Personal Documentary Flashcards
The immediate postwar period was a time of crisis for documentary-makers, who were wrestling with a film form that over the past decade had become closely associated internationally with propaganda, and had thus lost ________ in the eyes of the audience.
Validity.
Similarly, merely documenting reality seemed somehow insubstantial when faced with the ________ of recent reality that were being slowly revealed to the public postwar.
Horror.
The personal documentary sets out not to offer a universal view to which spectators can ascribe, but rather personal views on a subject, which are then used to illustrate or cast light on more universal _______ and issues.
Themes.
Many of these personal documentary filmmakers were from ______-wing backgrounds or from radical art movements, and had seen both oppression (both physical and intellectual) and conflict firsthand during the war.
Left.
Georges Franju’s Le Sang des Betes (Blood of the _______) (Forces at voix de la France, France 1949) offered an audience still too close to the slaughter of the Second World War a frank look at the daily life of slaughterhouses.
Beasts.
While peppered with __________ imagery and the casual brutality of the slaughterhouses set at the gates of Paris, the film is often reminiscent of newsreel imagery of the Nazi concentration camps.
Surrealist.
Franju’s use of music adds a personal commentary to the images, and his casual juxtaposition of the suffering animals and the homes and churches overlooking the slaughterhouses implicates them (by their inaction) in the slaughter, and in doing so edges towards questions about the role of _______ in the Second World War that were certainly not being publicly raised at the time.
France.
Similarly, in Nuit et Brouillard (Night and ____) (Argos/Como, France, 1955, Dir: Alain Resnais) the juxtaposition of monochrome archive footage of the Nazi concentration camps in operation, and newsreel footage of the horrors found there on liberation, with full-colour images of the deserted camps as they were at the point when the film was made, offers a powerful and personal commentary on the nature of the subject through a commentary that explores the difficulty of capturing the past.
Fog.
Resnais’ frank, direct approach, often setting the frenetic archive/newsreel footage against long, slow, _________ shots, placed reality and memory in tension, and stirred a wider debate around whether the underlying drive that led to the camps had been extinguished, or whether (like the colour images) it had merely adopted a different image.
Tracking.
Resnais’ inclusion of the image of a gendarme in a guard tower at one of the French transportation camps led to the film being censored and banned from the ________ Film Festival – the confirmation of collaboration and complicity in such crimes was too much for many French to bear.
Cannes.
