Land Without Bread: Analyzing Documentary Value and Techniques, Lecture notes of Voice

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Land Without Bread:

A Letter From the Future

Las Hurdes keys to analysis (for today)

Trustworthiness (Reliability and Tact as Narrator)

Las Hurdes keys to analysis (for today)

Trustworthiness (Reliability and Tact as Narrator)

Does this film have documentary value?

Voice Over (and Humor)

• Where do we place the Voice Over?
• If it tells us what “we” see, then who is the “we” that it refers to?
  • How is the voice over authorized?
  • Are there other possible meanings to the images other than what the VO tells us?
• Are the Hurdanos victims of history, or just dumb, or …?

Las Hurdes keys to analysis (for today)

Trustworthiness (Reliability and Tact as Narrator)

Does this film have documentary value?

Voice Over (and Humor)

• Where do we place the Voice Over?
• If it tells us what “we” see, then who is the “we” that it refers to?
  • How is the voice over authorized?
  • Are there other possible meanings to the images other than what the VO tells us?
• Are the Hurdanos victims of history, or just dumb, or …?

Sensitivity (and score):

Questions Without Answers

What is a documentary?

Questions Without Answers

What is a documentary?

• A documentary is a contract between text and viewer.

Questions Without Answers

What is a documentary?

• A documentary is a contract between text and viewer.
• A documentary is a transitional medium, carrying fragments of social experience from one person, place, group, or time to another, and in transporting them, translates them from a local dialect to a lingua franca. (Paraphrasing Jonathan Kahana)
• Documentary = Fiction + socio-political stakes in its engagement.
  • Or, as Vivian Sobchack would say, in “documentary there is an existential bond between documentary space and space inhabited by the viewer.”

If Las Hurdes is a documentary, then what does it tell us?

Does a documentary need to tell us useful information in order to be a documentary?

Questions Without Answers

What is “Realism”?

Questions Without Answers

What is “Realism”?

• An aesthetic technique that relies on verisimilitude and lays claim to a faithful representation of the “real”.
• An aesthetic strategy and philosophy that places its faith in rationalism and scientific technique.

Questions Without Answers

What is “Realism”?

• An aesthetic technique that relies on verisimilitude and lays claim to a faithful representation of the “real”.
• An aesthetic strategy and philosophy that places its faith in rationalism and scientific technique.
• Artistic realism, then, cannot mean ‘represents the world as it is’, but rather ‘represents it in accordance with conventional real-life modes of representing it’. But there are a variety of such modes in any culture, and ‘in accordance with’ conceals a multitude of problems. We cannot compare an artistic representation with how the world is, since how the world is is itself a matter of representation. We can only compare artistic representations with non-artistic ones, a distinction which can itself be a little shaky. - Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books

INDEX and ICON

Questions Without Answers

What is “Realism” In the Digital Age?

● Which image feels more “real”?

What is “Realism” In the Digital Age?

The images on the previous page illustrate a few technological determinants that impact

the way that we see.

We hear a lot about the ways that technology easily facilitates image manipulation in the

digital age, and thus we have to be aware of the fake, but in the digital age the opposite is

also true.

• the digital tech allows for increased fidelity/relationship to the real: “real time”

“retinal display” … (is “real time” the same as “lived time”? I.e., do we live in

real time?)

• Paradoxically, the representational realism of digital video has a way of making

the real appear theatrical.

Questions Without Answers

What is “Humanism”?