viz. - documentary film

Echotone: A Portrait of the Genre-Crossing Documentary Through Its Panoptic and Street-Level Lenses

Lisa Gulesserian — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:40:14 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

Hello, viz. readers! I’m Lisa, and I’m new to the blog. You’ll notice as you read my posts that I’ve got my favorite themes: cities and urban culture, genre-crossing productions (of the filmic and literary variety), and the global south.

My post today, on last year’s documentary film Echotone, concerns two of my three interests—I’ll leave it to you to figure out which of my interests apply.

The movie, made in 2010 by director Nathan Christ, is a self-described “cultural portrait of the modern American city examined through the lyrics and lens of its creative class.” Our fine blog’s hometown, Austin, Texas, is the American city under scrutiny in the film.

Throughout Echotone, the viewer is transported to staggering heights above the city. In fact, the opening shot pans across the skyline, documenting construction projects that dot the landscape of downtown Austin. Tethered to a crane, the camera sees the city in a panoptic—some might say voyeuristic, especially because of the evening/early morning light—way. With soft shadows and glimmering waters, there’s a beauty in seeing the city from above, removed from its day-to-day scuffles and scraps.

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

In truth, French theorist Michel de Certeau reminds us of this scopic pleasure in his famous chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life entitled “Walking in the City”: being atop the city’s highest structure and looking down at its beautiful totality transforms the mundane city into “a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God.” When we can contain the totality of the city in one image, one visage, we are empowered.

So, then, why would we leave such great heights (for, of course, Echotone must move to documenting what happens in the streets, the bars, the garages of Austin to get to the heart of the city’s “creative class”)? Why, per de Certeau, should we “fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth”? Let’s follow de Certeau into the darkness: “The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.” No overhead view of the city will show us its stories, its intricacies, its residents. So, we descend the heights (as we do in all movies about cities) into the murky streets and alleyways of the complex city.

Image credit: Screenshot, Echotone trailer on YouTube

And we do so with Echotone—we see a kitchen full of mattresses while an indie pop band records an album, we see a garage full of unsold CDs while the film’s producer explains why he promotes bands (it’s for the love of music), and we see a street full of tired and wired music-lovers during the city’s annual South by Southwest music festival. We see all these things in Echotone because a movie about a city can never be filmed only from on high.

The question is, why does Echotone switch between panoptic and street-level views as the movie progresses? We see everything on the ground through the “lens of [the city’s] creative class,” along with panning shots of the city from above, because Echotone is a tricky kind of movie. Part documentary, part moralizing tale about the problems that musicians face in the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World,” the film moves between the panoptic view of the city’s developers and the familiar views of its hardworking musicians. Like de Certeau’s pedestrian in the city that moves such that no panoptic power can know exactly what they’re doing at any given moment, the film strives to shake up our notions of the idyllic “music capital” by disorienting us with hypnotic sequences of the city from above. Of course, we know from the emotional value invested in the scenes with Austin bands (like Belaire who worry about “selling out,” like Sunset who worry about selling out again, and like Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears who worry about being “broke”) where the true loyalties of the film lie—in the streets with Austin’s musicians.

To see the city of Austin in a movie theater near you through both panoptic and street-level lenses, visit Echotone’s “Events” page.

Reboot: Innocence and Exploitation: Kids with Cameras by Andi Gustavson

ebfrye — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:49:10 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of viz.

This past week, I had the privilege of listening to Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Natasha Trethewey, and Kwame Dawes give a reading/ panel at AWP on their work that I have discussed in recent posts (here and here). The panel was moderated by VQR editor Ted Genoways and also included the poet Erika Meitner who is currently collaborating with a photographer on a project involving Detroit. I'm preparing a longer, related post to appear in the coming weeks, but, in the meantime, I've been thinking about issues of representation raised by those pieces and how the combined effect of literary and visual gazes transforms the stakes for subject, viewer, poet, photographer, and editor. In that frame of mind, I'm re-booting Andi Gustavson's provacative post on the power dynamics of documentary films that feature children. Writing about Born into Brothels, Andi is concerned with how "the viewer is invited into the film in a position of power." Surely, such a consideration can be extended to the "readers" of these projects.

Start of Andi's original post:

Image credit: screen shot of The New Orleans Kids with Camera Project

For our class on social documentary film, we screen Martin Bell’s Streetwise—a documentary that follows young homeless kids through their daily routines. Our class discussion always considers the question of consent and the issue of exploitation with subjects who are so young. This is an issue that always arises when there are cameras trained on kids—recently, however, we also considered the question of training kids to work with cameras. Over the last several years there have been many projects that seek to empower children by providing them with cameras and an opportunity to discuss their artwork. The New Orleans Kid Camera Project attempts to offer an “unfiltered view of New Orleans through the eyes of its youth.” These organizations— for instance, Kids with Cameras and The New Orleans Kid Camera Project and films like Born into Brothels—are surely providing an excellent experience for young people who might not otherwise have had access to cameras and a space to discuss artwork. Although these projects that provide kids with cameras claim to offer a therapeutic experience for participants and access to an innocent vision through the photographs for viewers, many of the issues of consent and exploitation are still at play here.

Image credit: screen shot of website for Born into Brothels

In one of the opening scenes of Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s 2005 documentary film Born into Brothels, an eleven-year-old girl introduces the viewer to her fellow student and herself. She is smiling, and obviously at ease on film. The camera angle is direct, shot at the same level as this young girl. As she narrates the film cuts away to still photographs of the children she is naming. The narration, the angle, the sequencing here all seem to suggest that it is Puja and the other children born to prostitutes in Calcutta’s red light district that are in control of their representation. Certainly Briski and Kauffman’s attempt to empower their subjects by handing over the camera contributes to the sense that this film is an example of unmediated, self-representation and that as such, the film mitigates those power dynamics that typically arise in social documentary photojournalism.

Born into Brothels seems at first to solve some of the disparities in power by inverting the expected relationships of photographer and subject; the young children to which the title refers are given cameras, the filmmaker appears often on screen. However, this documentary does very little self-reflexive questioning of the methods of representation. Rather this film seems to suggest that this inversion provides access to an objective truth. In many ways, Born into Brothels is a respectful, sensitive portrayal of many of these children. In fact, Briski and Kauffman go well beyond the typical level of involved, concerned filmmakers to alleviate the situation of their subjects. Viewers of the film and the film’s website are encouraged to purchase signed prints of the children’s photographs with all of the proceeds going towards their education. Simply because it does a better job than most documentary films at attempting to avoid exploitative situations, does not mean that this representations is unproblematic.

Right from the start, and despite Puja’s seeming narrative control, the viewer is invited into the film in a position of power. There are very few scenes of adults taking care of these kids and so the film asks us to protect them. As Puja tells the camera she will have to join the line of prostitutes and “they say it will be soon” the film encourages the viewer to alleviate her situation. Because the film introduces each child through his or her photographs juxtaposed with scenes of that child in Briski’s photography class, the film offers the viewer a powerful vantage point similar to that of the teacher who must recognize the talent in each child (especially Avijit) and then validate that talent. Setting aside questions concerning the voyeurism that surrounds a filmic excursion into the red light district of a foreign country, and questions concerning permission when documenting the lives of such young people, Born into Brothels still seems problematic in its presentation of the poverty of its subjects. Because the film focuses solely on these few children and what can be done to change their lives, Born into Brothels implies that if the viewer watches, understands, and perhaps contributes to their college funds then all pictured problems will be alleviated. There is no attention paid to the broader structural issues that have created the situation in the first place and no attention is given to any grassroots organizations that may be working to address the same problems in Calcutta’s red light district. This film privileges a model of missionary work in which a white Western woman enters into the third world to save her subjects. It seems that offering the camera to the subject does not entirely alleviate the filmmaker from the burden of representation.

Innocence and Exploitation: Kids with Cameras

Andi — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:46:47 +0000

Image credit: screen shot of The New Orleans Kids with Camera Project

Image credit: screen shot of website for Born into Brothels

Truck Farm! From King Corn to CSA

fc — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:20:15 +0000

Image Credit: Josh Viertel for the Atlantic

Last week, I came across an article on Civil Eats by Curt Ellis (on the left in the photo above) about the mobile farm he and Ian Cheney (on the right) spent last summer cultivating in the back of Cheney's 1986 Dodge Ram pickup truck. All three of these characters (Ellis, Cheney and the old gray Dodge) will be familiar to anyone who saw their 2007 documentary feature King Corn. In that film, the men grew a single acre of corn in a small Iowa town that had coincidentally been home to former generations of Cheneys and Ellises. This time around, they are operating what is probably the world's smallest CSA on the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn. More on trucks, farms and films after the jump.

While this little farm may not be able to grow much food (though you'd be surprised how much produce can come out of a small plot of dirt), it has garned lots of attention. Besides the attention it draws while driving through traffic, the Truck Farm has been covered by Josh Viertel at the Atlantic, Jessica Ilyse Smith from Living on Earth, Barbara Fenig at Huffington Post and (as I mentioned above) by Ellis himself at Civil Eats and Culinate, and that attention may be the Truck Farm's most important crop. Cheney puts it this way in their interview with Jessica Ilyse Smith: "not that Truck Farm is going to feed the world, but it sure is an example of how we need to start thinking outside of the box about how we can feed the world in a different way." At the end of his own article, Ellis says that "the patchwork farms and gardens sprouting up like weeds in the sidewalk cracks around New York these days may be a ways off from feeding us all, but I think they’re bringing our food system something it sorely needs: a dose of fun."

The Truck Farm documentary is nothing if not a bit of fun. Ellis and Cheney are currently working on the documentary project through their Wicked Delicate production company. As of February 2010, they have one trailer and two teaser episodes posted online. Here is the second episode:

While episode one splits its time between well-worn shots of urban decay and a tongue-in-cheek montage of the Truck Farm's construction featuring songs about a "sci-fi something" (soil) to "fill the void" (of the truck bed), this episode focuses on the rationale behind the Truck Farm: America's need to devise inventive ways to grow food and overcome the current failings of our AgriBusiness food system. Ellis tells Living on Earth that such ingenuity can play an important role in eliminating food deserts and make fresh, healthy food available to everyone, "I think that's where urban agriculture comes in. We've got all these rooftops around New York City and we've got all these empty parking spaces in New York City. We should be growing food there however we can."

This sentiment is shared by Annie Novak, one of the organizers of Rooftop Farms, a 6000-square-foot roof garden (also in Brooklyn). Novak plants one-square-foot demonstration beds at Rooftop Farms to encourage anyone and everyone to get in on growing. Paula Crossfield at Civil Eats reports, "Novak wants even beginners, or New Yorkers without much growing room to get in on the act. One row on her farm even showcases what can be done in a small plot. 'The square foot bed is an example of the amount of space a renter might have,' she said. 'We’re using that space to show that you don’t have to be confined to one tomato plant.'" Below is a picture of Rooftop Farms.

Image Credit: CivilEats.com

Cheney and Ellis (and the Old Gray Dodge) succeed in making the point that we can find new and creative ways to build a food system aimed at nourishing people. Their film King Corn, while noticeably less austere than Food Inc., follows the rather depressing circulaiton of corn and money through our current "food" system and ends on a note of disgust. The type of corn they grow is not suitable for human consumption and is only used in ethanol, artificial sweeteners, cow-killing livestock feed and other industrial corn-based products. After growing their one acre of corn, the pair of part-time farmers wonder whether they should even harvest the grain. They do eventually run the combine through their field and drive the corn-- in the back of the 1986 Dodge Ram--to the grain elevator. Cheney looks like he's going to be sick as they move the inedible corn from the bed of his grandfather's truck into the mountain of surplus grain stacked beside the already-full silo.

Image Credit: screen capture from King Corn

I get the distinct impression that Cheney's Truck Farm idea was at least partly an attempt to earn some creative redemption for all three of them. King Corn (like Food Inc. and a growing number of projects with and without Michael Pollan) makes a compelling argument that government-subsidized corn is the root cause of several systemic problems in our nation's unsustainable food industry (as well as a major contributor to chronic health problems). The Dodge's reincarnation as a mobile vegetable garden provides an additional, productive argument and a glimmer of hope. The truck's new life implies that the tools and resources currently used by our broken agriculture industry could be repurposed to really feed Americans (instead of feeding the subsidized industry of chemically manipulating and repurposing corn sugars). Call it "beating plowshares into plowshares." On a strictly personal note, I think the truck looks happier in its new life.

Image Credit: KCRW.com

Review: Food, Inc.

timturner — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:25:02 +0000

This weekend, partly out of personal interest and partly in relation to a project I'm working on for the CWRL, I saw the new documentary Food, Inc. What follows is a brief "review" of the film (in other words, my scattered response to it) and some ideas for incorporating the film in the classroom (I assume it will be released on DVD sometime in the fall). I won't be discussing the visual rhetoric of the film in depth, but will instead focus on the film as the visual presentation of an argument about food.

*****
The opening credits of Food, Inc. present viewers with a tour of the modern American supermarket and the cornucopia of brightly colored packages filling it. The audience is later informed by voiceover narration that this supermarket contains somewhere around 47,000 products. In one of the film's more sardonic moments, we are also informed that an astonishingly high number of these products are made with elements derived from a single ingredient: corn. This arc covered by the film, from the universal supermarket to the particular kernel, establishes its intention of uncovering the origins of the American food supply. Food, Inc. tells the story of industrial agriculture for an audience that, it presumes, is largely unfamiliar with where (or what), exactly, its next meal is coming from.

The film is particularly interested in exposing and documenting the adverse effects of factory farming (in fact, as one of my fellow viewers pointed out, the film was far more interested in meat than in vegetables), and included some gruesome images of the ways chickens, pigs, and cows are raised and slaughtered in this country. (Although there are many disturbing documentary images in the film, in fairness I think it could have been a lot more graphic than it actually was.) Yet these images are somewhat rare since, as the filmmakers argue, industrial meat producers are at pains to keep the means of production hidden from consumers. At one point, the narrators even mention that there is an effort afoot to make it illegal to publish photographs or video of factory-farming operations. This claim is not documented with evidence, but the film does introduce viewers to so-called "food disparagement" laws. These laws are in place in many farm-states, and they limit what food safety advocates can and can't say about food products and producers. I suspect that many viewers will be surprised to learn about the existence of such laws, but they were made famous as the basis of the well-known lawsuit brought against Oprah Winfrey by Texas cattle ranchers.

The film points to these laws above all to demonstrate another of its major arguments: that the food industry, by means of well-organized lobbying groups, wields considerable power over food policy in the United States. One of the film's more amusing animations chronicles the revolving door between industrial agriculture and the USDA, FDA, and Dept. of Agriculture. This portion of the film also includes one of its most powerful emotional appeals, the story of a two year old who died of e. coli food poisoning and his mother's efforts to lobby Congress to enact and enforce stricter regulatory powers for the agencies tasked with keeping the food supply safe.

Food, Inc. includes a number of familiar faces, most notably Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and a co-producer of this film, and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Pollan, cited in the credits as a "Special Contributor" to the film, adds much here. In fact, Food, Inc. essentially repackages the material of Pollan's books, presenting his arguments for an audience that hasn't, and maybe won't, read them. The structure of the film closely mirrors The Omnivore's Dilemma by presenting industrial agriculture, industrial organic, and local/sustainable organic farming in turns. At the same time, the argument of the film is less cerebral, and more immediate, than Pollan's writing. This stems in part from the fact that visual arguments may carry more weight than textual ones (since reading about acres of filth in factory farms, and seeing footage of mountains of manure, can produce markedly different physical responses in the reader/viewer), and in part from the fact that the film makes a concerted effort to move the audience with emotional appeals not present in Pollan's writing (such as the death of Kevin Kowalcyk from e. coli, or the plight of workers in a pig slaughterhouse).

The strengths of Food, Inc. are related to its weaknesses. The film effectively achieves its primary aim of informing the audience about industrial food practices and promoting an agenda of reforming (or revolutionizing) food production in the United States. It seeks to move its audience by deploying a number of different appeals, including both reason (there are plenty of facts and figures) and emotion. But the latter are not, perhaps by definition and certainly by design, subtle, and the film does promote its cause by linking it to the most helpless of victims (the toddler who dies of food poisoning, the sick cattle who are dragged to slaughter on forklifts). Such imagery may be justified by the urgency and gravity the filmmakers wish to convey, but some in the audience will undoubtedly accuse of the film of what is commonly referred to as "bleeding-heart" liberalism. To this criticism might be added the fact that the film is not balanced; it does not present the viewpoints of industrial agriculture, although not, perhaps, for lack of trying. In what becomes something of a running joke, Food, Inc. repeatedly informs the audience that representatives of X company declined to be interviewed for the film. This refusal of access by the leading industrial agricultural corporations is construed by the film as a conspiracy of secrecy, and at times the corporations are presented as shadowy overlords and de facto rulers of America's farming communities and food culture.

But of course, Food, Inc. does not need to present the views of its opponents; that is not the point of polemical documentaries. What it presents instead, effectively and compellingly, is advocacy for a particular point of view about the world we live in and the food we eat.

*****
Food, Inc. and Pedagogy
Instructors working with Pollan's In Defense of Food will find Food, Inc. a useful film to show to students since it recapitulates many of the arguments found in that book, albeit in a visual form. The film also raises additional, related issues, however, that instructors may wish to pursue in class, or encourage students to pursue in their research projects. These include, among others, the regulatory powers of the FDA and USDA ("Kevin's Law"), immigration and labor in industrial agriculture, and "food disparagement" laws (including the film's claim that factory farmers want to make it illegal to publish images of their farms).

It might also be useful to use the film to raise the introductory questions of visual rhetoric. For example, instructors might devise an exercise in which students consider and debate whether the film makes a more or less effective argument than the book. Does the addition of the visual dimension, including intensified appeals to pathos by means of graphic or emotional images, change the persuasiveness of the argument? What sorts of audiences are more likely to be moved by such images, and what audiences are less likely to be moved by them?

Additionally, the film might raise general questions about the visual rhetoric of arguments about industrial agriculture. I am thinking in particular of the notion of identification as it is introduced in rhetorical pedagogy, and of this film's reliance on images of suffering of animals to move its audiences. Such images are common, for example, in arguments in favor of vegetarianism or veganism or against factory farming in general (even when a change in diet is not advocated). How effective is it to ask audiences to identify with the suffering of animals? How much do such arguments, fairly or not, rely on the so-called "pathetic fallacy"?

Similarly, another pattern of interest is the film's pastoral imagery. The use of such imagery to market and sell processed foods is explicitly noted by the filmmakers--but to what extent do the filmmakers, in turn, rely on a romanticized image of the American farm that is, or is not, attainable today? What role does the topos of the country (or of the city) play in our debates about food and culture, and how does this situate them in relation to the long history of such debates in American politics and culture more generally, from Jefferson's agrarian republic, to Thoreau's Walden, to TV's Green Acres?

Critical Mass and Visual Protest

erinhurt — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:24:31 +0000

In my "Rhetoric if Protest" class today, I had my students watch We Are Traffic, a documentary directed by Ted White about the xerocratic protest group Critical Mass. This group relies on several key elements of visual rhetoric to both make their points within their local communities and to spread their ideologies nationally and internationally. I find these to be excellent classroom resources.

One way that Critical Mass spreads its message is through their flyer exchange . Each flyer offers a visual representation of how a particular Critical Mass community decided to present their ride - some are more informative, others are more political.

Also featured in the documentary is an artist by the name of Rigo23 , whose murals often take the form of street signs but impart drastically different messages by building eco-friendly meaning onto these pre-existing symbols. He explains (I'm paraphrasing here) that as a pedestrian and biker he found roadway symbols to be nonsensical (he uses the example of the one way street, which only seems to apply to cars) yet if one disobeys these symbols the result can be a city fine or even injury. His protest murals bring attention to the signs themselves, the meanings (or arguments) that we already attribute, and then add another layer of meaning. I found them to be one of the more interesting aspects of the documentary.