TED's DIGITAL JUNGLE -21ST CENTURY CONTENT REQUIRES 21 ST CENTURY FORM

21st CENTURY CONTENT REQUIRES 21ST CENTURY FORM

TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE#7

Have not updated blog in a while, since we have been very busy developing new formats for our Congolese programming. Am happy to say that the result, MONUC REALITES, a weekly magainze show, is now up and running, and has been a hit, both with the Congolese as well as our supervisors. ( see www.YouTube.com/MONUCVIDEO )

The challenge was common enough- – how to put accross the MONUC message to the Congolese TV audience – but our solution has been a radical one. No longer are we employing a style that mimics what documentary scholar Patricia Aufderheide rather devastatingly terms:” regular documentary – a film with sonorous, “voice-of-God” narration, an analytical argument rather than a story with characters, head shots of experts, leavened with a few people-on-the-street interviews, stock images that illustrate the narrator’s point( often called “b-roll” in broadcasting, perhaps a little educational animation and dignified music.” ( DOCUMENTARY FILM -A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION, p. 10)

This is the kind of “educational” film that became in vogue during World War II, thanks to John Grierson and the March of Time. and has been popular in institutional circles ever since. One of the major attractions of this approach is that it allows the bosses to closely scrutinize the text of the narration, and thereby control the content.

Or so they thought. I became painfully aware of the flaw in this premise some 30 years ago when some fellow screenwriters did a series of tests and discovered that many spectators paid no attention to the words being spoken, and were actually more influenced by the quality of the unseen voice delivering the lines. (Chalk up another victory for Marshall MacLuhan!) Of course, the music and the visual package were also important.

It never ceases to amaze me how many so-called media professionals appear to be oblivious to these realities – the most recent example being the esteemed former Vice-President’s exercise in didacticism which actually won him a Nobel Prize. While I have been preaching everything he said ( and a lot more!) for the past 35 years myself, I was stunned at the low level of media awareness displayed in the final product. ( and, as a Swede, I still cannot understand how they can give a Nobel Prize to a movie!)

Anyway, it took us a few months here to develop our new format. The goals was to create a vehicle which could relay reportages from the front lines in the eastern Congo to the entire country. The first task was helping our bosses to understand the technical realites of the Congo – bandwidth being what it is here, we cannot adhere to the 24 hour news cycle. Futhermore, getting around this huge country can be very time-consuming, particularly when covering events in remote areas. of which there are many.

Finally, we agreed on a magazine-style format inspired by CNN BACK STORY,  with reportages from reporters on location introduced by an in-studio presenter. Our expert graphics designer provided a very cool look for the program, and we managed to find several excellent Congolese on-camera reporters to work both in the field and in the studio,

The ultimate compliment has come from the Congolese broadcasters, who air MONUC REALITES now in prime time, and we have received a lot of positive feedback. My favorite, perhaps, came from a Congolese cameraman who asked one of our Congolese cameramen how many cameras we used to shoot the program.

(The secret answer: one!)

The bottom line is that we are now producing what I would call ” good propaganda ” – we are putting out a worthy message, but in a form that the intended audience finds pleasing, and therefore wants to see,








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TED's DIGITAL JUNGLE - JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTERS OR NONE

Ted’s Digital Jungle

The Revolution That is Not Being Televised

JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTERS OF NONE – OR ONE MAN BANDS

For lovers of the auteur theory, digital video must be the answer to their prayers. Now, at last, a filmmaker can control his ( or her)own work from first draft script to final cut. However, in my view, this is a very mixed blessing.

While it is wonderful that virtually anyone with access to a digital camera and a computerized editing system can make a film which can be projected on a large screen ( a big kick for me!). one cannot assume that the works produced will be worth watching.

My years of experience in film have television have taught me one thing: everyone needs an editor ready to tell you to “kill your darlings”, as they used to say in Hollywood.

Anyone who has ever tried to make a film knows how easy it is to fall in love with a shot or an idea, and how difficult it canbe later in the editing suite to admit that the shot or scene does not work at all.

The bottom line: any writer, no matter how great, needs an editor, and so do filmmakers.

Like traditional filmmakers, I divide production into three phases – pre-production, production and post-production – or writing, directing and editing. While I know there are young Mozarts out there who can compose masterpieces on the fly, the rest of us have to slog through these three phases and hope something worthwhile results. And personally, I have found that the results are best when there are at least one strong mind in charge of each phase – and that those 3 minds do not all belong to the same person. ( I know what you’re thinking, but even Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, et omnes, had collaborators!)

Even as a screenwriter, I always preferred to work in a team in which one person was the creator and the other was the editor. If I was the one coming up with ideas, then I was able to be completely right-brained and uninhibited, and let my partner be the left-brained wet blanket. Many great Hollywood scriptwriters worked in teams – Billy Wilder, the Epstein brothers and many others – and they did so for a reason.

Nowadays, of course, it is all too easy for a digital filmmaker to bypass the writing phase altogether, but this is a recipe for disaster. Like trying to build a house without a blueprint,

As the immortal Akira Kurosawa said,” It is possible to make a good movie from a good script, but it is impossible to make a good movie from a bad script..”

It goes without saying, of course, that ,without any script at all , a train wreck is all but guaranteed.

The bottom line is that great films cannot be made by one-man ( or one-woman!) bands, and that film remains a collaborative medium, even in the Digital Age.

As my great directing teacher Janos Hersko from Stockholm’s Dramatiska Institutet said when asked about the difference between a painter and filmmaker:” When you are a painter, you get an idea and put it on canvas. When you are a filmmaker, you get an idea and then you have to get 50 idiots who don’t give a damn to do it for you..”

SOME NOTES ON DIGITAL INTERVIEW TECHNIQUE

We have recently been working on an oral history of the MONUC mission, which is about to become 10 years old. Much running around trying to make appointments with busy people, but things have gone surprisingly well, and now we have completed our principal shooting, with only a few pick-ups remaining. We have also been editing as we shot, and I wrote a fairly structured treatment before we started, so we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted – or needed – from each interviewee.

However, this begs the question`; how much should one try to control the interviewee in an attempt to get the subject to say what you want – or in a way one wants?

A lot depends on the subjects.

In this case, we are talking about knowledgeable professionals with whom we already have some rapport. Generally, they want to see the questions of time, since they want to be prepared. This is fine with me, since the last thing we want to do is ambush anyone with surprise questions. However, there is also the question of what constitutes a good delivery.

Some people, like Barack Obama, are naturally gifted speakers who can talk about just about anything and make it sound interesting and spontaneous. And there are others who are not .

For television professionals, the latter are the challenge, of course. Getting people to relax in front of the camera is easier said than done, especially if the subjects have some knowledge of the medium. In the proverbial journalistic hatchet job, a skilled television professional can make virtually anyone look bad. FOX NEWS is a blaring case in point. ( or, as the great Swedish playwright August Strindberg once said: ” Be careful what you do to me – you may be in my next play!”)

So , the first thing is to establish trust. This is an art, and not easily taught. Some people just inspire more trust in others. However, clearly one has to be both relaxed and professional,as well as courteous while demonstrating a gentle mastery of the entire situation. The sound, the lighting, the composition, and some direction regarding appearance and movement work wonders. Ideally, the interviewee should feel he or she is in the capable hands of well-intentioned professionals, and should not be afraid to ask questions regarding how his or her performance might be improved.

The second step is to get the person talking, and then to keep the camera running until they finish. Most people will need to warm up a bit before they hit their stride, and then the pearls begin to emerge. I try to avoid interrupting people unless there is some technical disaster – and even then, I will generally let the subject decide to cut.

I suppose my thinking here is a bit influenced by own experience of writing and, later, teaching writing. As most writers know, there is no magic formula for writing. The trick is simply to start writing, and then stick with it until something good happens.

I find the same is true with speech. Once people get started, they end up saying all sorts of interesting things – a fact well known by police forces around the world ( which is why lawyers advise their clients to say nothing in trails and depositions- that seemingly harmless small talk can open the door to all sorts of unpleasantries!)

For this reason, I try to avoid overly clever questions, and instead prefer to stick to open-ended humble queries asking the subject to enlighten us about his or her field of expertise. People are going to say what they want anyway, and nobody likes clever questions that require too much thought.

From my teaching experience, I know students hate quizzes, and I think the same is true of most people. ( I remember substitute teaching a literary history class for a colleague who had broken his league. When I told the students what had happened to the unfortunate man, and said that he would not be back for the rest of the term, they applauded! I was shocked, and then learned that my colleague had a habit of giving quizzes on minutiae in the stories the students had read)

Similarly, I don’t know of anyone who enjoys being deposed in a civil suit, or , worse,being cross-examined in a criminal case. I have only had the first experience, thank God, and can only say it is an exhausting experience. (When you like talking as much as I do, it is very hard keeping your mouth shut, but that is what you have to do in a deposition)

For me, the best thing is to let the subject get on a roll, and then ask some follow-up questions. in the process, hopefully he or she will say something you can use in a natural, spontaneous fashion.

This approach may burn a lot of tape, but these days, tape is just about the cheapest part of the production. When I was studying film directing in the early 80s at Sweden’s Dramatiska Institutet, it was just the opposite – we had the most incredible equipment imaginable in the Swedish Film Institute studios, but could barely afford any film!

We were hardly alone in this dilemma – the same was true in Eastern Europe, where most of our teachers had learned their craft. The result was that our productions tended to be extremely well-planned and organized, with as little as possible left to chance. Under these conditions, it was pretty difficult to think about doing real documentaries, with shooting ratios of 20:1 or more – something like Marcel Ophuls’ classic THE SORROW AND THE PITY must have cost a fortune!

Nowadays, however, great documentarians like the Australian Dennis O’Rourke can spend months getting people to reveal themselves talking to the camera in films like CUNNAMULLA, and the results are extraordinary. I had the good fortunate to meet Dennis in New York when CUNNAMULLA was shown at the Margaret Mead Festival; he explained his technique was simply to spend time with people, and then tape his chats with them. He does his own camerawork, so essentially the films are dialogues with the subjects as they describe their lives. Dennis does not pretend to be invisible, but tries to be as. unobtrusive as possible. He ends up with a lot of material, of course, which he then looks at and makes a preliminary edit, saving the material he likes on external hard drives.

Then he goes on to make the final cut.

Needless to say, without digital technology and the liberation from the shackles of Eastman Kodak, none of this would be possible!

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TED's DIGITAL JUNGLE - INFORMED CONSENT- A HOT POLITICAL POTATO

 

    INFORMED CONSENT , A VERY HOT POLITICAL POTATO!
 
It is no secret that Sexual Violence here in the DRC is a huge problem ‚along with a host of others.  From a Multimedia perspective, the subject raises some troubling issues, and we had a first-hand encounter with one a few weeks ago.

The American filmmaker Lisa Jackson, who made a film about rape in the DRC a few years o ago ( one none of us here has seen, since no one seems to have a copy, even though the production was made with MONUC support and was shown to  the Security Council in NYC, was also on HBO) returned to ostensibly screen her film in the home villages of some of her victims.

 Since Ms. Jackson was making no effort to cover the faces of the victims, this was an immediate problem for us, since our Human  Rights Division has a policy of not showing rape victims' faces  images available for public viewing,  and the very idea of showing the film in the victims' home villages, where the perpetrators might be still living, seemed to be to be both reckless and totally irresponsible.

Of course, we support freedom of the press, but in this case Ms. Jackson was again asking for our assistance. The fact that  she had not gone through proper channels in doing so didn't help her case, as well as the fact that she seemed to be using the screenings to surreptitiously be shooting a sequel didn' t help either.

After all, the DRC is a sovereign nation, and we are but invited guests here; we certainly do not want to be supporting an activity that would be illegal in most countries we
could think of, so we withdrew our support as soon as we found out what was going on.

Ms. Jackson promptly left the country, with loud proclamations ( having not seen her film, I cannot comment on it, but she does a very good job of promoting herself) that she would return to Kinshasa to show her film to the National Aseembly and on a national TV channel. I would pay good money to see that encounter, since her most recent visit aroused the ire  of one of the DRC' s largest Human Rights organizations, who accused
her of treating the rape victims like they were animals in a zoo.

From what I have seen of Ms. Jackson' s blog, I have to agree with them.

Defenders of Ms. Jackson say that she has the victims' written consent, but our Human Rights Division would argue that there is a big difference between consent‚and informed consent.

In other words, Individuals might agree to allow their faces shown, but not be aware of the potential consequences; furthermore, here in the DRC, there are many desperate people who would agree to anything under the sun for a suitable fee.
Written consent, has no validity , per se.

But you are denying the victims the right to bear witness!‚Ms. Jackson's defenders then protest, ignoring the fact that the victims can bear witness on camera, but not for commercial distribution,. And have done so on occasions when we could guarantee that the material would only be shown internally.

Interestingly enough, many of these victims said the only thing that could help them would be peace and the elimination of the armed groups who were preying upon them. And a surprising number of these victims of sexual violence were men, a fact which undermines the gender-based advocacy of Ms. Jackson and others such as Eve Ensler.

Ms. Jackson claims that measures were taken to provide funds for re-location of victims if they were subsequently in danger, but that is pretty callous coming from someone who lives in New York, because we know the victims will not be coming to New York to stay with her. And anyone who knows anything about Third World village life knows the home village and their families are the world for these woman, and that once they leave, they have little or nothing.

Writing as a filmmaker, I think no work of art, however, spectacular or importat, can justify putting lives in danger, so I find Ms. Jackson's actions both irresponsible and reckless.

She might then reply she is an advocate, which presumably would provide her with special license, but then I would reply that the notorious King Leopold of Belgium also claimed to be an advocate for the people of the Congo, and was responsible for much of this country's tragic history,

Self-proclaimed advocacy might play well in some circles, but is no excuse for inhumane exploitation of fellow humans, no matter where they are. And exploitation is what we are talking about, since Ms. Jackson has built her career on this one production, and she seems to enjoy the festival circuit.

What goes around comes around ‚and I don't expect to see her here again .




       


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TED'S DIGITAL JUNGLE -TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF DOCUMENTARY FILM

    TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF DOCUMENTARY FILM
 

While documentary film is a universally recognized cinematic form, an agreement on exactly what is, and what is not , a documentary film has been elusive throughout the course of cinematic scholarship from the early 20^th century to the present day. Indeed, the definition has often been the subject of heated controversy, and remains so today.

For example, the noted American cinematic scholar Bill Nichols posits that documentary film is a representation of reality`‚ as the title of his major work on documentaries ( REPRESENTING REALITY) would indicate.

However, one of the problems inherent in Mr. Nichols' definition is that the definition of reality itself has been a classic conundrum for philosophers since ancient times, and has yet to be resolved. And in the cinematic world, the issue of accurate portrayal of reality has been a political hot potato since the days of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.

Perhaps the great Federico Fellini had the answer when he was castigated by ideologues for having abandoned the principles of Neorealism in films like  LA STRADA and LA DOLCE VITA ( not to mention 8 1/2 !) . Mr. Fellini  simply said he was showing other realities in these films, and
they were real enough to him ‚ e basta`!

Finis origine pendet, as the Romans used to say ; the end depends upon the beginning . Most film historians would categorize the early works of the  French Lumiere Brothers as  documentary‚ since they were motion picture images of daily life at the time  - workers leaving a factory, a train arriving at a station, soldiers on military drills ; there has never been any suggestion that the Lumiere Brothers staged any of these events for the camera. ( for the purpose of this discussion, we shall ignore the few comic skits they did which were obviously directed)

In short, there appears to be a critical consensus that the Lumiere Brothers 'work was puredocumentary, and that the Lumiere Brothers were the first documentary filmmakers.

The American critic James Monaco went a step further, using  the Lumiere Brothers'films as an example of Cinematic Realism, contrasting their films with the films of their French contemporary Georges Melies, whose work he defined as Expressionist.

According to Monaco, Cinematic Realism meant that all creative expression was in front of the camera, and that camerawork was as unobtrusive as possible, with the absence of special effects or the kind of cinematic trickery Melies was famous for.

Cinematic Expressionism, therefore, gave free license to image manipulation behind the camera.

Monaco  then proposed that all subsequent cinematic work would fall into one of these two stylistic categories. However intriguing, this Theory  does not resolve the issue of a definition of documentary, since it is entirely possible to conceive of a documentary that is realist in subject but expressionist in execution!

Writing as a filmmaker myself, I would suggest that an operational definition of documentary film is more useful than any definition based on content . In other words, the key is the process rather than the end product.

Accordingly, I would like to propose the following, with apologies to my friends at DOGME:

1)  A DOCUMENTARY CANNOT CONTAIN STAGED OR RE-CREATED MATERIAL:

This means, for example, that all those wonderful historical documentaries done by the BBC et al, are not documentaries if they have actors playing the roles of historical figures; they may be excellent /docudramas, /but they are not documentaries.

This is critical, since any clever filmmaker can easily re-create an event which completely misrepresents what actually happened. A mountain-climbing film  a friend once did for National Geographic comes to mind; in the film , the heroic mountain climber proved incapable of conquering the intended peak in the Himalayas, so a more attainable summit in Scotland was found which he could then annoint with the
American flag while beating his chest and proclaiming his victory over mother nature.

Similarly, an otherwise excellent film like Errol Morris 'THE THIN BLUE
LINE is also not a documentary, since it employs the device of re-created events. This unfortunately puts it in the category of TV shows like COPS -  or what a friend of mine from Miramax once described to me as reality-based programming.

I prefer the term /reality-based programming to describe all the reality-based shows that are so popular on television, like SURVIVOR, etc, since they are all unabashedly staged, for maximum impact, to the term docu-soaps,which I find a bit misleading.

Now I know some documentary historians are going to come at me with the example of the legendary Robert Flaherty, who is alleged to have staged scenes in NANOOK OF THE NORTH; if this is  indeed true, then I would be the first to admit that Flaherty crossed the line.

But since he poor man was trying to make a pioneering film in the Arctic with the most ancient equipment imaginable, so I would grant him a lot more poetic licence than I would to some contemporary shooting in Sony HD with the latest in Arctic gear, etc!

And, as Ingmar Bergman once said, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot: The great artist does not borrow ‚he steals!

A more controversial  historical example is presented by  Leni Riefenstahl's TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, which, politics aside, is a masterpiece of technical perfection. However, close inspection of the production reveals a good deal was, in fact, staged for the camera; indeed, a case could be made that the entire rally at Nuremberg was staged for Ms. Riefenstahl' s benefit, which would make the film a huge industrial, if not one of the biggest commercials ever made.

And since we now know that she shot the whole event the year before in a dress rehearsal, I certainly would not call it a documentary.

( in l fairness to Ms. Riefenstahl, however,  I think her magnificent film on the Berlin Olympics certainly passes the test, and is an extraordinary documentary. One can hardly blame her for having so many cameras and such a crew of masterful cameramen and technicians!)

2) CINEMA VERITE IS AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEAL:

Since I cut my cinematic teeth working as an assistant cameraman with some of the great practitioners of cinema verite  in New York City , I find this a bit difficult to write, but the bottom line is the presence of cameras affects behaviour in human beings around the world.

And not just in humans ; we did a program on gorillas in Virunga Park  in the  DRC Congo a few years ago, and my cameramen told me that he thought the gorillas were actually posing for the camera! Skeptics should check out Barbet Schroder's KOKO THE TALKING GORILLA  these animals are not as dumb as some people think

New camera technology is, of course, making the cameras smaller and quieter all the time; the new Canon is truly amazing in this regard ‚ and what can one say about the I-Phone 4S ??

 We have come a long way since the 16 mm Eclairs ,Arriflexes, Auricons and Nagras that I started with 40 years ago. Obviously, we are lot more invisible than we used to be ‚ but unless we are working with hidden surveillance cameras, our own presence is still
 a huge factor, and we can never be “flies on the wall.”

Nontheless, I still love watching documentaries, and I love making them.




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FORM VS. CONTENT

    FORM VS. CONTENT


When I worked as an adjunct professor of English and Speech at New
York's Fashion Institute of Technology a decade ago, I always used to
end the term with a written debate on form vs. content in media. The
class was divided into two teams, and each student could his or her own
media -  film, theatre, print, music, fashion, architecture, design,
fragrance, sex, politics, etc.

There were no right or wrong answers ; the whole point was to help the
students learn how to argue a position.

Conventional wisdom supported content, but the FIT students proved hip
enough to understand the big picture. After all, branding is a
phenomenon that began in the fashion industry. and most of these
students knew how much money is spent every year to create brand
awareness. And some students even knew that Burberry had created a line
of baby clothes to addict the defenseless toddlers to Burberry plaid.

Likewise, these students knew that the fragrance industry spends more on
designing bottles with sex appeal and ads that share the fantasy than it
does on actually developing the contents of the bottle ‚ the fragrance
itself.

Many of my students were  East Asian, and East Asian  culture has always
valued process as much as actual product. In other words, the way you do
something is just as important as what you actually do. Of course, this
is the diametric opposite of the popular American ideals of  winning
is not everything, its the only thing, nice guys finish last, and never
give a sucker an even break ( thank you WC Fields!)

However, there are other American cultures with affinity for these Asian
values. I remember interviewing representatives of 10 different Native
American nations in Stockholm, Sweden, as a correspondent for Rolling
Stone during the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972.
Their message: we are all connected by the air we breathe.

And when I asked David Monangaye, Spiritual Leader of the Hopi
Nation,and the American equivalent of the Dalai Lama, why he had come to
to Stockholm, he answered: To teach the White Man how to live with the
earth..

This was a transformational experience for me, to say the least, and
provided me with both a spiritual modus operandi and a polar star which
has served me ever since.

Now, almost 40 years later, I can look back and say there has been some
progress, There are, of course, a lot of people who are now saying the
world is coming to an end in 2012, but to them I say that I have bene
expecting the world to come to an end in one way or another since the
late sixties, and , lo and behold, we are still here ( at least I think we are!)

And I do believe the words of a German theatrical performer who used to
do a play for children about the history of the world which ended with
him giving the kids seeds and encouraging them to go out and plants
trees. When I asked him what if the world came to an end, he answered,
without missing a beat:No big deal. As long as we do our best in this
lifetime, the world will be better the next time around.‚

So, to all my faithful readers, best wishes for a Happy, Healthy and
Safe 2012 and Year of the Dragon




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