Poetic Documentary

This week in the lesson we looked at a lot of clips of poetic documentary, we were trying to get a feel of what makes a doc poetic and the differences between poetic and non poetic doc's. First poetry itself has a specific feeling, different to prose, so when analysing we found the following things important; Rhythm, Feeling, Tone, Metaphor, Lyricism, Punctuation. We then applied these to films, punctuation strongly links to editing, metaphor can be visual metaphor, tone and mood obviously links to the tone and mood of docs and finally lyricism can be strongly represented in docs with emotional content and style.

We started looking at specific films beginning with Regen (1929 Joris Ivans) a heavily visual doc about... Rain? maybe, or a storm. The music that plays along moves the piece really well and helps to alter the pace of the piece. Much of the visuals are reflections, shadows and have basically no subjects, the subject of the piece is the weather going on during each abstract image, this gives the doc its abstract and poetic feel. Inspired by Dali, Ivans' abstract visual montage is an avant garde doc that well illustrates the idea of a poetic documentary through, pacing and its starkly beautiful and interesting visuals.

Next we looked at Night Mail (1936 Harry Watt, Basil Wright) it seemed much more conventional however it concentrated heavily on pacing to match visual and audio cue's of the mail delivering trains the doc is based on. The mainly poetic part of Night Mail is the actual use of poetry read in a voice over to narrate and illustrate the metaphorical points of the film.

Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983) was the next film we watched, classed as an Essay doc, a documentary that makes a point for or against a cause, Sans Soleil is a series of relatively random looking shots with a female voice over that makes reflective comments about society and about film making. Marker brings the themes of memory and thinking into this piece as well as he often does in his other work such as La Jetee. The poetic element of this doc is the voice over, which isnt poetry but is largely philosophical and therefore poetic when coupled with the often emotional visuals.

Night in Fog (1955 Alan Resnais) was the most hard hitting film we watched, a reflective doc about the concentration camps of world war 2. The contrast of past and present is evident throughout and this is emphasised by contrasting black and white with colour as well as manipulating the sound. The movie was hard hitting and the brutal images of death were narrated fairly simply by a monotone emotionless voice, the film uses the poetic doc form to question why this happened and who is responsible. The poetic imagery of death camp stock footage and the overgrown broken down death camps of the present have been fittingly described as having a terrible gentleness.

One of the most conventional or at least most normal docs we watched was Wisconsin Death Trip (1999 James Marsh) a recreation of the mental illness and harsh winters in a desolate part of Wisconsin. The recreation was based on photographs of the time, the stories and images are news reports and psychiatric notes written at the time. These make up a general picture of what the town was like at that time in history. The poetic part about this documentary can be seen in the others, it uses many fragmented narratives to build a specific emotion, mood and story rather than using a single story to dictate the whole film.

Finally we saw Tarnation (2003 Jonathan Caouette) which was made up of home video, photographs and text which told a harrowing personal story of the film makers life growing up with a schizophrenic mother. The pacing of the photographs in this piece was incredibly important along with the emotional audio and factual text that contrasted in a brilliant way both scaring and exciting the audience. Poetically the basic narrative contrasts most of the other docs we looked at but the form is surely poetic, the flashing images and emotional music really evoked an emotional response and perfectly set the tone and mood of the doc.

In conclusion lots of things make up poetic doc, it is almost as hard to define as traditional doc. However it is common for them to use multiple fragmented narratives, to be more focused on emotion than fact, are often not to inform and nearly never have classic interviews! I am looking forward to developing our own poetic ideas and seeing where the freedom of poetic doc takes us.