This week we discuss making cell phone films, as well as Alvarez's discussion of Urban-Self portraits through looking at three different films.

1. DOCUMENTARY
&
EVERYDAY
URBAN LIFE
CLASS #5
GE3106 – DR. SHANNON WALSH

2. ASSIGNMENT 1
FINAL GROUPS &
WHAT TO EXPECT NEXT WEEK

3. CELL PHONE FILMS

4. Everything you learn
on a phone, can be
applied to video..
Step 1: Plan
Step 2: Shoot
Step 3: Edit
Step 4: Sound & Output
Step 5: Distribute
FIVE STEPS

5. TIPS, TECHNIQUES & SOFTWARE
• Organizing
• Storytelling
• Access
• Pacing
• Visual Imagery
• Shot compositions
• Audio!
• Watch films
Cell Orientation – always in landscape
Lighting
Audio
Steady

7. READINGSURBAN SELF
PORTRAITS
Self-portrait, autobiography
Subjectivity, witnessing

8. SELF- PORTRAIT
AS SOCIO-POLITICAL
DOCUMENTARY

9. ROGER & ME
MICHAEL MOORE (1986)

10. “THE PUBLIC FACE OF NON-FICTION CINEMA”
• Close relationship with hometown of Flint, MI
• Guerrilla style interviews
• Ordinary citizen persona
• Personal witnessing + agit-prop
• Updating socio-political doc making
• Introduces self as character
CRITICISM
• Lack of structure
• Manipulation of chronology of events
• Failure to give coherent socio-political
analysis
Bowling for Columbine (2002) – Academy Award
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) -- Palme d’Or

11. ROGER & ME
Era of Reganomics
• Life-long job security destroyed in US labour
market
• Precarity & flexibility, short term contracts
• Without protection, class culture, or collective
frameworks
“The solitude and isolation of the
autobiographical self becomes a
symptom of the social
fragmentation characteristic of
post-industrial capitalism”

12. USE OF HUMOR, IRONY & ARCHIVE IMAGES
Talking to everyday people:
Rhonda Britton who sells rabbits for meat
A metaphor for the fate of the working
class?
Song “Wouldn’t it be Nice” mixed
with the crisis on the cityscape

13. UNEMPLOYED VS. WORKING CLASS
Fahrenheit 9/11
Confronting upper classes’
lack of social conscience.
Bowling for Columbine

14. SELF- PORTRAIT
AS ESSAY FILM

15. OF TIME & THE CITY (2008)
TERENCE DAVIES

16. EMOTIONAL ORDER, INTIMATE GEOGRAPHY
“We love the place we hate
then hate the place we love.
We leave the place we love
then spend a lifetime trying
to regain it.”
“Cinema is the only art form
that can show the passage of
time visually’

17. MEMORY
“At the heart of this mediation on the city lies a tension,
between urban change as a process that is brutal and
unremitting, and the persistence of memory as something
that is delicate and filamentary. We weave our memories
into a palimpsest of dreams where time and place melt into
each other. Memories become maps through places to
which we can never return in a world that is changing all
about us.” (Gandy 2009)

18. MUSIC
Popular songs ‘de-privatize
his own feelings’… ‘to
recreate a remembered past
but also, simultaneously, to
interrogate and deconstruct
that past’.
(Everett, 2004: 167)

19. SANS SOLEIL
CHRIS MARKER (1983)
"Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place”…
(And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place.)”

20. SELF- PORTRAIT
AS SELF-FICTION

21. MY WINNIPEG
GUY MADDIN (2007)

22. THE CITY AS A TEXT TO BE DECODED
Maddin imitates, copies, & quotes a
range of styles, from “German
expressionism, Soviet montage,
French surrealism, film noir,
excessive melodrama, classic
horror, trash cinema and even early
musicals.”
Self-fiction allowing for a
greater depiction of the
filmmaker’s inner most worlds.

23. CITYSCAPE AS MINDSCAPE
Fantasy worlds, mixing truth and fiction, city-referent replaced by
city-character.