate them into verse. Then he’d translate his verse back into prose and examine, sentence by sentence, where his essay was inferior to The Spectator’s original.Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a ball. The aim is to focus meticulously on technique. (Try to slow down your golf swing so it takes 90 seconds to finish. See how many errors you detect.) By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance. Then our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges. By now she is redoing problems — how do I get characters into a room — dozens and dozens of times. She is ingraining habits of thought she can call upon in order to understand or solve future problems. The primary trait she possesses is not some mysterious genius. It’s the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine. Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Making a Documentary Film: From India Together
A journey through documentary film-making For more than a decade now, Supriyo Sen has been making his way through awards bestowed for excellence in choice of subject and aesthetics of creative expression, the latest being accorded for Wagah. Shoma Chatterji looks back at his films.
• Write the author • Film Reviews • Send to a friend • Printer friendly version 05 March 2009 - Wagah, a 12-minute documentary film by Supriyo Sen, last month won the prestigious Berlin Today 2009 Award, now in its sixth consecutive year. It is the story of an extraordinary event that takes place at the only border crossing between India and Pakistan: Every evening, thousands of cheering spectators gather to witness a patriotic parade for the ritual closing of the border. Wim Wenders, reading from the jury's statement, concluded that the film is "a convincing manifesto against any wall that divides people."
A bit of background to the Berlin Today Award will shed light on the talent of Indian documentary filmmaker Supriyo Sen, famed for his strikingly original ideas about little-known realities of life that are waiting to be explored and archived through and on film. The Berlinale Talent Campus is an initiative of the Berlin International Film Festival, a business division of the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a decision of the German Bundestag, in co-operation with MEDIA-Training programme of the European Union, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Skillset and UK Film Council as well as Volkswagen.
350 Talents from 106 countries arrived for the event to converge at the Hebbel am Ufer to exchange to interact with international experts and network amongst themselves. The patron of the competition, Festival Director Dieter Kosslick together with jury members Wim Wenders, Andreas Dresen, Emily Atef and Kirsten Niehuus, CEO of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, handed the Berlin Today Award 2009 to this year's winner.
A distinguished record
Wagah is still to hit Indian screens. But to people familiar with the works of this journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, this award will be no surprise because Sen has been making his own journey through awards bestowed for excellence in choice of subject and aesthetics of creative expression. His debut film, Wait Until Death (1995), done on U-Matic, was an investigative documentary on the deaths of workers employed in a stone-crushing factory. It is the tragic saga of a young tribal, Shakuntala, who dies when the film ends. Hers was the 23rd death caused by silicosis in the tribal hamlet of Chinchurgheria, near Jhargram in Midnapore district of West Bengal.
"The film began as an inquiry into the tragedy of a little village, but ended with the growing awareness of an age-old legacy exploitation of one group of human beings by another, more powerful group" said Sen. The film was screened at film festivals in Nepal, Bangladesh and India. Within two years of working at a stone crushing unit in the area, villagers from five neighbouring villages fell victim to the deadly disease, imbibed through inhaling the stone dust in the unit. The film, following a linear narrative beginning with the dying Shakuntala and closing with her death, leaves the question of human rights hanging in the air. The film blends the genres of the environmental documentary, the human rights documentary and the investigative documentary to make it a powerful political statement on celluloid.
Sen thereafter made a 26-minute film called The Dream of Hanif. Shot on Beta for the video format, the film explores the dying art of scroll painting, a hereditary form of art in Bengal that combines painting with singing the songs of the stories painted on the scrolls. Bending under the changing demands of a changing cultural world, the traditional artists of scroll painting have changed the content of their scrolls to suit the market demands of the time, with one exception. His name is Dukhushyam Chitrakar, who refuses to leave the heritage he was trained to perpetuate. But he has only one scroll left to be sold. It is called 'The Dream of Hanif'.
Wagah is still to hit Indian screens. But to people familiar with the works of this journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, this award will be no surprise.
• The price of catastrophe Another of Sen's memorable films is The Nest, which won the National Award for the Best Film on Environment in 2001. In Jamboni village in Midnapore district, the sight of hundreds of white open-billed storks descending together each year around May-June is an unforgettable experience, but it is more than a grand migration. It is also, in the eyes of the local residents, a visit by the birds to farmer Jatin Mahato's house. It is amazing, almost unbelievable, but these lissome birds come at the onset of winter to nestle and breed in the trees next to Mahato's humble thatched hut.
No one in the village quite knows where the birds come from and where they go. But they have been the closest friends of the Mahatos for generations together. Mahato has been badly beaten up twice during midnight attacks for not permitting the poachers and hunters to have their way. But he is not intimidated. It is as if, he is divinely committed to save the birds in whatever way he possibly can. This 38-minute documentary is a straightforward documentation of his life, and his love for the open-billed storks that fly in droves to nest, mate and breed in and around his home.
Sen's next work was a two-part documentary, Way Back Home and Imaginary Homeland. A personal and intimate journey by the parents of the filmmaker to their homeland in Barisal, now in Bangladesh, slowly raises the larger question of communalism across and within the borders of India and Bangladesh, closing in on the tragic reality of human hate cutting across time and space. The film opens with the small family and the film crew embarking on the journey. The senior Sens are making the journey after fifty years – they had never been back since they crossed over to Calcutta - and the rest of the family plus the film crew are making it for the first time.
"Is this the small town I left as a young boy?" the senior Sen keeps asking himself. "Even the trees have changed, the waterways are no longer where they were, the skyline looks different," he goes on. Placed in perspective 50 years after the partition of India, displacement and uprootal have become a global reality. "The concept of the refugee is what I feel, made the prestigious Jan Vrijman Fund possible," confesses Sen who received the Jan Vrijman Fund on the basis of a worldwide competition of scripts from the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam.
"For me, the journey has been metaphorical and historical," says Supriyo Sen. The group had to cross dangerous hurdles while they shot clandestinely in Bangladesh on the eve of the elections there. The film does not reveal these cracks. Sumit Ghosh's seamless editing demonstrates editorial control as Ranjan Palit's camera offers panoramic shots of the cityscape, or takes us along those drives within Bangladesh roads, through avenues lined by trees that did not exist before, and the steamer rides from Dhaka to Barisal and back. The credit for the rich texture of the film lies squarely on the shoulders of the senior Sens – Supriyo's father and mother who come across as the best performers ever – spontaneous in their expression and their body language, not in the least conscious of the camera following them.
Hope Dies Last in War
Then came Hope Dies Last in War, which narrates the struggles of the families of some of the 54 Indian soldiers taken prisoners of war during the Indo-Pak war of 1971 who are yet to return home. Some parents died waiting in vain, some children lost the last ray of hope bending under the pressure of bureaucratic and administrative non-cooperation, some wives married again to open a fresh page in their lives, while some committed suicide. But this film is a tribute to the tremendous zeal and determination of the few that did not give up. Their lives have reduced to a perennial struggle between hope and despair. But they refuse to give up the fight that has evolved into a crusade for the restitution of basic human rights – the right to live and die in one's own country, the right to come back home, the right to a national identity.
The fight has been on for nearly four decades and none of them are about to give up. Hope Dies Last in War is a saga of their individual and collective struggle, spanning three generations, to get their men back. It records a tragic stalemate, sufferings of love and shining moments of humanity, courage and hope. "It is a singularly tragic story of human rights violations based on the testimonies of parents, wives, siblings, children and grandchildren. The film is about their pain, helplessness, dejection, reconciliation, hope and dreams in war-hungry Indian sub-continent," says Sen. The film was first screened in public in 2007. Cinematographer Ranjan Palit bagged the Indian documentary Producer's Association gold award for his brilliant work in this film.
The painstaking and long research that went into the making of this film – field research, documentary research, first-person interviews, travelling back and forth with some active members of the "Missing Defense Personnel Relatives Association" invests the film with that rare blend of research, emotion, commitment and honesty not easily witnessed even within the documentary format. It widens the canvas of the film from a simple wait-and-search saga to a tragedy of the last century that neither government has tried to mend even when it is equipped with the infrastructure and the power to do so.
While getting to grips with the emotional reactions of the family members, Sen defies the slotting of this film into any definite genre. It is an anti-war documentary. It is an investigative film. It is also a scathing attack on the inertia and callous attitude of the government of both countries towards the lives of 54 gallant soldiers who were prepared to sacrifice their lives but whose lives were allowed to hang in suspended animation of suspense. It is a personal saga of families still fighting what seems to be a losing battle in their search not only for their missing family members, but also to assert the right to restore to these soldiers, the dignity they deserve. ⊕
Shoma Chatterji 05 Mar 2009
Dr. Shoma A Chatterji, freelance journalist and author, writes on cinema, media, human rights, cultural issues and gender in several print media and electronic publications in India and abroad.
• Write the author • Film Reviews • Send to a friend • Printer friendly version 05 March 2009 - Wagah, a 12-minute documentary film by Supriyo Sen, last month won the prestigious Berlin Today 2009 Award, now in its sixth consecutive year. It is the story of an extraordinary event that takes place at the only border crossing between India and Pakistan: Every evening, thousands of cheering spectators gather to witness a patriotic parade for the ritual closing of the border. Wim Wenders, reading from the jury's statement, concluded that the film is "a convincing manifesto against any wall that divides people."
A bit of background to the Berlin Today Award will shed light on the talent of Indian documentary filmmaker Supriyo Sen, famed for his strikingly original ideas about little-known realities of life that are waiting to be explored and archived through and on film. The Berlinale Talent Campus is an initiative of the Berlin International Film Festival, a business division of the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a decision of the German Bundestag, in co-operation with MEDIA-Training programme of the European Union, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Skillset and UK Film Council as well as Volkswagen.
350 Talents from 106 countries arrived for the event to converge at the Hebbel am Ufer to exchange to interact with international experts and network amongst themselves. The patron of the competition, Festival Director Dieter Kosslick together with jury members Wim Wenders, Andreas Dresen, Emily Atef and Kirsten Niehuus, CEO of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, handed the Berlin Today Award 2009 to this year's winner.
A distinguished record
Wagah is still to hit Indian screens. But to people familiar with the works of this journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, this award will be no surprise because Sen has been making his own journey through awards bestowed for excellence in choice of subject and aesthetics of creative expression. His debut film, Wait Until Death (1995), done on U-Matic, was an investigative documentary on the deaths of workers employed in a stone-crushing factory. It is the tragic saga of a young tribal, Shakuntala, who dies when the film ends. Hers was the 23rd death caused by silicosis in the tribal hamlet of Chinchurgheria, near Jhargram in Midnapore district of West Bengal.
"The film began as an inquiry into the tragedy of a little village, but ended with the growing awareness of an age-old legacy exploitation of one group of human beings by another, more powerful group" said Sen. The film was screened at film festivals in Nepal, Bangladesh and India. Within two years of working at a stone crushing unit in the area, villagers from five neighbouring villages fell victim to the deadly disease, imbibed through inhaling the stone dust in the unit. The film, following a linear narrative beginning with the dying Shakuntala and closing with her death, leaves the question of human rights hanging in the air. The film blends the genres of the environmental documentary, the human rights documentary and the investigative documentary to make it a powerful political statement on celluloid.
Sen thereafter made a 26-minute film called The Dream of Hanif. Shot on Beta for the video format, the film explores the dying art of scroll painting, a hereditary form of art in Bengal that combines painting with singing the songs of the stories painted on the scrolls. Bending under the changing demands of a changing cultural world, the traditional artists of scroll painting have changed the content of their scrolls to suit the market demands of the time, with one exception. His name is Dukhushyam Chitrakar, who refuses to leave the heritage he was trained to perpetuate. But he has only one scroll left to be sold. It is called 'The Dream of Hanif'.
Wagah is still to hit Indian screens. But to people familiar with the works of this journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, this award will be no surprise.
• The price of catastrophe Another of Sen's memorable films is The Nest, which won the National Award for the Best Film on Environment in 2001. In Jamboni village in Midnapore district, the sight of hundreds of white open-billed storks descending together each year around May-June is an unforgettable experience, but it is more than a grand migration. It is also, in the eyes of the local residents, a visit by the birds to farmer Jatin Mahato's house. It is amazing, almost unbelievable, but these lissome birds come at the onset of winter to nestle and breed in the trees next to Mahato's humble thatched hut.
No one in the village quite knows where the birds come from and where they go. But they have been the closest friends of the Mahatos for generations together. Mahato has been badly beaten up twice during midnight attacks for not permitting the poachers and hunters to have their way. But he is not intimidated. It is as if, he is divinely committed to save the birds in whatever way he possibly can. This 38-minute documentary is a straightforward documentation of his life, and his love for the open-billed storks that fly in droves to nest, mate and breed in and around his home.
Sen's next work was a two-part documentary, Way Back Home and Imaginary Homeland. A personal and intimate journey by the parents of the filmmaker to their homeland in Barisal, now in Bangladesh, slowly raises the larger question of communalism across and within the borders of India and Bangladesh, closing in on the tragic reality of human hate cutting across time and space. The film opens with the small family and the film crew embarking on the journey. The senior Sens are making the journey after fifty years – they had never been back since they crossed over to Calcutta - and the rest of the family plus the film crew are making it for the first time.
"Is this the small town I left as a young boy?" the senior Sen keeps asking himself. "Even the trees have changed, the waterways are no longer where they were, the skyline looks different," he goes on. Placed in perspective 50 years after the partition of India, displacement and uprootal have become a global reality. "The concept of the refugee is what I feel, made the prestigious Jan Vrijman Fund possible," confesses Sen who received the Jan Vrijman Fund on the basis of a worldwide competition of scripts from the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam.
"For me, the journey has been metaphorical and historical," says Supriyo Sen. The group had to cross dangerous hurdles while they shot clandestinely in Bangladesh on the eve of the elections there. The film does not reveal these cracks. Sumit Ghosh's seamless editing demonstrates editorial control as Ranjan Palit's camera offers panoramic shots of the cityscape, or takes us along those drives within Bangladesh roads, through avenues lined by trees that did not exist before, and the steamer rides from Dhaka to Barisal and back. The credit for the rich texture of the film lies squarely on the shoulders of the senior Sens – Supriyo's father and mother who come across as the best performers ever – spontaneous in their expression and their body language, not in the least conscious of the camera following them.
Hope Dies Last in War
Then came Hope Dies Last in War, which narrates the struggles of the families of some of the 54 Indian soldiers taken prisoners of war during the Indo-Pak war of 1971 who are yet to return home. Some parents died waiting in vain, some children lost the last ray of hope bending under the pressure of bureaucratic and administrative non-cooperation, some wives married again to open a fresh page in their lives, while some committed suicide. But this film is a tribute to the tremendous zeal and determination of the few that did not give up. Their lives have reduced to a perennial struggle between hope and despair. But they refuse to give up the fight that has evolved into a crusade for the restitution of basic human rights – the right to live and die in one's own country, the right to come back home, the right to a national identity.
The fight has been on for nearly four decades and none of them are about to give up. Hope Dies Last in War is a saga of their individual and collective struggle, spanning three generations, to get their men back. It records a tragic stalemate, sufferings of love and shining moments of humanity, courage and hope. "It is a singularly tragic story of human rights violations based on the testimonies of parents, wives, siblings, children and grandchildren. The film is about their pain, helplessness, dejection, reconciliation, hope and dreams in war-hungry Indian sub-continent," says Sen. The film was first screened in public in 2007. Cinematographer Ranjan Palit bagged the Indian documentary Producer's Association gold award for his brilliant work in this film.
The painstaking and long research that went into the making of this film – field research, documentary research, first-person interviews, travelling back and forth with some active members of the "Missing Defense Personnel Relatives Association" invests the film with that rare blend of research, emotion, commitment and honesty not easily witnessed even within the documentary format. It widens the canvas of the film from a simple wait-and-search saga to a tragedy of the last century that neither government has tried to mend even when it is equipped with the infrastructure and the power to do so.
While getting to grips with the emotional reactions of the family members, Sen defies the slotting of this film into any definite genre. It is an anti-war documentary. It is an investigative film. It is also a scathing attack on the inertia and callous attitude of the government of both countries towards the lives of 54 gallant soldiers who were prepared to sacrifice their lives but whose lives were allowed to hang in suspended animation of suspense. It is a personal saga of families still fighting what seems to be a losing battle in their search not only for their missing family members, but also to assert the right to restore to these soldiers, the dignity they deserve. ⊕
Shoma Chatterji 05 Mar 2009
Dr. Shoma A Chatterji, freelance journalist and author, writes on cinema, media, human rights, cultural issues and gender in several print media and electronic publications in India and abroad.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Ethic Jungle!? Who's call is it anyway?
http://www.cinematical.com/2007/07/02/film-clips-pierson-moore-and-the-ethics-of-doc-filmmaking/
What do you think of choices before a filmmaker?
Ponder on subject/filmmaker relationship?
What can be an equal situation?
Is it possible?Whow?When? Have you seen a film like that?
Who's is that Thin Green Line?
Making Money: Profits & Ethics in Documentary Filmmaking By Beth Gilligan
Related Links
Tribeca Film Festival website
Cannes Film Festival website
Michael Moore's official site
Merchandise Links
Bowling for Columbine (Region 1 DVD) - Amazon.co.uk
Etre et Avoir (Region 2 DVD) - Amazon.co.uk
In a world where shows like American Idol, The Apprentice, and Survivor regularly win the TV ratings game, the increased public appetite for documentary films should come as no surprise. Just last week, Entertainment Weekly reported that Touching the Void (2003) had broken into list of the top ten grossing documentaries of all time. Based on opening box office reports and terrific word of mouth, Morgan Spurlock's Super-Size Me (2004) seems poised to join it, and there's always the possibility that Michael Moore's already-controversial Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) could trump the $22 million gross that made the filmmaker's previous effort, Bowling for Columbine (2002), the highest-grossing documentary of all time.
Not only have these films been prospering financially, but they have also been garnering the type of critical attention that has often eluded them in the past. Abbas Kiarostami's 10 on Ten (2004) and Jonathan Nossiter's Mondovino (2004) join Fahrenheit 9/11 in competition for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, while Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2004), made with an initial budget of $218.32 (approximately £125), drew a ten-minute standing ovation when it screened as part of the Director's Fortnight.
However, as documentaries grow more successful and find a greater space within the public consciousness, there remain a number of unresolved issues facing their filmmakers. On Saturday, May 8, the Tribeca Film Festival gathered a panel of insiders to discuss this changing landscape, most notably the perceived financial success of the genre and ethical issues such as whether or not a film's subject should be compensated for his or her participation.
In light of the recent lawsuit waged by Georges Lopez, the rural schoolteacher featured in the hit French documentary Être et Avoir (2002), against filmmaker Nicolas Philbert, the latter issue seemed timely. While Lopez is demanding 250,000 euros on the grounds that the film was partially his creation, Philbert has famously asserted that, 'one of the founding principles of documentary filmmaking is to not install relationships of subordination. If you start paying people in documentaries, they become your employees.'
While this specific incident was never broached by the panel, the issue remained in the air. Peter Gilbert, producer and cinematographer for Hoop Dreams (1994) and director of With All Deliberate Speed (2004), an upcoming documentary about the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, disclosed that he and Hoop Dreams director Steve James felt obligated to give the families depicted in the films an equal share of the profits. Not only had the directors forged a close relationship with them (filming took place for over seven years), but they also felt that withholding profits would be exploitative given the dire economic situations faced by many family members. Gilbert acknowledged, however, that this case was extraordinary, not only because Hoop Dreams was wildly successful, but also because few filmmakers commit to spending such an extensive amount of time with their subjects.
Panelist Daniel Anker, the producer and co-director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (2000), and Edet Belzberg, director of the Oscar-nominated Children Underground (2000) and the upcoming Gymnast, recalled painful decisions where they were forced to omit key participants from their films because they refused to be filmed without receiving financial compensation.
Spellbound (2002) producer Sean Welch initially found himself in a similar bind with one of the families featured in his film, but was ultimately able to convince them to appear in the movie without being paid. Although this situation worked out for the best, Welch admitted that if he and director Jeff Blitz had had unlimited financial resources to tap into, they might have considered paying the family on the grounds that their participation helped make it a better film.
The discussion, moderated by Caroline Kaplan of IFC Entertainment, then turned to the film industry's reaction to the growing commercial success of the genre. Mark Urman, head of THINKfilm's U.S. theatrical division [which released Spellbound, Bus 174 (2002), and The Agronomist (2004]), pointed out that the $6 million grossed by Spellbound was probably about as much as 'Van Helsing (2004) made before lunch yesterday,' but nevertheless predicted that box office records for documentary films would continue to be shattered with increasing frequency. Urman also remarked that 'documentaries are the most exciting films I'm seeing [and] the most interesting films I'm seeing.' From a marketing perspective, they are also relatively inexpensive, as many come with what he described as 'built-in media hooks.' As an example, he cited the Sundance hit Super-Size Me, which has drawn volumes of free press coverage for its outrageous exposé of McDonald's fast food. Still, for every Bowling for Columbine, there are several less-heralded films that fail to do good business.
Still, with the explosion of affordable equipment and technology (Tarnation, for example, was edited on Apple's iMovie software), documentaries make an increasingly safe financial bet for studios and filmmakers alike. Urman cited the case of Bus 174, which despite garnering rave reviews only earned roughly $200,000 at the box office. Although this number may appear dismal on the surface, THINKfilm somehow managed to eke a small profit from it.
Whether this current fixation on documentaries is a passing fad or the shape of things to come remains to be seen, but with festivals like Sundance and Cannes continuing to place heavy emphasis on the genre and mini-blockbusters such as Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and Winged Migration (2001) putting dollar signs in the eyes of potential distributors, these films look like they're here to stay.
So where are you in the midst of this debate? What's your position?
Read more about all the films mentioned in this piece?
Can you trace any other ethical dilemmas before docuwallas? You can? You can't!
Related Links
Tribeca Film Festival website
Cannes Film Festival website
Michael Moore's official site
Merchandise Links
Bowling for Columbine (Region 1 DVD) - Amazon.co.uk
Etre et Avoir (Region 2 DVD) - Amazon.co.uk
In a world where shows like American Idol, The Apprentice, and Survivor regularly win the TV ratings game, the increased public appetite for documentary films should come as no surprise. Just last week, Entertainment Weekly reported that Touching the Void (2003) had broken into list of the top ten grossing documentaries of all time. Based on opening box office reports and terrific word of mouth, Morgan Spurlock's Super-Size Me (2004) seems poised to join it, and there's always the possibility that Michael Moore's already-controversial Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) could trump the $22 million gross that made the filmmaker's previous effort, Bowling for Columbine (2002), the highest-grossing documentary of all time.
Not only have these films been prospering financially, but they have also been garnering the type of critical attention that has often eluded them in the past. Abbas Kiarostami's 10 on Ten (2004) and Jonathan Nossiter's Mondovino (2004) join Fahrenheit 9/11 in competition for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, while Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2004), made with an initial budget of $218.32 (approximately £125), drew a ten-minute standing ovation when it screened as part of the Director's Fortnight.
However, as documentaries grow more successful and find a greater space within the public consciousness, there remain a number of unresolved issues facing their filmmakers. On Saturday, May 8, the Tribeca Film Festival gathered a panel of insiders to discuss this changing landscape, most notably the perceived financial success of the genre and ethical issues such as whether or not a film's subject should be compensated for his or her participation.
In light of the recent lawsuit waged by Georges Lopez, the rural schoolteacher featured in the hit French documentary Être et Avoir (2002), against filmmaker Nicolas Philbert, the latter issue seemed timely. While Lopez is demanding 250,000 euros on the grounds that the film was partially his creation, Philbert has famously asserted that, 'one of the founding principles of documentary filmmaking is to not install relationships of subordination. If you start paying people in documentaries, they become your employees.'
While this specific incident was never broached by the panel, the issue remained in the air. Peter Gilbert, producer and cinematographer for Hoop Dreams (1994) and director of With All Deliberate Speed (2004), an upcoming documentary about the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, disclosed that he and Hoop Dreams director Steve James felt obligated to give the families depicted in the films an equal share of the profits. Not only had the directors forged a close relationship with them (filming took place for over seven years), but they also felt that withholding profits would be exploitative given the dire economic situations faced by many family members. Gilbert acknowledged, however, that this case was extraordinary, not only because Hoop Dreams was wildly successful, but also because few filmmakers commit to spending such an extensive amount of time with their subjects.
Panelist Daniel Anker, the producer and co-director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (2000), and Edet Belzberg, director of the Oscar-nominated Children Underground (2000) and the upcoming Gymnast, recalled painful decisions where they were forced to omit key participants from their films because they refused to be filmed without receiving financial compensation.
Spellbound (2002) producer Sean Welch initially found himself in a similar bind with one of the families featured in his film, but was ultimately able to convince them to appear in the movie without being paid. Although this situation worked out for the best, Welch admitted that if he and director Jeff Blitz had had unlimited financial resources to tap into, they might have considered paying the family on the grounds that their participation helped make it a better film.
The discussion, moderated by Caroline Kaplan of IFC Entertainment, then turned to the film industry's reaction to the growing commercial success of the genre. Mark Urman, head of THINKfilm's U.S. theatrical division [which released Spellbound, Bus 174 (2002), and The Agronomist (2004]), pointed out that the $6 million grossed by Spellbound was probably about as much as 'Van Helsing (2004) made before lunch yesterday,' but nevertheless predicted that box office records for documentary films would continue to be shattered with increasing frequency. Urman also remarked that 'documentaries are the most exciting films I'm seeing [and] the most interesting films I'm seeing.' From a marketing perspective, they are also relatively inexpensive, as many come with what he described as 'built-in media hooks.' As an example, he cited the Sundance hit Super-Size Me, which has drawn volumes of free press coverage for its outrageous exposé of McDonald's fast food. Still, for every Bowling for Columbine, there are several less-heralded films that fail to do good business.
Still, with the explosion of affordable equipment and technology (Tarnation, for example, was edited on Apple's iMovie software), documentaries make an increasingly safe financial bet for studios and filmmakers alike. Urman cited the case of Bus 174, which despite garnering rave reviews only earned roughly $200,000 at the box office. Although this number may appear dismal on the surface, THINKfilm somehow managed to eke a small profit from it.
Whether this current fixation on documentaries is a passing fad or the shape of things to come remains to be seen, but with festivals like Sundance and Cannes continuing to place heavy emphasis on the genre and mini-blockbusters such as Capturing the Friedmans (2003) and Winged Migration (2001) putting dollar signs in the eyes of potential distributors, these films look like they're here to stay.
So where are you in the midst of this debate? What's your position?
Read more about all the films mentioned in this piece?
Can you trace any other ethical dilemmas before docuwallas? You can? You can't!
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Mira Nair: First the Documentary girl !
Mira Nair's first film was Jama Masjid Street Journal, her Harvard thesis project, which explores the life of a traditional Muslim community from a Western perspective and was originally conceived as a silent film. After graduation, Nair moved to New York, where for six months she waitressed at night ("my parents said I didn't exist in New York, they were so ashamed"), so that she could pursue her film ideas during the day. Earning enough money to buy film stock, borrowing a 60 mm Bolex camera, and receiving a grant from the New York State Foundation for the Arts enabled Nair to begin her cinema verite film So Far From India, the story of an immigrant working in a Manhattan subway newsstand who returns to India to see the wife he left behind and to meet his newborn son. With her camera, Nair became like "a go-between," or "an ambassador," between her protagonist and his estranged wife. "This is what I mean when I talk about the extraordinariness of everyday life," she says.Nair, who tells John Lithgow she has "never regarded documentary as a stepping-stone to fiction," spent the next seven years making "a series of documentaries" in India on "things that got under my skin, ideas that appealed to me." Her most acclaimed documentary, India Cabaret, was inspired by the question "What divides good women from improper women in our society"? Centering on the aging strippers of a seedy strip club in Bombay, with whom Nair lived while making the film, India Cabaret explores "the double standards of an essentially patriarchal society." The story of one of the club's regular customers and his wife also enables Nair to grapple with "the eternal triangle, Indian-style."As much of a "struggle" as it was to make these movies, Nair feels her greater challenge was to find her audiences. For three weeks every year, she would "take all my films under my arm and get on a Greyhound and show them to anybody who wanted to see them." Despite the frustrations, Nair tells Lithgow she never thought she would give up. "I'm diseased. I'm permanently afflicted by cinema. I could not imagine life without making my work," she says.Nair's "epiphany" came when India Cabaret was chosen to open the Indian International Festival and she witnessed the documentary's impact. "The language in the film is very wickedly funny...bawdy, mish-mash…very much how we speak," and unlike the usual "heightened, artificial" language of Indian "Bollywood" movies. When Nair saw how "swept away" people were by this language, she suggested to her friend Sooni Taraporevala that they co-write a fictional screenplay, using the same spoken style, about the lives of Bombay street kids.Nair's "idea" for Salaam Bombay! was to "amalgamate" the "inexplicability of everyday life that we have in documentary" with "gesture, drama, and the controlled situation that we have in fiction." Although Nair shaped the film's narrative in the edit room with editor Barry Alexander Brown, she attributes much of the power of Salaam Bombay! to the twenty- four children who act in the movie. Following an "informal" acting workshop, Nair worked with these kids as she would with professionals, screen-testing them and paying them a day rate. "By the time we were out on the streets with 5,000 people watching…their focus was extraordinary." Their work, Nair reflects, contributed greatly to the "extraordinary experience" of making this film. For Salaam Bombay! Nair was awarded the Best New Director at the Cannes Film Festival. The film also was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.
Exercise-
Read about the documentary films Mira has made.
How does she choose her protaganists?
How does she treat them?
In which film is she using the DocuDrama approach?
What is Docudrama?
Exercise-
Read about the documentary films Mira has made.
How does she choose her protaganists?
How does she treat them?
In which film is she using the DocuDrama approach?
What is Docudrama?
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