Narrative Reportage

Ostensibly, I was going to use this blog to discuss my Honours project and use it as a tool to track the development of my research. While that remains the primary objective, my head is currently in a swirl as I investigate journalism – the who, what, where, when and hows necessary for factual stories. Drilling down even further though, is the WHY? The ‘Why’ which defines Feature Writing, Literary Journalism, Creative Non-Fiction. Story-telling with a distinctive voice: tales not hampered by that barnacle call ‘objectivity’, but enriched by emotional depth that can make a stronger connection with readers.

Gay Talese is a giant in literary journalism. His article “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold“, was published in Esquire, in April 1966. This is the background info taken from his website:

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L. A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra–his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on–and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism–a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.

Get ready for some fine reading!

Internal Montage

Although I’m primarily investigating ‘film‘, I read an article today by Scott McQuire called Videor-Video Theory. Although this 1999 article has a focus on video, it was interesting to ‘re-think’ the impact of image de-composition and the function of the frame afforded by video.

McQuire writes about the problematic relationship between video and theory, suggesting that ‘[o]ne of the problems, even for those theorising video as a ‘specific signifying practice’ was that, while it was clearly different to photography and cinema, it was not entirely new. Moreover, I would argue that the arrival of video around the 1970s didn’t make nearly as radical a break or cultural rupture as photography had in the 1840s or cinema in the 1890s. Nevertheless, it did stretch existing paradigms in a number of ways’. He traces this impact under three headings:

1) instantaneity
2) architectonics
3) plasticity

Plasticity was what I found of most interest.

What I wanted to talk about briefly is a shift in the aesthetics of the image: its increasing density and malleability. I wanted to approach this by considering the changing function of the frame from painting to photography to cinema to video. The frame becomes crucial in painting around the same time that painting begins to detach itself from architecture; it corresponds to the moment in the Renaissance when painting is being reconceptualised by those such as Alberti as a ‘window to the world’. The function of the frame is firstly to demarcate the inside of the image from its exterior; but the stability of the frame also serves as guardian of the stable and centred position of the spectator.

This system continues in photography, with its inheritance of painting’s visual language and its aspirations to be considered an art. But it does so with difficulty. The crux of the matter is that, with the number of ‘views’ which begin to be made, the authority of the one ‘ideal’ view which painting represented becomes increasingly tenuous. The shift towards an active frame, and by implication a mobile, decentred spectator, becomes more explicit with the arrival of cinema, and more, particularly, with the development of a cinematic language based around camera movement and montage. From this moment on, the frame delineates a point of view which is inherently unstable, shifting and highly mobile. The philosophic, political and social ramifications of such a shift are still being felt.

What happens with video belong less to this external axis of framing than to its internal dimensions. As the interior of the image becomes increasingly fluid, there are new possibilities for what might be called ‘internal montage’. One aspect of this is the proliferation of internal ‘windows’ — frames within frames — which can be seen in the work of a film maker such as Peter Greenaway.

This idea of internal montage set my heart aflutter! McQuire concedes that although the plastic possibilities are not unique to video; you could do similar things with film but it was a more laborious and expensive process. He argues that, ‘it is interesting to speculate on video’s role as screen technologies moves away from purely visual concerns to become a combination of image and text — a data screen for the information society.

Aesthetic shifts, fluid frames, overloaded images, montage. It sort’ve fits in with my hazy ideas of re-interpreting home movies/found footage and discovering what’s NOT shown in them and I constantly keep thinking of the wash of amateur film, photos, words on the Web today…am looking for connections…what is this identity thing all about?

‘Video theory’ Globe (1999)
Scott McQuire
www.artdes.monash.edu.au/non-cms/globe/issue9/smtxt.html
Accessed 20 August 2008

The Danube Exodus – Film by Peter Forgacs on Vimeo

The Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács is one of the most prominent so-called found footage filmmakers. In particular home movies and amateur films serve as the basis of stories he reveals and compose by using recovered personal and historical events.

He is primarily interested in the way in which these films seem to depict only happy moments, but on closer consideration they also appear to tell a hidden history, which can be brought back to the surface by the recycling filmmaker.

In the travelogue The Danube Exodus, he documents the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning of World War II. In two boats, a group of nine hundred Slovak, Austrian Jews tried to reach the Black Sea via the river Danube, in order to get to Palestine from there. Forgács based his film on the amateur films of Captain Nándor Andrásovits, the captain of one of the boats.
He filmed his passengers while they prayed, slept and even got married. At the end of this journey, it is clear that the boat will not return empty: a reverse exodus takes place, this time of repatriating Bessarabian Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich because of the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia.

more about "The Danube Exodus – Film by Peter For…", posted with vodpod

Mining the Home Movie

I’ve recently finished reading the book Mining the home movie, which is the first international anthology to explore the historical significance of amateur film. These essays are written by filmmakers, film theorists, moving image archivists and preservationists. All authors are passionate about home movies as vital methods of visually preserving history, and see them as an important genre of film studies.

I was interested to read about the wide range of amateur film/home movie collections around the world and somewhat surprised that the National University of Mexico (UNAM), has one of the largest film archives in Latin America – Filmoteca UNAM.

I keep stumbling across the word historiographic and discovered it examines the writing of history and the use of historical methods, drawing upon such elements such as authorship, sourcing, interpretation, style, bias, and audience.

Hayden White argues that ‘history is an imaginative and transformative act, one in which fiction and fact endlessly flow in and out of each other…[and] that historiographic practice needs to be reimagined: “I think the problem now, at the end of the twentieth century, is how we re-imagine history outside of the categories that we inherited from the nineteenth century” (16).

Peter Forgacs is a media artist and independent filmmaker based in Budapest, whose work has been exhibited worldwide. He’s made a series of award-winning films based on home movies from the 1930s and 1960s, which document ordinary lives ruptured by extraordinary historical trauma that occurs off-screen. He tries to ‘see the unseen, to de-and reconstruct the human past through ephemeral private movies’ (47).

I was also intrigued by the definition of trauma by Michael S. Roth. He argues that ‘the modern concept of trauma points to an occurrence that both demands representation and refuses to be represented. The intensity of the occurrence seems to make it impossible to remember or to forget’ (67).

Tzvetan Todorov says that:

totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have revealed the existence of a danger never before imagined: the blotting out of memory. These twentieth century tyrannies have understood that the conquest of men and territories could be accomplished through information and communication and have created a systematic and complete takeover of memory, hoping to control it even in its most hidden excesses (p17).

Quite a bold statement, but it made me think…

Finally, Roger Odin discusses the family home movie as a document. He argues that ‘family productions are deployed for a local or identity claim context. The rising interest in amateur productions is one symptom of micromovements fighting for identity and the dissolution of a structured public space. Although these movements can be read as a reaction against globalization, there exists a dangerous corollary in the rise of tribal identifications and mobilizations (267).

There are many other worthy essays in this book, including a selected filmography, videography and bibliography that will have me reading and viewing for many months to come!

Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories
Editors: Karen L. Ishizuka, Patricia R. Zimmermann
Published by University of California Press, 2007
ISBN 0520230876, 9780520230873
360 pages

Peter Forgacs

more about "Peter Forgacs", posted with vodpod

The first episode of the Private Hungary series tells the Bartos family Saga: a talented amateur filmmaker Zoltán Bartos, a chanson composer and lumber businessman made more than five hours of 9,5mm amateur film from the late twenties until the mid sixties. In 1944 the Hungarian “Quisling government” plundered the half Jewish Bartos family. Following the Nazi period, surviving the war in a Forced Jewish Labor unite, Zoltán divorced and remarry. Later the Communists rage the Hungarian citizen’s life; in 1949 his plant was nationalized and lost everything again, except his humor.