Digitizing Democracy

For our last class blog entry this semester, I’d like for us to further explore two issues. First, in the assigned reading from Julianne Pidduck about citizen journalism, she quotes Graham Spry discussing the relationship between communication and community: “A society, a community, a nation, like any other organism, is a function of a network; society is organized, integrated and made responsive by information” (478). Do you agree with this analysis? Why or why not? Moreover, where does documentary fit into this schema? Yesterday in class, we debated the function of non-fiction films in (our) society, and there seemed to be a consensus that it’s acceptable (or even only possible) for documentaries to just provide information to the public. This assertion certainly conforms to the ways people have understood the purpose of documentary cinema historically (i.e., to educate, to inform, etc.). Yet, I can’t help but think that these filmmakers (especially the ones whose works we’ve screened this semester) want their documentaries to accomplish more (such as ameliorate some aspect of their society). What do you think? Can documentaries like Burma VJ do more than simply educate and inform? More importantly, should they aspire to do so? What do you see is the connection between communication and community, especially in the current era of new media?

Second, Burma VJ, just like Waltz with Bashir, considers the issue of the personal and the public. Arguably, all of the recent documentaries that we’ve screened in this course address the tension between the personal and the public somehow. Burma VJ makes the case that one should risk one’s own personal safety in order to support a greater, public cause (the anonymous cameramen in Burma are certainly not the first in film history to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of documenting something they deemed important, nor will they be the last to do so). What do you think? Should the “public” always trump the “personal” in documentary cinema? Can you give examples of non-fiction works that privilege the personal over the public? Is it ever possible to find a compromise between the two? Why do you think this tension between the public and the personal is such a popular topic for recent documentary cinema?

Thank you for all of your thoughtful contributions to the course this semester, and I hope that you continue your explorations of documentary cinema long after this class ends!

Projecting Trauma: Animated Documentaries

One topic that we briefly discussed during yesterday’s discussion was the question of history. The representation of history is a key concern for documentarians, and many of these filmmakers (including contemporary ones) have struggled with the issue of how to show the past. In the History of Documentary course that I teach, this question of how to represent the past (particularly a traumatic past) always arises when we screen Alain Resnais’ reflection on the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1955). In Resnais’ case, he was faced with two problems in particular: how does a filmmaker portray an event from the past where (s)he was not present, and how can anyone adequately represent the horror of something that defies representation? While Ari Folman was not attempting to illustrate the Holocaust in Waltz with Bashir and he *was* present at the Sabra and Shatila massacres, I do see Folman’s film as grappling with the problems of how to represent the unrepresentable (in this case, the internal, the subjective, memory, trauma, dreams, and the psyche). What do you think - was Folman successful in his quest to represent the unrepresentable in Waltz with Bashir? Why or why not? What are the advantages and disadvantages of Folman’s utilization of animation to document emotion and history, and to illustrate the relationship between the past and the present?