This is also the newsreel that begins Citizen Kane by blending historical and staged footage.
Michael Michael Betancourt, Ph.D https://michaelbetancourt.com | cell 305.562.9192 | zoom 875 581 4648 https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Betancourt/e/B01H3QILT0/ sent from my phone > On Jul 1, 2021, at 5:15 PM, Dave Tetzlaff <[email protected]> wrote: > > David Holtzman’s Diary isn’t a hybrid. It’s all “fake”. > > OTOH, a lot of canonical docs made prior to 1960 were “hybrids" due to the > limits of film technology to capture actualities as they happened — so they > incorporated staged sequences with varying degrees of verisimilitude. > > The Frank Capra “Why We Fight” films from WWII are classics examples of > everything-including-the-kitchen-sink assembleges. Joris Ivens was the > primary author of the now-infamous “Know Your Eneemy: Japan”, which added > some ‘experimental' touches to the Capra template — specifically a fairly > long sequence based purely in visual montage w/o accompanying narration. > > To make a broader point, into the 1950s “experimental film” wasn’t a common > rubric, and works we now categorize as such — e.g. Meshes, Fireworks, Blood > of a Poet — were commonly thought of as “poetic film”, and — going back to > Flaherty and Nanook — documentaries also had a strong ‘poetic’ streak, quite > distinct from the popular entertainments produced by Hollywood. You can see > this in the most celebrated films from John Grierson’s GPO film unit — “Night > Mail” and the wartime films of Humphrey Jennings — especially “Listen to > Britain”. > > While I imagine you have more contemporary examples in mind, a look back > might provide some useful context for comparison and contrast. The context of > any mixed-method non-fiction filmmaking has changed, and more recent > ‘hybrids’ are likely self-consciously genre-benders, which certainly matters… > for something…. > > There’s a good amount of scholarly literature relevant to the topic, though > the only specific work coming to my mind at the moment is Bill Nichols book, > _Blurred Boundaries_. It’s written with a fair amount of theory-speak, so not > the most user-friendly, but could well be worth a look nevertheless. > -- > Frameworks mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.film-gallery.org/mailman/listinfo/frameworks_film-gallery.org
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