At the halfway point in my senior project, I found I have hit a bit of a wall. In an effort to create a film that is both intimate but not exploitative, I have decided to focus my film solely on the creation of an album/music rather than the personal lives led by Elijah and Z when they are outside of the music room. However, there are certain personal yet crucial moments that have posed challenges to creating this album. College visits, long weekends, and absent musicians have often kept me from filming, and stunted some progress being made on Z and Elijah’s album. These instances do not quite pertain to the creative process of making music, and to me feel intrusive, bordering on exploitative, if documented, yet they have significantly altered how and when the album is being made. I have thus far made the choice to exclude these moments from being filmed for my documentary, but I’ve also had to look at the flipside and ask myself does excluding these experiences from the film reduce authenticity, something direct cinema deeply values, in the final product?

By this point in my project, I have also read a lot of work about the uses, philosophies, accomplishments and criticisms of the genre of direct cinema. I have focused mostly on Stephen Mamber’s book Cinema Verite: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary, but also turned my attention to its criticisms as well as texts from different perspectives. My initial question for my project was “Is direct cinema still valuable in an age of constant and easily accessible methods of documentation?” By reading these works as well as engaging in the process of creating direct cinema films, other questions have certainly come to my mind. Currently, I feel mostly confident saying that direct cinema is indeed still a valuable form of filmmaking. However, when initially writing the aforementioned question, I was thinking about the value of direct cinema in terms of new technologies. I was thinking: if people could create an “authentic” narrative on their iPhone and then use YouTube as their means of distribution of such content, then should direct cinema films still be made when this way of creating a moving image is far more equitable and accessible. I believe that the introduction of a new technology does not make something old obsolete, and this is absolutely true in art. I think about the introduction of handheld cameras. This did not do away with studio films, as they are still made to this day and are still valuable in the sense I was talking about before. However, with my question about direct cinema, I was thinking about it as solely a filmmaker and viewer, but not as a subject nor did I expand and examine the ethical lens I looked through to create such a question. I needed to refocus the question about the uses of direct cinema away from “value” and towards something else.

The question “Do the inherent intrusive and voyeuristic tendencies of direct cinema call for the remodeling or deprecation of such genre?” feels much more relevant to me. Bernice K. Schneider’s thesis “DIRECT CINEMA: Filmmaking Style and its Relationship to ‘Truth’” brings up the idea of participatory direct cinema to rid the genre of its intrusive and observational techniques and ultimately convey truth. In my last blog post I ruminated upon this idea and took a liking to it, but since then I find myself thinking about it differently. Despite a filmmaker taking a participatory approach, they still are not the subject of the film, and also are the ones creating the gaze in which viewers adopt. I find it interesting that most distinctly direct cinema films are directed by men. I believe that this is because direct cinema, in the genre’s observational techniques, is inherently voyeuristic. The male gaze, coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975, is also inherently voyeuristic, and through its cinematic techniques teaches boys and men that it is ok to watch over those who are apparently subject to them, or women in the case of Mulvey’s essay. For the direct cinema film to be created, a hierarchy of some sort must be too, with the camera/filmmaker/director as the overseer, and the subjects of the film as actual subjects to the filmmaker. It is also interesting to me that most film theorists that praise the direct cinema format, like Mamber, are men. I think this is because they feel comfortable adopting the voyeuristics gazes of the genre, it is easy for them. 

I find myself uncomfortable with forcing a gaze upon Elijah and Z and the future viewers of the film, and this has been one of the key reasons I find myself rethinking the question I initially posed. I think direct cinema is still valuable in terms of technology, but it is ethically unsound, and creating new films in this style perpetuates the idea of a voyeuristic gaze. I hope to challenge this by working more collaboratively with Z and Elijah, just as I had said in my last blog post but haven’t had the chance to incorporate yet because of unforeseen circumstances. 

In the more general senior project sense of rethinking, I must rethink the idea of completing an entire film for the senior project presentations. Z and Elijah seem to still be in the practicing and writing phase of their album, which means they will probably get to recording, and ultimately mixing and finishing the album later than I had expected. This may leave me with less time than I thought for me to be editing. I am still holding out hope that I will be able to have a final cut by the share, but I do want to introduce the possibility of a rough cut by the end of senior project.