Tuesday 3 May 2011

Week 9: Cinema Verite, Zombies and Dead Space


Life is slow, life has bits you wish you could skip. Reality settles in and time is relative. There is nothing you can do. So when the great escape films (and books and art before) move past the point where they are comfortable to be realistic representations of time we are left with cinema verite. Or cinema of truth. (dead space) Obviously there can never be an objective truth, it is impossible,  above is an example, a short film I made of the walk I had to take every day from school to home. It was a boring walk, in my small home town. I sped it up almost 200% and left out the sound, putting some classical score over the top.
The point here is although I just filmed exactly what I did, walking home- which is boring for most people but shouldn't that be truth. There is no edits, its just pov. Well of course, the lense itself is a choice, what I focus on what is being filmed and for how long. There is no escaping that all film, because it is filmed is contrived, set out to be and created with intent. Even if there is no edits, no apparent editing there is intent with what has been filmed. And thus it is not objective truth, but perhaps there can be some semblance of an individuals perception of truth. 


 
My housemates have been watching Dead Set. A TV show I now can appreciate which uses elements which reference and convert the techniques of Verite to television. It follows housemates in the big brother house, after a zombie apocalypse.
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Bibliography

Jeanne Hall, realism as a style in cinema verite: a critical analysis of primary, 1991, Cinema Journal

Filmography

Dead set (2008) Yann Demange and Charlie Brooker, UK 

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