Well, here we are, heading into the big winter season of holidays and end-of-year festivities, as well as end-of-year deadlines. And meanwhile, we are winding down into the last few classes of our intro course. I hope you have mulled over some of our discussion about Stranger with a Camera and gotten a little reading in during your week off. If you have comments about the film or any of the readings (or our class discussion), please post them here.
Please check your syllabus and use the link to find the online WRAL documentary. Watch it before class please! There are several other interesting topics there you might want to check out as well.
I am out of town and will be home late tomorrow. But you can reach me on my cell phone if you need me before then.
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3 comments:
Is anyone else having difficulty playing the WRAl video, Standards of Living?
Firefox was giving me a problem. I switched to I.E. and it worked fine.
I thought is was a good piece. One of the more balanced I've seen lately. The right, left and middle were all given an opportunity to explain their positions. On it's face, the subject appears so simple. As in life, the reality is much more complicated. I'm looking forward to this discussion in class.
I found both of this week's readings very interesting. I thought that Hinson's was particular pertinent the discussions we've been having about ethics and the role of documentary maker. This example of Roland Freeman's photography is an excellent one for showing how the photographer and the subject become partners in the creation of the project. Milton Jews's had a real say in the outcome through his many conversations with Roland and also got to actively help with the creation of the staged setting in his basement.
I was intrigued by Perils of the Transcript by Raphael Samuel. It mainly focuses on the published transcript, but I was also trying to apply the article to video work. We often need to transcribe our interviews for instance as part of the editing process. The last one I did I noticed, going back to the actual video, that the feel of the interview was much different than the feel of my written transcript, which affected the way I had scripted it out. I wish I'd read this article before so that I could have done a written transcript more true to the actual interview, it would have made my editing process a lot easier.
But there is more to this little article than simple practicalities. It also raises questions of authenticity and the efficacy of the published transcript. It also brings up questions in my mind of what is appropriate and what isn't. For instance, say a person speaks with an alternative grammar, and though it may sound beautiful in person, perhaps in the writing it may make an affluent highly educated reader perceive the speaker as "dumb". Is there a better or worse way to transcribe the piece? How much of the original interview can really be preserved in the written word?
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