Filmmaking Techniques Research Articles

Psychophysical measures of visual function and everyday perceptual experience in a case of congenital stationary night blindness.

An appreciation of the relation between laboratory measures of visual deficit and everyday perceptual experience is fundamental to understanding the impact of a visual condition on patients and so to a fuller characterization of the disorder. This study aims to understand better the interpretative processes by which modified sensory information is perceived by a patient with congenital stationary night blindness and the adaptive strategies that are devised to deal with their measurable visual loss. Psychophysical measurements of temporal resolution, spectral sensitivity, and color discrimination were conducted on a 78-year-old male patient with the condition, who was also interviewed at length about the ways in which his diagnosis affected his daily life. Narrative analysis was employed to identify the relation between his subjective perceptual experiences and functional deficits in identifiable components of the visual system. Psychophysical measurements indicated a complete lack of rod perception and substantially reduced cone sensitivity. Two particular effects of this visual loss emerged during interviews: 1) the development of navigational techniques that relied on light reflections and point sources of light and 2) a reluctance to disclose the extent of visual loss and resulting lifelong psychosocial consequences. This study demonstrates the valuable complementary role that rich descriptive patient testimony can play, in conjunction with laboratory and clinical measurements, in more fully characterizing a disorder and in reaching a more complete understanding of the experience of vision loss. It also evidences the particular suitability of filmmaking techniques as a means of accessing and communicating subjective patient experience.

Shakti Butler: Stimulating Dialogue among Diverse Film Viewers

in october 2012, depaul university in chicago hosted the premiere of Shakti Butler's latest film, Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity. Thanks to the superb organization of the event by numerous campus cosponsors, an audience of over five hundred students, faculty, staff, and community members was on hand to see the film and participate in the discussion it sparked. And it did spark discussion, not only because of the issues it brought to the fore but also because Butler, the founder of World Trust Educational Services Inc., invited audience members to engage those issues and prepared them to do so.One aspect of Butler's presentation that can disarm an audience, one she uses regularly in her workshops and talks, is the brief breathing/ focusing exercise she asks audience members to participate in before she begins. This may take just five minutes, but sitting up straight, breathing deeply, and clearing one's mind pays dividends when people respond by directing their attention to the task at hand: seeing and hearing with open minds and hearts what they are shown. Beginning a presentation in this way, however, carries a certain risk since it veers from the traditional modus operandi for academic programs and can create some dissonance and resistance. As an integral aspect of Butler's identity and a reflection of the conviction and honesty she brings to the table, the approach has proven effective.Interviews and personal stories have been essential to Butler's films since she began making them. Identifying herself as an educator as clearly as she is a filmmaker, she brings multiple voices into her work as she explores issues that revolve around racial/ethnic and gender identity. With Cracking the Codes, she successfully integrates many voices with other filmmaking techniques she has used with her previous films: theatrical sketches, dance, voice-over narration, music, poetry, historical documents, and superimposed titles that introduce subtopics and, in Cracking the Codes, provide an overview and outline of the film content. Supplementing the films are extensive guides and reference materials on the World Trust Web site (world-trust.org) to help users mine the films' multiple levels of information and insight.Brief analyses of her earlier films, all of which remain relevant, demonstrate Butler's long engagement with the inequities that revolve around race/ethnicity and gender in the United States. These films include The Way Home, a record and distillation of the conversations of sixty-four culturally diverse women who discussed their experiences over a period of eight months; Light in the Shadows, a film that brings together ten women who participated in The Way Home while dramatically reconfiguring the makeup of the group; and Mirrors of Privi- lege: Making Whiteness Visible, a compilation of interviews with prominent white educators who are countering racism and sexism in their work and in their lives. Moving from these earlier films and then back to Cracking the Codes for further analysis will provide some understanding of the films' value and can serve as a gateway to the rich trove of resources Dr. Butler and her colleagues have produced.The Way HomeSixty-four culturally diverse women in conversation over eight months? Butler manages to film and edit the results of this lengthy exploration into an accessible ninety-two-minute film, weaving the film together by highlighting themes and creating visual links between segments. That she does so effectively reflects her insight and commitment to antiracism, the feminist movement, and education as well as to her filmmaking skills. The sixty-four women, all with a background in speaking and facilitation, met in eight ethnically identified councils that include African, Arab, Asian, European, indigenous, Jewish, Latina, and multiracial Americans. Questions of identity and the ramifications of one's identity within a society that regularly uses race/ethnicity as a measure of value anchor the exchanges as the women grapple with intra- as well as intergroup biases. …

“The Utmost Care, Kindness, and Consideration”: The MPPDA versus Allegations of Animal Abuse, 1923–1925

This essay provides a case study of the extended conflict between an animal welfare organization, the American Animal Defense League, and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) that took place between 1923 and 1925. The essay distinguishes among actual cruelty inflicted on animals during production; “suggestive” cruelty, which appeared on screen but could have been achieved through filmmaking techniques without actual harm to animals; and general negligence of animals living under the care of studios. Drawing extensively on MPPDA archival records and historical newspapers, the essay foregrounds the importance of animal cruelty as a concern of the American film industry and provides an early demonstration of MPPDA president Will Hays’s strategies for negotiating with pressure groups as well as the press.

Visual and Experiential Knowledge in Observational Cinema

This article examines observational filmmaking methods, which have been influential in shaping ethnographic cinema. It offers a theoretical discussion of the techniques of observational filmmaking and their exploratory function, providing an analysis of the general features of observational films. The paper examines observational cinema with respect to the degree of control exerted over the filmmaking process, camera style and editing, the role of subjectivity and the interaction of words and images. The article concludes with an analysis of the contribution of observational cinema in the creation of corporeal and experiential forms of knowledge foregrounded in postmodern anthropology.

La persistance de la misère : Les Trois soeurs du Yunnan et L’Homme sans nom, deux études cinématographiques de Wang Bing

The Persistence of Misery : Three Sisters and Man with No Name, Two Cinematic Studies by Wang Bing. Three Sisters and Man With No Name hold a special place in the film career of Wang Bing. These two documentaries present a picture of the extreme poverty of isolated figures, without voices, of whom we know almost nothing. Absorbed in difficult tasks or, just the opposite, idle and dreaming, they are filmed with persistence and great care, as if these two films were studies. To understand their particular appeal and their significance in the overall career of this filmmaker, the present article reflects on the literary influences on Wang Bing as well has his filmmaking technique and style of narration, and presents as well a comparison with other representations of rural poverty.

"Without One Tree, a Forest Will Stay a Forest" by Dagmara Drzazga As a Religious and Historical Documentary

Katarzyna Citkos article is an analysis of Dagmara Drzazga’s film Bez jednego drzewa las lasem zostanie (Without One Tree, a Forest Will Stay a Forest, 2012), an example of a religious and historical documentary. The article describes the film’s depiction of the tragic fate of Jan Macha, a priest who during the Nazi occupation of Poland organized help for victims of German oppression as a co-founder of the Scout organization Konwalia (Lilly). For his work, he was arrested and executed in a prison in Katowice by means of a guillotine that was installed there in 1941. The article also analyses film-making techniques characteristic to documentaries, as well as the specific forms of expression which situate Drzazga’s work in the realm of religious cinema. These documentary techniques include combining photos and archival documentaries, interviews with people who knew Macha, and the opinions of experts, such as historians, clergymen and journalists. Other interesting techniques employed by the director make it possible to describe the film as belonging to religious cinema of the transcendental style, as described by Paul Schrader, which abandons unnecessary suspense in favour of poetic images; focuses on the dynamics and drama of the events rather than an in-depth psychological analysis of characters’ motivations; interweaves first- and third-person narration, which is carried out by means of both voice-over and by people speaking in the film; uses suggestive image editing combined with music which employs the theme of Agnus Dei. All of these features helped Drzazga’s interesting and thought-provoking film win a number of awards at international Catholic film festivals.

Sound, image, rhetorical strategy and traumatic memory in Ai Xiaoming’s Our Children

Abstract This study examines Ai Xiaoming’s Women de wawa/Our Children (2009), an independent film documentary about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake where over 50,000 children died in collapsed school buildings. The analysis draws on film-making techniques, issues in modern Chinese media and politics and psychology, and trauma studies. Our Children reveals a violent process of governmental oppression that attempted to erase traumatic memory. As a result of the politically enforced amnesia, the earthquake victims were doubly victimized. Because crucial information related to the trauma – the quality of the school buildings – remains inaccessible, and the official explanation is unacceptable, the trauma continually haunts the traumatized victims, as well as the society at large. However, by drawing on everyday people’s testimonies and an abundance of images from digital phones and cameras, Our Children succeeded in preserving both individual and public traumatic memories and allowed some people to heal.

Star Wars franchise, fan edits, and Lucasfilm

Fan edits assert that fan authority is on par with that of a work's original creator; this authority is generated not only through the argument, but through the structure of the text itself. Fan edits adhere to classical filmmaking techniques, creating coherent plots and editing for continuity. These recut texts are emblematic of current ownership debates; they are the read/write culture brought to fandom. The Star Wars series of films are among the most frequently recut texts and are my focus here.

Projecting Thailand: Thai Cinema and the Public Sphere

Abstract Thai royal anthem before artistic performances and sporting events. In the air conditioned and upholstered theaters and movie houses throughout the kingdom, the royal anthem is accompanied by a montage of images in celebration of the king's many achievements over the course of an illustrative reign. While these montages change from year to year, they are nonetheless spectacular (in the performative sense of the term) testaments to the power and the endurance of the royal image and the advanced filmmaking techniques employed to project it. As is customary for the duration of the anthem, the audience is expected to stand in order to formally and ritually pay respects to the king. The pacing of the sequence of images, paired with the reverential tempo of the anthem itself, allow for a moment of introspection before the presentation.

Reflections of an Ethnographic Filmmaker‐Maker: An Interview with Paul Henley, Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester

ABSTRACT Two decades ago the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (GCVA) at the University of Manchester, U.K., was created. Since then it has become one of the most acclaimed postgraduate visual anthropology schools in the world, providing a space for theoretical debate and training in ethnographic filmmaking techniques. Conceived originally as a master's program under the sponsorship of Granada Television and the University of Manchester, it has now extended training to the Ph.D. level to students from around the world. In this interview, Professor Paul Henley, GCVA‘s director since its inception, reflects on the last 20 years of the Granada Centre, ethnographic filmmaking, the state of the art in theory and practice in visual anthropology, and new possibilities and challenges for the future. [Keywords: visual anthropology, ethnographic filmmaking, documentary, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology]

Life after Île Ste-Croix (review)

Reviewed by: Life after Île Ste-Croix Alan Gordon Life after Île Ste-Croix (DVD). Ronald RudinLeo Aristimuño. ONF/NFB, 2006. 63 min., $19.95 Life after Île Ste-Croix, produced by Ronald Rudin and directed by Leo Aristimuño, is not really new to most readers of this journal. The DVD release is dated 2006, but the film itself has been screened at a number of academic conferences and other special events over the past few years. It recounts the story of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first French effort to establish a permanent settlement in North America. In the summer of 2004, Acadians, members of the Passamaquoddy First Nation, and English-speaking residents of New Brunswick and Maine came together to remember what happened on a tiny island in the Ste-Croix River, now the boundary between New Brunswick and Maine, during the winter of 1604–5. Each group involved in the commemoration had its own reasons for remembering this early seventeenth-century colony, and the film tells the story of what they hoped to gain from the celebration, how they understood its historical significance, and how they managed to work together to pull off an international celebration in a small Atlantic community. Thus, Life after Île Ste-Croix tells the story of commemorating the ‘birth of Acadia,’ but reveals that this commemoration was about so much more. Champlain’s arrival at Ste-Croix in 1604, one participant stresses, is a founding Canadian – not ‘just’ Acadian –moment. Others draw connections to regional, international, American, and Aboriginal contexts and memories. But the film puts its own stress on the efforts of the Passamaquoddy nation in its struggle to win official recognition from the Government of Canada. For the most part, the film allows the participants to speak for themselves. There is no narrative voice-over, and only the structural division of the film into five subtitled sections instructs the audience in what to interpret. As a result, the presentation of information is left in the words of the participants in the festival; the film does not intrude [End Page 301] overly on their messages, even if in places this may have been desirable. Even the expert analysis is left to participants in the film, scholars who play the role of organic intellectuals, participant observers of their own communities. This was clearly a conscious decision intended to teach lessons about the construction and expression of collective memories. However, as a film-making technique, it reduces the presentation to a sequence of fairly static shots of segments of interviews, speeches, and glimpses of musical performances. Undergraduate students might be forgiven for concluding that expressions of collective memory and commemorative events are fairly dull. When I first saw the film I thought it would have made an excellent radio documentary, but with the dvd release it has become even further out of step with its medium. Simply put, the dvd’s greatest drawback is that it fails to take advantage of the dvd technology. The film does not advance by chapter and title, meaning the dvd is little more than a digital version of a vcr recording. The storage capacity of the dvd format would have allowed maps, images, documents, and other teaching tools to be included. It also could have permitted students and teachers to pursue some topics in greater depth, all on the same disk. Part 2, ‘Who Remembers and Why,’ serves as an illustration of the potential. In this section of the film, multiple lines of memory can be seen to intersect and interact in this one commemorative event. These lines might have been separated out or explored in more depth in a mini-feature, or by supplying additional footage and background context. Leaving the dvd as simply the original film makes for a clumsy teaching tool. This is a great shame because, although the film itself is not visually arresting or dynamic, its presentation of the motivations, competitions, and jostlings of different players putting together a fairly obscure commemorative celebration offers a fascinating window onto the processes of making public memory. [End Page 302] Alan Gordon University of Guelph Copyright © 2008 University of Toronto...

Racist Film: Teaching The Birth of a Nation

Racist Film:Teaching The Birth of a Nation Paul McEwan (bio) The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) is all too seldom taught in film studies classes, given its centrality to the development of narrative film and its usefulness as an extreme filmic example of racial misrepresentation. I teach the film in my introductory class, in film history, in film theory, and in a special topics class on historical fiction films. While the film is the focus of my research and a text I find endlessly fascinating and disturbing, it obviously presents numerous challenges in a film classroom because of its virulently racist content. It is also a three-hour silent film that can be difficult to fit into screening schedules and challenging for entry-level students who generally have no experience with silent film. But the payoffs for teaching the film are well worth its challenges, and not because it is some kind of "classic" that needs to be appreciated. The film is one of the most effective tools I have for teaching ideological analyses of film, for understanding audience reception, and for considering the ways in which films can "tell" history. Preparation is, of course, key for this film, since students need to be at least somewhat aware of what they are about to see. I tell them that this is a central text in the history of cinema, and that it brought together many of the techniques of narrative filmmaking that Griffith and others had been developing. At this point in the semester, my students have seen a range of silent films, have been taught the concept of the cinema of attractions, and are aware that Hollywood narrative techniques did not spring into existence fully formed. I also warn them that the film is one of the most racist things they will ever see, that it was the subject of protests in 1915, and that the history it purports to tell is an extremely biased one. Some kind of balance is essential to this introduction, which I provide in class beforehand and in a handout that they receive by e-mail before the screening. In general, it is more important that they are prepared to see the film as racist rather than as a formal masterpiece, so that is what I emphasize. All of our screening choices are, on some level, endorsements of a given film–unless we go out of our way to convince the students otherwise. Students naturally assume that there is some lesson to be learned from each film, and in this case that lesson is primarily about racism and not about the history of silent cinema. There is a risk, though, to overemphasizing the film's racism. In a continuing education class I taught at Northwestern some years ago, I had a much more diverse group of students than I have had in any of the more traditional classes I have taught since—a diversity of races, ages, and social backgrounds. Since I was trying to be careful about the racism in the film, and wanted to make it clear that I was not endorsing it, I explained more of the context at the beginning, including [End Page 98] the fact that the film had been used as a recruiting film by the KKK.1 At the end of my introduction, one African American student asked me "why do we have to watch a Klan recruiting film in this class?" Her question got at the heart of my reasons for using this film. I backtracked somewhat, explaining more about its significance as a milestone of narrative, and also about my motivations for providing a lesson in the particularities of early twentieth-century racism and the centrality of mediated images to that racism. She was moderately satisfied with the answer, but there was no escaping the fundamental issue: as an African American woman living in Chicago, she did not need any lessons in racism, least of all from me, a white Canadian ten years her junior. My primary reason for teaching this film—to give students a sense of the depths of American racism—does not apply to every student. Even a...

‘At the Other End of the camera’: Film through history in John Marshall's documentaries

John Marshall's five-part A Kalahari Family (2002) is the subject of this paper. I shall discuss Marshall's film-making techniques, his shift from amateur/adventurer through conventional documentary, cinéma vérité to reflexivity and advocacy. Marshall was part of the Ricky Leacock, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch and Maysles brothers' generation in the United States and contributed fundamentally to the development of this documentary film movement. A Kalahari Family is Marshall's response to his anthropological critics. John's first footage among people in the Kalahari was exposed in 1950 and his last is in A Kalahari Family (2002). This series is culled from over a million feet of 16mm footage and outtakes, not including Marshall's recent video documentation. Marshall's corpus of released titles and out-takes is truly film in history and film through history, history on film and a chronology of new techniques, technologies and theories, some of which he himself wrote and innovated. Despite his significant aesthetic and reflective theoretical contributions to documentary, John was always more concerned with those ‘in front of the camera’ than he was with those who studied film as film. Herein lay the source of his conflicts with the Kalahari anthropological community and development NGOs, the subject of this study.

The Dressman's Line: Transforming the Work of Costumers in Popular Hindi Film

Costumes in Hindi cinema are traditionally cared for on set by workers known as dressmen. Dressmen have always employed informal methods and techniques in their work, and they now find their skills, knowledge, as well as their privilege of maleness in a male-dominated industry being eroded as Hindi filmmaking is transforming itself aesthetically and organizationally in response to global forces. Interviews with dressmen with careers spanning nearly fifty years form the basis of a description of dressmen's discourses and practices. Dressman practices, in particular, are revealed to contribute in important ways to the appearance and meaning of costume in film. De-skilling of the dressman's job coincides with new organizational structures and the entry of assistant directors, many of them female, who claim superior knowledge of filmmaking techniques and of the fashion world that informs film costume. Studying film workers like dressmen informs our understanding of urban skilled workers in the Indian context, and provides a corrective to the exclusively semiotic approach to costume analysis that has prevailed to date.

Medicine, Sexuality, and High Anxiety in 1950s New Zealand: Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures" (1994)

Heavenly Creatures is a filmic representation of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case. The depth of reaction to the case can be explained both by the rarity of the crime committed a matricide and the transgression of normative boundaries of gender and sexuality in the 1950s. It was also New Zealand's most public postwar moment involving the perception of a homosexual relationship. This paper considers how Peter Jackson and his partner/coscreenwriter, Fran Walsh, have presented an alternative history of the case using a visual text. In particular, the paper focuses on anxieties around sexual deviance and the use of medicine and psychiatry to diagnose, control, and remedy its manifestation. Both the sensibilities of Jackson 's present the 1990s and his filmmaking techniques impact centrally on his portrayal of the

Medicine, Sexuality, and High Anxiety in 1950s New Zealand: Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures" (1994)

"Heavenly Creatures" is a filmic representation of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case. The depth of reaction to the case can be explained both by the rarity of the crime committed--a matricide--and the transgression of normative boundaries of gender and sexuality in the 1950s. It was also New Zealand's most public postwar moment involving the perception of a homosexual relationship. This paper considers how Peter Jackson and his partner/co-screenwriter, Fran Walsh, have presented an alternative history of the case using a visual text. In particular, the paper focuses on anxieties around sexual deviance and the use of medicine and psychiatry to diagnose, control, and remedy its manifestation. Both the sensibilities of Jackson's present--the 1990s--and his filmmaking techniques impact centrally on his portrayal of the case.

Double Exposure

Double Exposure

Eyeing the Field: new horizons for visual anthropology

As a member of staff at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, I have seen it emerge over the last decade as a critical site for anthropological film-making. The primary focus of the Centre's operations is its Masters course that offers training in documentary film-making techniques to anthropology graduates. There is, however, considerable confusion among both anthropologists and film-makers about the status of anthropological documentary. This essay explores what is distinctive about anthropological film-making practice. I will argue that it is no longer about the exotic or about the documentation of disappearing worlds; it also makes no claims for science and objectivity. Instead it is distinguished by a unique sensibility rooted in experiential knowledge. The cultivation of an anthropological way of seeing also offers an unusual perspective on other visual forms. I believe that the Granada Centre has much to gain from developing collaborations with those working in adjacent sites.

Digital Transformations

Digital Transformations