As of April 17th, I have engaged in almost 50 hours of senior project related work. Eight days of filming, six documentaries that have been watched, and some hundred pages of content that have now been read and annotated. Thus far, my project has not been as thrilling or immediately gratifying as I hoped it to be, but the project certainly challenges me as expected, and it is even more thought provoking than I first imagined it to be.
When I first set out to create a direct cinema documentary, I understood that many hours would be spent silently with a camera in hand, however I did not quite anticipate how exhausting this was going to be. Filming and organizing each day’s footage requires me to exert much more mental energy than I counted on; I now certainly understand why film production requires the support and labor of a group or the industry.
Additionally, I have found the filming process quite difficult because I am not capturing a set story and giving autonomy to my camera like I have done previously with short filmmaking classes at school. Currently, I must give complete (non-exploitative) autonomy to Z and Elijah, the subjects of my film, and later, when editing, and the writing and recording of the album is complete, I must search for the story. While filming I am constantly reminding myself to take a backseat and allow Elijah and Z to be their most authentic selves in order to communicate to future viewers a truthful story and experience of young people creating and engaging with music.
Watching other mostly direct cinema music documentaries and reading texts surrounding the philosophies, approaches, legacies, and techniques of direct cinema has been one of the more rewarding and interesting parts of my senior project so far. It is fascinating to study these texts and films while simultaneously engaging in the process they represent and analyze. I have found Bernice K. Schneider’s thesis “DIRECT CINEMA: Filmmaking Style and its Relationship to ‘Truth’” and Andrew Dominik’s film One More Time with Feeling particularly thought provoking and inspiring.
Schneider’s thesis has forced me to be continuously conscious of my presence in the room as a filmmaker. This text helped me better understand how film is able to and unable to convey truth and authenticity, something that direct cinema documentaries inherently prioritize. The text highlighted the importance of a filmmaker’s participation in filming direct cinema movies, yet Schneider focused on this necessity in the 1980s, and through my engagement in filming in a direct cinema style, I have found that her idea of participation must be shifted to better fit today’s definition of representation.
Following my viewing of and thinking about One More Time with Feeling (2016), I have drawn up a more succinct idea of how to use direct cinema to display unabashed authenticity without resorting to exploitative practices. This film helped me to find an element of what was missing in Schneider’s genre analysis. Andrew Dominik, One More Time with Feeling’s director, and Nick Cave, the subject of the film, worked in a collaborative process to create the documentary, and their communal goals and efforts more than paid off to create this beautifully intimate and genuine film. Moving forward I hope to implement a similar directorial balance as that of Dominik’s where performance is recognized as authenticity and truthful expression, thoughts of my film’s subjects are more regularly and artfully expressed, and direct cinema techniques are implemented, yet the stories of Elijah and Z are prioritized over the goals of the filmmaker or the techniques of the genre.
To accomplish this, I have been discussing with Elijah and Z the idea of bringing in texts, either that they’ve written or read, that conveys their feelings about the process of creating their album or any text about music that resonates with them during this project. We have also discussed working collaboratively during the process of filming the recording session, which would include group decisions on lighting, staging, and filming.