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We dove head first into the trenches of documentary film on Thursday with the screening of Michael Glawogger's Megacities (1998). This film brought up lots of questions surrounding the quest for true 'documentation.' The most pressing questions it brought up for me was, how does the audience's role function differently when presented a documentary film? How does our expectations and definition of the documentary set up a lens in which to view the events on the screen?
In particular to Megacities I was thinking about how as a viewer our experiences in life can validate or vaporize the 'truth' presented to us in a documentary. Someone in class remarked how the New York scenes in the movie felt more staged than the scenes shot in Mumbai. I have to wonder, are these scenes truly more set up? Or do they appear more staged to an audience who is far more likely to have experienced New York city than Mumbai and thus our personal connection vaporizes the 'truth' in that footage?
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ReplyDeleteI think what Glawogger gave us is very different from the "typical" tropes of documentary film -- informative without being instructive or pedantic -- so that it doesn't demand from us indignation and action the way that other films made on the subject of poverty/human suffering might. In the interview with Ginu Kamani, Glawogger asserts that he focused on the beauty of truth -- that the people in the film are not bitter because, for the most part, he did not encounter bitter people.
Kamani's glorification of Cassandra was really problematic for me. Like: I don't think that scene, which was arresting by virtue of the swelling music and semi-explicit footage, is grotesque or sleazy or repressive. But neither is it a cause for a flowery veneration of female sexual power -- it's a person doing her job, same as the the many-colored guy or the Russian cops.
I think that is an interesting point that we may find the NYC scenes less believable because we have more experience with New York than any of those other cities (in general). I got the impression that many of the scenes were set up... not explicitly staged, but the people being filmed understood that they were going to be and were told to go about their actions (rather than it being scripted or planned out completely). It made me think about how the audience has that suspension of disbelief when watching fiction (non-documentary) movies, and some of the scenes set outside the US had a simliar suspension of disbelief, perhaps because we are unfamiliar with that territory, but then the scenes set in NYC pulled the audience out of its belief because we "know" what NY and Americans are like. When watching the scenes of unfamiliar places, there is a lot of information to take in about those places; with the NY scenes, there is less new information to sort out, and the audience can begin observing the actions specifically and the filmmaking and note where it seems more artificial. While watching, once I felt like the NYC scenes were set up, I started paying more attention to the others and felt as though they were too.
ReplyDeleteUltimately I don't really think it matters though. Whether or not each scene was "real life" or close to it, I think the general idea of the film was to get across the overall atmosphere of the Megacities and those who are trying to survive in them, and how they are different in many ways but very similar in many ways as well. Regardless of how the scenes may be set up, I still believe what the film presented to us and think the filmmaker effectively got the feelings of the cities across to the audience.
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ReplyDeleteIt's all about context. Everything is. The color of the dog in that painting is influenced by color of its frame and that of the wall on which it's mounted. This shot is preceded by that shot, which comes just after that one, which reminds me fondly of the one just before. Taking the context into consideration is one of the many responsibilities the audience has when it comes to any film. With the context, though, come expectations the film in question is trusted to meet. If it's a documentary, the expectation is to document. The audience's responsibility is to both take in the information being delivered to them and to sift through it, critically assessing whether or not the documentary truly documents. In the case of Megacities, it's interesting to say it doesn't matter whether or not one scene or another, let alone the entire film is authentic, candid. There's nothing wrong with that, but I do have to wonder, at what point is a documentary not a documentary? Is it just when it says so? And when it does say so, we're back where we began, taking the film for a documentary or a narrative or a musical and assessing it that way.
ReplyDeleteDoes this mean our set standards of classification is wrong or outdated? Is something that imitates life a documentary if Netflix has it under that category? But then again, isn't all we want from a documentary to be convinced?
In Megacities, I was personally convinced much of the time. There was some poetic license taken, shots requested from their subjects and dramatic soundtracks slipped in right under our noses, but I remain convinced, not of suffering and poverty specifically in this case but that there are people all around the world just getting by. As as the world turns and as they get by, they and us, we're all connected. It doesn't matter is you don't speak spanish or if you've been picked up by the police because you passed out drunk in the park or if you've never bought a baby chicken from a man in an old, slow, low Chevy. We use the same chickens, wear the same dyes. We dance, we scam guys in the back alleys of Manhattan for cash, we parent our children as best we can and we all collectively continue to populate this planet. And that, if nothing else, I'm happy and comforted to be convinced of.
I also felt very strange about the way Kamani spoke about Cassandra. That scene too was very impacting for me because of the manipulation of the very corny sad song paired with the footage and the amount of time spent on that character compared to the rest. It infuses a specific lens by which to view Cassandra with, and such is a pitiful one. Though again as Abbey is saying, what is going on is neither end of the sleazy/empowering spectrum but it does function within that gradient.
ReplyDeleteSomething I found interesting in Megacities was the sparse moments of self-awareness/acknowledgement. In one of the sequences in Russia, at the train station there is some text (I assume) being read talking about how if you'd like to know the life of a beggar all you have to do is ask and give them something. In some ways that is very self-referential of the film itself.
Glawogger on Cassandra:
Delete"Actually, if you go there—I’m not a big aficionado of theater, but I always liked to go there because I think it says a lot, it says a lot without words, it says a lot about capitalism, it says a lot about male-female relationships in a society like that, it says a lot about how sometimes this can also be, in a way, religious, it says a lot about—I sometimes pity the men who do that, being down there, grabbing up at her—it says a lot about how they, sort of, in a way, think she’s something like a holy mother or something, it says that she enjoys it, and at the same time sometimes thinks it’s gross and appalling. There’s a lot in there. And also with this corny music, I mean I chose one of the songs that is used for the performance. Sometimes it’s a Madonna song, sometimes its Seven Seconds, it’s whatever is modern, and this is a very popular song by a Spanish guy, something like Julio Iglesias or something, a pretty corny song, so I took one of those songs that she uses. But the whole thing is actually really a theater, with a couple of shows everyday, and Cassandra is a member of the actors’ union of Mexico City, and she sees herself as an actor."
"Cassandra is a poor woman, is a very proud woman, is a woman who does what she does very well and who also enjoys being a queen of this world and who also enjoys having so many men who admire her body, who admire her, who admire her sexuality, and then again, she is like every other woman, she is afraid of being too fat, she is afraid of being not beautiful enough anymore, she’s just a normal person. But it’s an act—I mean, things like that happen in Japan but in a different way, it reflects a lot on the relationships bet- ween men and women in a society, but for me it’s never gross, and the last thing I would do is to pity her, and that is completely wrong, or to see yourself up on the stage doing that, I mean that’s just a wrong approach."
He also talks about how the scene functions as a center of the film and how it only seems like the longest scene in the film because of its explicit nature. In fact, the Cassandra scene is just as long as the scene with the Russian woman working in the steel factory. Some interesting food for thought.
There are some points Glawogger makes the in the interview that are pretty relevant to some of the things we are discussing here:
ReplyDelete"If you think about it, every documentary filmmaker has a different degree of altering or of looking at reality, and it’s always a question of degree—how far do I go. I always explain it with the New York sequence about the hustler—you never ever could shoot something like this in a documentary film, so you have two choices, either you do it with a hidden camera, which I find pro- foundly immoral: I would never do it; or you stage it, and if you stage it, you do so to a certain degree. So I took this hustler, I took Mike and I stood with him on the corner and I looked at the people that came by, and what they looked like, and what were his marks, which were the people from among whom he could find a trick, and then I held a big casting in New York and I said to everybody, Look, if you want to work a day for me, you have to know a lot of improv, and I’m not going to tell you what it’s all about, you come around the corner with the camera, and you go with whatever happens. So, to a degree, those people also didn’t know what was going to happen. And it almost looks like what it looked like when I saw him really do it. So, if you alter reality by being there with the camera, then you always alter it. So, if you set the degree to an extent higher where you can show such a thing, it’s never ever going to be exactly like it is in reality, but what is?"
Also, something relevant to the discussion of exploitation or not, he was asked if the subjects had seen the film:
"Not all the time—not because I wouldn’t want to show the film, but the film is so spread out over the world, like Mikey in New York I never found him again, so I cannot spend a month running after people and trying to show them the film, but whenever I have a chance, I’m very pleased to show them the film. I show- ed it to Cassandra and she was quite proud of it, so whenever we have the chance... Like, when I do a film here, we always make it a priority to invite the people to the premiere, but with this movie it just wasn’t always possible."