Critical Reading reviews – Jordan Shepherd
Charles Forceville – The Source-Path-Goal schema
Charles Forceville is a Dr in Amsterdam who studied English but teaches media studies my aim is to critically review his schema. Firstly his study focuses on the life or journey of three documentary filmmakers. These documentaries are focusing on the movement of their own lives and or the lives of others. This movement is pivotal to the story telling it drives the piece forward. The journeys end is no less important than the journey itself to the filmmaker. The document describes how the information learnt along the way is just as important.
The style of the three documentaries found in the reading all contain similar elements. All include voice over from the filmmaker, all include the life of the filmmaker and all include video and photographic elements portraying the journey. From this we recognize that the documentary focuses heavily on one single protagonist and is in a first person view. The films show the importance of the hero within every narrative. The idea of a documentary is to tell a story must as a film or novel does, it is just represented differently.
How does this relate to the Source path goal schema? From this we see that people’s lives are our central focus. We are encapsulated by the journey that these people go on. This is where I can relate to our own documentary making process. We want to see some amazing journeys, but to have these we first need the people to go on these journeys. Finding the right primaries is very important.
Ohad Landesman – The Aesthetic of realism
Ohad Landesman from the university of New York describes documentary and its changing aesthetic with the introduction of digital video being one of the main factors for change. Since the 1960’s film cameras became much smaller, less invasive and cheaper, so people could go out and film the world for themselves. Today this is still the case with portable digital cameras providing some of the clearest picture quality within the reach of most people.
“Some artists turn from documentary to fiction because they feel it lets them come closer to the truth, their truth. Some, it would appear, turn to documentary because it can make deception more plausible.”
Erik Barnouw
This quote taken from Ohad’s article summarises how people choose to create drama or documentary and their reasons why. To me it shows how people have changed their thinking about capturing realism. People who turn to documentary are searching for the realism that it traditionally contained through its “early naïve days of observation.” To me this dates back to the first films ever made in history. Such films as leaving a factory (1895), Rough Sea at Dover (1895) and leaving Jerusalem by railway (1896) Are to me the earliest forms of documentary footage ever collected as they aimed to show the world for what it was.
So in summary what Ohad is trying to say is that with the rise in technology can we truly trust shaky handheld camera work to be true as seen in reality TV or have people become so aware of the media as they are not only consumers but producers as well that we will never get true observational documentary again.
Visual theory
Visual theory contains several elements that allow us to break down and analyse images. The first element I notice is the rule of thirds. This shows how every image has a frame containing four points of balance. By using these sectors to frame your subjects you gain visual harmony within most images.
The next is to use juxtaposition to contrast subjects against each other. These can be point locations, contrasting light or depth of field. The first point location must be dominant in order to gain the viewers attention first.
Horizon lines are important in giving context to an image. Having this horizon line we are drawn to look at the subjects in the foreground, especially if the background is softened by using a wide aperture/small f-number.
As humans who have lived in a media crammed world for the last 60 years we have become attuned to recognise images and break them down without thought and without realising.
