Like Harlan County, Bell sticks to documenting the lives of her subjects instead of crafting a specific argument around them.

This blog is not supposed to be a personal response journal, but I can’t think of anything else to say so here goes.

Watching this film made me realize how “unnatural” and priveleged most of us are today. After going through school, we are able to learn a body of knowledge that took over 2,000 years of work and innovation to discover. We are beginning to understand the makeup of our universe at a subatomic scale; we understand the origin of life on earth and are beginning to piece together the detailed history of that evolution; we can look at art and film and discuss the artist’s meaning as it relates to life/death/society/etc. But we are only able to do these things because the groundwork was already laid for us. Without education, we would be animals.

The kids in this movie, although probably receiving some sort of minimal education at school, reflect this in their lives. Most of their worries and desires revolve around basic human instincts: food, water, sex, and pleasure.

…blah

Harlan County USA

Absent from Harlan County is the typical ‘voice of God’ narration, open personal commentary, and overt framing of the subject matter that we have seen in most of the other documentaries this semester. The film feels more like a narrative being captured in real time.

This style of filming gives the impression of objectivity on the part of the filmmaker. But is it really objective? Most of the story is filmed from the perspective of the local townspeople. Most of the personal interviews come from the coal miners and their families.

Despite these choices, I believe the film truly is objective in its presentation. The film does not purport to cover all the issues concerning unions, coal miners, and job satisfaction in America. Instead, it simply seeks to document the lives and incidents surrounding a small coal mining town in Kentucky. And it does just that; without bias or spin. In other words, the choice to focus on the mine workers plight from their own perspective was not a stylistic choice but one of subject matter.

You might reply, “You are wrong. The simple choice of the subject matter of the film is itself an argument.” I have heard this many times, and in fact the idea seems to be so pervasive that our textbook for this class is called Everything’s an Argument. But this idea is ridiculous. For instance, the presentation of the results of a scientific study is not an argument; it is simply an explanation of the data. In the case of Harlan County, the choice of subject matter is also not an argument; it is simply Kopple’s choice of a particular subject matter to document. If I were to make a film documenting the lives of honey bees, noone would call me bias if I chose to leave out the poor flowers perspective.

The most pervasive and obvious of these devices is the ‘voice of god’ narration by Michael Moore throughout the film. In these narrations, Moore often begins hypothesizing an explanation for some particular scenario or issue, and then jumps to wild speculation. This speculation, which would otherwise seem ridiculous, is given a sense of authority by the style in which it is presented (namely, the ‘voice of god’ style, which is typical of news reporting).

Although there are a plethora of devices in this film typical to the documentary genre (such as choice of music, choice of footage, and jumpcuts), I would like to spend some time talking about a more subtle device used towards the middle of the film by Moore to undercut the credibility of George W. Bush. After a long segment focused on George W. Bush, Moore begins a series of clips intended to demonstrate the impact of Bush’s fear-mongering on the public. These clips include: companies advertising ‘work parachutes’ and home bomb shelters, small-town interviewees expressing blatant xenophobia, etc. The proximity of the segments discussing Bush and these ridiculous people and products reflects on poorly on Bush, undermining his authority.

The second half of the film features a sensationalized story about a woman with whom Moore intends the audience to empathize with. Originally a steadfast supporter of the military, the woman becomes disheartened after the death of her first-born son while serving in Iraq. This segment lends credibility to Moore’s arguments by showing the ‘conversion’ of this particular woman against the war. She once was blind, but now can see.

This advertisement by the Coal River Mountain Wind Project is a good example of how flow is used in film media to make an argument. The ad is promoting wind energy as an alternative to coal mining, arguing that coal energy comes at the cost of destroying precious natural resources.

The ad begins with tense, foreboding music over a series of clips showing natural landscapes and animals. In the third shot we see a deer walking across a shallow river abruptly picking up its head as the guitar(?) in the background strongly plucks a melancholy note. This scene is very similar to the one in Bambi as the animals first begin to realize that something terribly is about to happen. And indeed, in the ad, this scene is followed by the edge of a cliff violently exploding with the caption “… cheap coal.”

A few shots later the ad shows a bunch of dark clouds converging across the sky, followed abruptly by a shot zooming in on a white windmill with a clear blue sky behind it. Simultaneous with the jumpcut to the windmill, the music resolves itself and begins to sound uplifting.  After a loud BANG from the music, the caption “… clean wind energy” appears before a clear white background. The BANG halts the music, making the caption appear all the more powerful.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122580370

Sontag presents only a few brief pieces of analysis to support this claim. Sontag begins her analysis of Arbus by giving the reader a feel for the types and manner in which her subjects were photographed. The first piece of analysis comes on page 109 when Sontag suggests that Arbus deliberately chose to photograph her subjects from the front and in a ‘pose’ to convey a tone of frankness and unselfconsciousness, although Sontag does not say why Arbus chooses to do this. Sontag follows this analysis with an irrelevant reference to Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932).

Sontag consistently presents connections between Arbus and other artists which serve no purpose to her central argument, and are often left without a full explanation. For example, the comparison between Arbus’s suicide and that of Sylvia Plath is noted by Sontag only to remark that “the attention [their] work attracted since [their death] … is a kind of apotheosis.” Sontag then flips to an unintelligible discussion of war photography with sentences that seem to have no meaning such as this:

“To discover (through photographing) that life is ‘really a melodrama,’ to understand the camera as a weapon of aggression, implies there will be casualties.”

Sontag goes on to imply that Arbus was a masochist who chose the particularly horrifying subjects because of a desire to “[seek] pain.” This argument flatly contradicts quotes from Arbus earlier in the paper where she says that photographing freaks “had a terrific excitement for me … I just used to adore them.” A few paragraphs later, Sontag refers to Arbus’s “naive image of the photographer’s quest,” which I find a bit appaling since Sontag is not a photographer herself.

The rest of the essay contains more of Sontag’s conjectures about Arbus’s reasons for photographing. Some of these conjectures are very strong and are given without explanation or evidence, such as Sontag’s claim that Arbus was revolting “against the Jews’ hyper-developed moral sensibility.”

Uncharacteristically, Sontag makes a good point on page 114, observing that Arbus’s depiction of “freaks, mad people, suburban couples, and nudists [as equivalent] is a very powerful judgement.” Sontag then claims that Arbus’s “judgement” is that these subjects are “members of the same family … [an] idiot village [of] America.” This conclusion, although very subjective, is refreshing insofar as Sontag has finally given us evidence for one of her assertions.

Just for fun, I’ve compiled a list of quotes from Sontag’s essay which seem like they were written by someone tripping on acid.

“Each thing or person photographed becomes — a photograph; and becomes, therefore, morally equivalent to any other of his photographs.”

“Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent”

“Arbus’s words in retrospect describe a kind of combat death: having trespassed certain limits, she fell in a psychic ambush, a casualty of her own candor and curiosity.”

“For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.”