TITICUT FOLLIES

What sorts of 'readings' can you give to Titicut Follies? Although there's not much story (it's about this place and these people but not in a linear, cause-effect way), there is style. What do you make of this style? Can you imagine choosing such a style for a documentary you are making? What are the shortcomings/advantages?

Grey Gardens

What about a film, like Grey Gardens, that seemingly has narrative without story? That is, there's no attempt at exposition; there's no info needed to unravel the plot; no path to be followed; and, no goal toward which we need orientation.

Vernon, Florida

We will be discussing this film on Tuesday along with the online essay by Alex Gerbaz. Link to that article through the course day-by-day syllabus.

I have a feeling after watching a Morris film that I've watched a fiction film, something with the feeling and narrative features of fiction, a sort of ambiance associated with such. Does it have to do with the Interrotron's "new" way of both suturing me into the film and of revealing its process?

Doc in the age of terror (SOP)

We have discussed many facets of documentary truth and the creation of meaning (which, of course, alters our conception of what truth is). We may have even come to recognize the ultimate impossibility of a totalizing understanding of such a thing as truth. I use "thing" here intentionally as a vague, nebulous, amorphous word since truth is too. Specifically, we noticed how Trihn Mihn-ha points to the complications and slipperiness at the intersection of reality and moving image. To quote Reassemblage regarding the way that film (specifically ethnography) seeks to establish 'meaning' to every sign: "what about the internal commentary that escorts images?" In other words, do images "mean" something from the outside (the critic, theorist, observer), or do images manifest their own logic independent from this outside?

We have not yet talked about the ways that documentary appeals to our genuine desire for 'truth'. That is, although truth may be always already gone when we think we 'have it', our want/need to go after that truth is real and genuine. We want stability, something to fall back on; Higgins' article works from that side of the truth discussion. If Trihn Mihn-ha highlights the fissure between sign and reality, Higgins points to our human desire to bridge the gap between sign and reality. For her, documentary serves a particular purpose here, based no small part on our tradition of putting faith in images.