Scribd
Upload
48 views

Week 6

The document discusses useful cinema and non-fiction film theory. It explores how film technologies have been integrated into spaces beyond movie theaters like classrooms, factories, and transportation to form particular genres like industrial, educational, and training films. Schools, businesses, and public agencies have deployed film technologies to instruct, sell, and shape citizens. The concept of "useful cinema" frames how motion pictures have been utilized as institutional tools to satisfy organizational objectives beyond entertainment. A separate section outlines four modes of documentary representation: expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive.

Uploaded by

Sven De Zeeuw
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPSX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
48 views

Week 6

The document discusses useful cinema and non-fiction film theory. It explores how film technologies have been integrated into spaces beyond movie theaters like classrooms, factories, and transportation to form particular genres like industrial, educational, and training films. Schools, businesses, and public agencies have deployed film technologies to instruct, sell, and shape citizens. The concept of "useful cinema" frames how motion pictures have been utilized as institutional tools to satisfy organizational objectives beyond entertainment. A separate section outlines four modes of documentary representation: expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive.

Uploaded by

Sven De Zeeuw
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPSX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 10

Week 6

USEFUL CINEMA &


NON-FICTION FILM THEORY

Film III: Film Theory


Nir Ferber
“Documentary, or the creative
treatment of actuality”

John Grierson, “The Creative


Producer”, 1933
Useful Cinema – “Introduction: Utility and Cinema”
Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland

Moving images serve an expanding range of corporate, governmental,


rhetorical, and aesthetic functions. More than this, they are integral to
our experience of institutional and everyday life. […] The world of
public commercial entertainment has long had an important place as a
ritualized part of popular commune and the naturalization of moving
images in modern life. But there was this other cinema, one defined by
film’s ability to transform unlikely spaces, convey ideas, convince
individuals, and produce subjects in the service of public and private
aims. (1-2)
Useful Cinema – “Introduction: Utility and Cinema”
Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland

Film technologies—screens, projectors, and cameras—were long ago


integrated into a surprising range of spaces and situations, shaping the
aesthetics as well as the display of and engagement with motion
pictures. And these places, beyond conventionally defined movie
theaters, included classrooms, factories, museums, community halls,
and modes of transportation like trains, planes, and ships; each has
been a key site for the formation and reformation of cinema itself. In
such screening contexts, people encountered particular genres
including industrial, educational, training, advertising, adult, and home
movies. (2)
Useful Cinema – “Introduction: Utility and Cinema”
Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland

Schools, businesses, and public agencies invested in celluloid and its


diverse family of technologies in order to instruct, to sell, and to make
or remake citizens. In other words, cameras, films, and projectors have
been taken up and deployed variously—beyond questions of art and
entertainment—in order to satisfy organizational demands and
objectives. Accordingly, cinema has been influential upon a modern
understanding of culture’s utility or what Tony Bennett calls “useful
culture”. For Bennett, following certain strains of Michel Foucault’s
work, culture is productively conceptualized as an institutional tool.
(3)
Useful Cinema – “Introduction: Utility and Cinema”
Haidee Wasson and Charles R. Acland

The concept of useful frames a dispersed body of texts, contexts, and


practices. It overlaps with, but is not equivalent to, similar terms such
as “functional film”, “educational film”, “non-fictional film”, and “non-
theatrical film”. […] This has entailed crafting cinema into a tool that is
useful, a tool that makes, persuades, instructs, demonstrates, and does
something. Such functions include creating the captive audiences and
compulsory spectatorship of classroom and training venues, and also
the voluntary and edifying gatherings of museums, planetariums, and
public libraries. (4, 6-7)
Documentary Modes of Representation
Bill Nichols

Expository mode
Observational mode
Arose from the dissatisfaction with the moralizing quality of expository
documentary.
interactive mode
The observational mode of representation has enjoyed considerable use
as an ethnographic tool, allowing filmmakers to observe the activities of
others without resorting to the techniques of exposition that turn the
sounds and images of others into accomplices in someone else's
argument. Reflexive mode
Documentary Modes of Representation
Bill Nichols

Interactive mode Expository mode


Arose from the same technical availabilities but as a counter-answer to
the detachment of the observational documentary.
A participatory dynamic is one that extends beyond the use of interview
material in an expository text. Commentary made by or on behalf of the Observational mode
filmmaker clearly subordinates the interviews to the film's own
argument.
Expository and observational films unlike interactive or reflexive ones,
tend to mask the work of production, the effects of the cinematic Reflexive mode
apparatus itself, and the tangible process of enunciation.
Documentary Modes of Representation
Bill Nichols

Reflexive mode Expository mode

Arose from a desire to make the conventions of representation


themselves more apparent and to challenge the impression of reality
which the other modes normally conveyed unproblematically.
Observational mode
Rather than hearing the filmmaker engage solely in an interactive
(participatory, conversational, or interrogative) fashion with other social
actors, we now see or hear the filmmaker also engage in meta-
commentary, speaking to us less about the historical world itself than
about the process of representation itself Interactive mode

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy