LIDF

PocketVisions examines a different theme every week over the course of eight sessions per term. One or more films will be screened followed by an open-room debate where together we (with guest speakers) will examine the implications of the films, the system of production, the position of the subject, and how, we, the audience consume it, and where that consumption might lead.

Beauty
14 October 2009
Film: Kago

The Beautiful subject. One of cinema’s greatest pleasures is the wonderfully photographed image. For documentary filmmakers this presents an ethical dilemma. Does photographing a world in a certain way separate you from it or connect you to it? Or does it create a different world altogether. The ethical issue is of creating a stylised representation that can distances, or even constructs a gross misrepresentation. All for the benefit of the eye of the viewer. And where is the agency of the subject? This debate is about artistic licence, and who the filmmaker is responsible to; his audience, his subject, or himself?

Order
21 October 2009
Film: Apocalypse on Wheels (Apocalypsa după şoferi)

Film encapsulating society. The impulse to make a film often comes from wanting to describe a society. A filmmaker might pick up a camera and follow an individual or group of individuals with the idea that they will capture the nature of that society. The people filmed are held up as examples of a community, and sometimes as a metaphor of processes happening on a larger scale.

Some filmmakers have trained in social sciences and see using film as an extension of their descriptive research methods. But the impulse to ‘capture society’ is spread much wider than academia.

Hero
28 October 2009
Film: Holes in My Shoes

Portrait of an amazing life: The hero’s journey is not a standard narrative device restricted to Hollywood. We see it in the earliest forms of documentary film, and in a particular type of film that is about a heroic life.

Documentaries that celebrate a life often describe an individual that overcame the odds. And through determination and unique talent achieved a status that seemed almost predestined.

The need to see heroes on screen reflects the celebration of individuality in our society rather than seeing success in its wider social context. Does the need to make this genre of films show the dominance of the myth of the self-made man? And is it a coincidence that the film selected for this discussion is American?

Struggles on the Margins
04 November 2009
Film: Bar de Zi (and other stories)

Noble and dispossessed. The struggling subject who is living in adversity or on the margins is a recurring theme in documentary film. What do such films hope to achieve? How is the subject selected, and who is considered “worthy”?

The moral or political urge to film the dispossessed belies the unquestioned presumption that making suffering or marginality visible helps in alleviating it. We would like to question the power relations between the filmmaker and the subject, and also how the film is consumed by an audience.

Loss
11 November 2009
Film: Wish You Were Here
Film: Megumi

Making sense of what is lost. Loss is a universal human experience that finds expression in all sorts of art forms. Documentary film as medium can approach it in unique ways using reconstruction and archive material. Loss and mourning, as described by Freud, involves a repeated return to memories, images and events in the mind. This repeated looking back and reconstruction is, in effect, the work of mourning.

New Anthropology
18 November 2009
Film: Travelling (Nedarma)

Can documentary be ethnography? The aims of documentary film and ethnographic film have crossed and interwoven since the days of Flaherty and Vertov. There is now a new genre dealing with old themes; films about remote tribes and so called primitive people.

It is useful to contrast an ethnographic method that is research and theory based with a documentary narrative that is based on characters, drama, and interesting stories. Are films being made today able to reconcile the two approaches?

Format
25 November 2009

Cookie-cutter documentary film. Documentary as a genre has become a staple of television programming. Every evening, audiences can expect to see anything from the drinking habits of British teenagers to radicalisation in the Muslim community. Although varied in content, the form and presentation of these films has become convergent. It is not only the constraints of the slot, being a national broadcast and thus speaking to a general audience, but also the way they are constructed. There is a standardisation occurring in the narrative arc and the use of music. How can an audience engage with a topic if the frame is predictable and rigid? And is there room for authorship by the filmmaker given the constraints set by commissioning editors?

Suffering
02 December 2009
Film: The Meaning of Life
Film: The Boy Inside

Interpreting pain. Illness, accident, pain and other forms of suffering are recurring subject matter for documentary filmmakers. To what extent is this an attempt to make meaningful something that occurs for no reason yet affects everyone? Pain is an existential question, its experience results in the question “why?” How does filming suffering give sense to it? Film fixes complex feelings and experiences into a linear narrative and fixed photographic frame. And maybe this is a secular response unique to our digital age.