Documentary and Cinematic Expression

 Jeff Holley

Richard Simpson

ENGL 342

October 6, 2020

 

Documentary and Cinema

 

Upon introducing A Propos de Nice (1930),  by Jean Vigo, whose first Avant-Garde representation among spectators at the famous French theater, Vieux Columbier. "I don't know whether the result will be a work of art, but I am sure it will be cinema, in the sense that no other art, no science, can take its place" (82). 

Vigo adopted many of Vertov's ideas, whose younger brother, Boris Kaufman, was his photographer. Like in A Man with a Camera, they used Kino-Eye devices in their shots that depicted the rich and the poor's idle nature, the middle class, and all their roaring 20's attitude. (Barnouw, 72)

            Mysteriously, Vigo died in jail at 29 years of age (Barnouw, 74). Perhaps Vigo would have passed early anyway since his onset of tuberculosis led him to the warmer climate.  His whole purpose filming there and the ability assumed to pay for it by his father, a "radical journalist" from France's southern Basque region. 

Also, during the 20's the atmosphere among the artist's struggle against the commercialization of cinema was a new frontier that was quickly becoming volatile for the industry. The artists of every medium imaginable were concerned less with plot and script. Lighting was the new artistic medium for cinema and the concept that "all the arts are shaken by the rise of film" (Barnouw, 71). 

In Vigo's unconventional film, the shoe, the shoe shinner, and the contrast transition from shoe to a barefoot tell a rich and poor story. Alternatively, the same posed woman, as the dress repeatedly changes until the last woman, same pose but naked. Throughout the film, these devices, the advent-guard way of telling a story from the filmmaker's viewpoint is apparent, there is a story to tell, and it's useful. 

Other than the modes of documentary, i.e., the poetic, the expository, and the Reflexive Modes, all have different approaches to make cinema expressive and artistic in form and less about the plot and theatrical agendas that sell to audiences for money.  During this period, cinema was an artistic revolution or could have been more so having not the commercialization took place. 

These cinematic expressions, known now as documentaries, are about real people, social actors, and real stories (almost).  The new documentary cinematic film gifts a more subtle eye-level world-historical view from the filmmaker's perspective, allowing the audience to decide their interpretation (Nichols, 104). Now, that is cinema! 

 

~Jeff