Friday 13 September 2013

Approaching Apocalypse

I don’t understand people. That is a very encompassing statement, I know. It’s just a fact I’m sure many before me have reiterated to the point of making it a cliché. But think about it: Why do Indian halls fill up with people to watch a Nolan movie but remain eerily silent and desolate when one of their own kind thinks out of the box?
Why does the world blame Afghanistan for terrorism when America takes child prisoners in a “war against terror” and tortures them to madness?
 Why does the world need a hero and a villain?
Why do people need wars?
Why are nuclear weapons built everyday when we all know what can happen if we use just one of them?
Were there always this many rapists roaming the streets?
Were our lives always under such threat?
Do we only see it now because we want to have something to be afraid of? Because now that everything needs to be out in the open thanks to the so called open media, everyone must be made afraid of what has been going on around them without their knowledge heretofore? Knowledge is power they say. Who are “they” I wonder sometimes; and what power? The power to stop the killers and rapist and terrorists who roam our streets because the court has acquitted them yet again? The power to raise their voice only to be killed the first instant one goes and files an RTI? Or the power to fast unto death in a jail cell for twelve years in protest while people slowly forget about you? Or the power to shut your eyes and stop up your ears like you had been doing heretofore.
Hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil.
Do those doctrines of Buddha apply today? In fact does any religion apply in a world about to face the apocalypse not of humankind but of humanity?

So you see... I do not understand people. Just like you do not. Just like I do not know why I am writing about this in my blog, an entry a little different than normal, just like the rest of the pseudo-protesters against injustice in the world do, instead of doing something about it. But I do know that I will continue to only write. To only let my words free and hence not cause even a dent. Because I don’t understand people. And I, after all, am a person.

Saturday 23 March 2013

Reading Photography: Bandeep Singh's Antarghat






The subject that I have chosen for my analysis of photography is Antarghat, meaning “the vessel within”, the

 first book in a series called Sa or “the feminine”, by photo-editor of India Today, Bandeep Singh. In the 

book, Singh has taken a series of pictures of the nude female body, juxtaposed with the patra or vessel. The 

pictures, though mostly silhouettes, show the features of the subjects quite prominently. The figures are not 

curling into themselves as photographs of the female are often seen to do in the genre of Eurocentric 

photographs, but rather proudly displaying the sacredness of the feminine. Even though the bodies are not 

clad or covered in any way, they do not impart a sense of voyeurism or the intrusion of the gaze as is the 

case in pornographic pictures. Singh’s depiction of the female, looks at the body not just as a sum of its 

parts, or as a commodity, but as a metaphor, having multilayered connotative meanings.

Stephen Bull, in his essay Making Meaning of Photographs, separates the meaning of photographs using semiotics used by Sassure, which divides linguistic signs into two inseparable parts, the signifiers and the signified. The signifier is the linguistic symbol while the signified is the object it refers to. “While Sassure’s concept worked on the level of language, Barthes argued that it is also important to take into account the culture in which language produces meaning.” Hjemslev gave the term of “denotation” to describe that which the signs communicate on the level of language while he used “connotation” to mean the cultural meanings that arise from the specifics of context and discourse. The given series of pictures denote the naked female body in several postures with an earthen pot. However when looking at the connoted meaning, one has to look into the discourse of Indian mythology and the sublimity of womanhood.
Generally, the naked body of the female depicted in any photograph would constitute a voyeuristic gaze. According to Susan Sontag, in her essay, In Plato’s Cave, “Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.” A pornographic photograph would have been the ultimate proof of this statement. However, although the women in these pictures are completely unclothed, the photographs still maintain a transcendental aura about them. The very fact that the women in the photographs have completely bared their bodies to the photographer instead of curling into themselves shows a link of trust between the photographer and his subject, not the type of relationship found between the voyeur and his object. The women in the pictures have also been kept from being commodified by the lack of focus on their faces, highlighting instead in the sensuality and aesthetic beauty of the feminine body. This is further supported by the fact that there are photographs of three women in the book but they cannot be differentiated from each other.
The discourse here is not the modern Eurocentric approach which would look at nakedness as something to be condemned but rather the post-modern mingling of the old and new styles, of tradition and technology, Singh acting as the architect or potter of the patra, the camera being his chisel and potter’s wheel. “Most postmodernist critics of this ideological bent insist that postmodernist art be oppositional. This opposition can be conceived in two ways: as counter to the modernist tradition, and/or as counter to the ruling “mythologies” of Western culture, which, the theory goes, led to the creation of the modernist tradition in the first place.”[1]  Postmodernism, and especially postmodernist art, therefore seeks to break the myths of the “western” and the “modern”, the “myths” of the “autonomous individual” and the “individual subject”. In the photographs of Bandeep Singh, the myth of commodification of the naked body shatters and what we are left with is art at its most worshipful of feminity and its sacred gift of fertility as connoted by the kalas or the kumbha and the triangle.
Hindu mythology and the tantric which Singh draws from do not treat the female as a commodity. Quite the contrary, “from the dancing girl of Mohenjodaro, to the yakshis, to the shalabhanjikas/tree spirits, apsaras/ celestial beings, and the nayikas/heroines in their munificence, the female nude is worshipped, celebrated, adored but never really commodified in traditional Indian art practice. Within Indian culture, be it Buddhist, Hindu, or Tantric, from the sacred to the pleasurable, the nude woman is always represented within the domain of the sublime.”[2]
The emphasis that Singh gives in some pictures is to the concept of beauty of the Indian female. Unlike the photographic tradition in India, which has mostly followed western patterns, the nude is an integral part of painting and sculpture, the traditional art forms of India. Singh inculcates these forms of art into his photography, thereby becoming the artist and the sculptor. The bodies are not clothed, they are not covered: they flow freely, the lines of the body conveying an eroticism which is beautifully articulated, uninhibited by concepts of false modesty. The monochromatic nature of the photographs helps to emphasise the feminine form, not distracted by colour. What Singh has played with are light and shadow, creating a juxtaposition of the earthen pot and the female, thereby bringing out the sacred and ethereal realm of fertility that Indian mythology has worshipped and uplifted. The merging of the pot and the woman, especially in the first picture of the pot-bearer, shows fertility in a light that is other than the mundane physical plain, making it miraculous. The centering on the ghat or earthen pot, as well as the representations of the tantric mudras signifies fertility. Also depicted in one of his pictures is the “primal symbol of the inverted triangle, the seed and cosmic womb, the creative genetrix feminine power and the female emblem of the Shakti-principle is the foundation of many compositions.”[3]
Bandeep Singh’s photographs should not even be called completely post-modern or post-structural, these concepts being primarily western. His work can be seen as a revival of the richness of Indian tradition and the magnificence of the Indian feminine figure at its luxurious and productive. Modern technology merges with ancient tradition and thought in Singh’s work to bring out aspects of the trade heretofore unexplored.
Bibliography:
Grundberg: The Crisis of the Real
Bandeep Singh: Sa
Susan Sontag: In Plato’s Cave
Stephen Bull: The Meanings of Photographs



[1] Grundberg: The Crisis of the Real

[2] SA
[3] SA

Friday 1 February 2013

Biopics of Satyajit Ray


The name of Satyajit Ray is one of the most well known in the context of Indian cinema. He is hailed as the visionary who ushered modernity into Indian cinema. Ray directed thirty seven films including feature films, documentaries and short films. He also wrote several works of fiction in his own unique style of writing. Besides this, he is also known as a publisher, a graphic designer, a film critic and an illustrator. There was also an exhibition of photographs taken by him in 2011 at the Kolkata film festival.
Some well known films of Ray are the Apu Trilogy, Charulata, Aranyer DinRatri, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Hirak Rajar Deshe, the Feluda Series and others. Films like the Apu Trilogy have a pervading sense of realism in them. In fact Satyajit Ray was greatly influenced by the ideas of realism, especially Italian Neorealist cinema. This was a movement in Italy where films mainly about the working classes were made. They were filmed on location and often used non-professional workers. It showed life in post-war Italy, focusing on the everyday life of the people, their psyche and the oppression and poverty that they faced.
The movies of Ray reflect this and as a realist, his work on his documentaries is interesting to review. His biographical documentaries, about the lives of several artists of his time that he himself greatly admired, show a certain influence of the neorealist cinema as well as his perception of modernity. These films are Bala, based upon the famous bharatnatyam dancer, Balaswarswathi, The Inner Eye, based on the blind painter, Binodbehari Mukherjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sukumar Ray.
A biography is an account of someone’s life which is detailed and deals with not just the bare details like place and time of birth education work and death, but also highlights various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience. It may also include an analysis of the subject’s personality. There have been several biographical feature films made with an actor playing the role of the protagonist whose life is being portrayed, such as Johny Depp as Edward D. Wood, Jr. In Ed Wood (1994), Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon (1999), and Jaime Foxx as Ray Charles in Ray(2004).Documentary biographies, unlike feature films, mostly use newsreel and photographs. Sometimes, if the person on whom the film is being made or people who know him or her personally or professionally are alive, then they are interviewed. Documentary biographies have been made about prominent public figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, The Duke of Windsor and Martin Luther King Jr.
The films of Ray, too, use mostly newsreel and old footage in some and interviews or live performances in others. Bala, a documentary film based on the classical bharatnatyam dancer, is probably the only documentary which has almost no information on the personal life of the dancer. From the beginning to the end it focuses on her professional life and achievements. It is also the only of the four documentaries where Ray has used the interview style several times. The music in the documentary has been composed by her two brothers T. Viswanathan and T. Ranganathan. There is a smooth blending of still photographs and newspaper clippings with video which gives the documentary its continuity. However, it seems lacking in detail, especially regarding her childhood and early years of dance. This is because there was a lack of cooperation from Balaswaraswathi herself who was shy in speaking English and reticent about her early life “when dancing was considered by polite society to bevirtually synonymous to prostitution.”[1] Also, Ray had not seriously studied Bharatnatyam until he came to make Bala. All this leads to the value of the film being mainly “archival” and does not reach his usual standard of film-making.
Rabindranath Tagore is, according to Mary Seton, “not a film which on first viewing reveals what has gone into its creating”[2]. On the day the full-length film was premiered in Delhi (may 5th 1961), Ray remarked: “I put as much work on it as on three feature films. My approach to biography was to stress Tagore as a human being and patriot.” [3]Frequently, Ray’s scripts had taken him around ten days to finish. The one hour tribute to Rabindranath had no formal scenario but it took him a month to prepare a visual continuity. The biggest challenge was his adamant decision not to use any interviews in the film which was an extraordinary and bold decision as it would have been easy to rely on them. He also did not include any recitations of Tagore’s poems despite the fact that he is primarily a poet. This is because he felt that the brilliance of Tagore’s poetry is lost in translation. However he did include some passages of singing which are quite moving. Although the film is far from being propaganda such as those by the Indian Government’s Films Division, it does gloss over any controversy surrounding the poet. It contains no mention of his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi’s suicide, his fraught relationship with the Bengali public, his ill-advised praise of Mussolini’s Italy or his criticism of Gandhi although it is briefly mentioned that the two did not see eye to eye. However, despite all this, parts of the film truly achieve the mark of a great work, especially a sequence which shows Rabi’s childhood. Ray himself considers this to be amongst the best work done by him.
Sukumar Ray is a biographical documentary made by Satyajit Ray about his own father. It was made on the centenary of his birth. This too was a rather difficult film for Satyajit to make as he had to depend largely on photographs of his father, his writings, illustrations and dramatisation of his works. “Ray rejected the idea of anyone playing the role of Sukumar on grounds that he himself wouldn’t be convinced by it.”[4] This fact combined with the untrancelatable quality of humour is probably why the film remains to some extent inaccessible to non-bengali audience. Ray did not attempt an English version of the film, opting to only use subtitles. Despite the difficulties posed while making this film, it never seems slow thanks to Ray’s clever use of drawings. The music based on Tagore, may seem a little mournful at times which is perhaps Satyjit’s way of mourning the loss of his father. The showing of the dramatisation of his plays as well as “Haw Jaw Baw Raw Law” (“gibberish”) also keeps the interest alive. The scene from the latter reminds us of the mad hatter’s tea party in Alice in wonderland where time stands still. Using the silhouette of three unique characters and purple backlighting, the scene shows the intrinsic sense of the ridiculous which was present in Sukumar’s works.
The Inner Eye, a documentary film based on Binod Behari Mukherji is considered by many film critics as a creative masterpiece. Andrew Robinson calls it “...quite simply the finest short documentary about a creative artist I have seen...” [5]Ray was inspired by Binode Bihari while at Shantiniketan. He calls him the “finest Indian painter” and is impressed by his precise technique and the lack of flamboyance in his art. Ray mixes the past and present and “manages to distil Binode Behari’s essence, to make comprehensible the extraordinary fact of his continuing to create art without sight.” The music in the entire documentary is congruous and stirring. It comes to the fore with the sitar composition by Nikhil Banerjee at the end of the film. As the music flows on, the image freezes on a profile of Binode Behari’s face with a quote from the man himself.
After viewing these documentaries, one cannot help but notice the many similarities in approach. The most basic similarity is that all these films are informed by a deep admiration of the subject. Also, though the narration is spoken by Ray himself, except in Sukumar Ray, where the famous actor Soumitro Chottopadhay narrates, he hardly ever intrudes into the film as an individual. There is an omniscient narrative voice in all the films. Music is given special importance and brings out the mood of the film. If a certain shot which is important in depicting the character is not present, ray is not opposed to using reconstructions and actors. He finds Cinema Verite to have a “slightly false element to it” [6]and therefore does not use this technique in any of his documentaries. The impetus to make these films is also the same: the appeal to him of a particular personality, rather than cinematic considerations. He ushers in modernity by using several western scientific techniques such as voice of god technique in these films. Also, in a way, through his documentaries, we get a picture of the modern man faced with seemingly insurmountable difficulty, whether it is Binod Behari’s loss of eyesight or Sukumar Ray’s impending death. However, unlike most of the western modernist writers or film-makers, his films lack any sense of Nihilism. Instead, he shows personalities who surpassed these odds which seemed impossible to others and still managed to create art and literature. Just as they inspired the film-maker, they act as an inspiration to the audience. The similarities between these films show us the basic principles of Ray in regard to documentary and his approach to the genre of Biographical Documentary.


Bibliography
Andrew Robinson. Satyajit Ray The Inner Eye. Rupa & co. 1990
Marie Seton. Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray. New Delhi: Vikas Publications. 1971.
Suranjan Ganguly. Satyajit Ray In Search of the Modern. Indialog Publications. Pvt. Ltd. 2001.



[1] Andrew Robinson. Satyajit Ray The Inner Eye. Rupa & co. 1990.  P 280
[2] Andrew Robinson. Satyajit Ray The Inner Eye. Rupa & co. 1990.  P 277
[3] Marie Seton. Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray. New Delhi: Vikas Publications. 1971.
[4] Andrew Robinson. Satyajit Ray The Inner Eye. Rupa & co. 1990. P 280
[5] Andrew Robinson. Satyajit Ray The Inner Eye. Rupa & co. 1990. P 282
[6] Andrew Robinson. Satyajit Ray The Inner Eye. Rupa & co. 1990. P 274

Sunday 20 January 2013

Defining Documentary: A Reading of Night and Fog and La Jetee


“Documentary calls for specific techniques to give cinematic embodiment to lived encounter and historical events, experience and reflection, research and argumentation... It calls for an ethics of responsibility, an aesthetics of film form, and a politics of representation.” (Bill Nichols)
Do you agree with this description of documentary film practice?
Describe the “specific techniques” deployed by Alain Resnais in Night and Fog and Chris Marker in La Jetee to achieve their cinematic purposes. How have these film-makers brought together their sense of ethics, film form and politics to create these rich works of cinema?
Documentary is a blend of technique and aesthetics in an attempt to create a reflection of reality. Technique creates an impression of reality whereas it is actually a mere replica of it created through a “form of discourse fabricating its effects, impressions and point of view”1. This tampering with reality automatically leads to questioning whether it is the right thing to do. The technique used in a film is also linked with the director’s own sense of right and wrong as he would not wish to create a film that he himself feels goes against his moral sense.  It is, thus, extremely difficult to separate the aspects of documentary into the essentials of ethics, film-form and politics as they are so intricately interlinked and interwoven.
“You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your own juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it.”2 Thus writes Grierson, on the topic of documentary cinema. He also writes that this “creative intention” is manifested in several methods used by the film maker. A film maker may emphasise on the individual, like Flaherty in Nanook  and Chris Marker in La Jetee or on a section of the masses, as in Fredrick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Alain Resnais in Night and Fog .
In Night and Fog, Resnais uses what is described as the direct address style. There is a narrative voice, powerful in its oratory skills, using a highly rhetorical language. It evokes in the audience a sense of sobriety and doom with its almost monotonous but highly evocative and expressive eloquence. It is this voice that lets the audience know about the specifics of the inhuman conditions of the concentration camps. Towards the beginning, it rings with sarcasm as it speaks of the construction of the concentration camps: “A concentration camp is built like, a stadium or a big hotel. Men in the field survey the land. You need contractors, estimates, competitive bids. A steam shovel hangs motionless from a factory rig. And no doubt a bribe or two.”3  Sympathy is evoked at every turn for the victims of oppression by the Kapo and the S.S. At the end of the documentary the narrator says “Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?”4These questions bring out the relevance of the documentary even in the world of today, and not just as a depiction of a past atrocity. The background music also lilts in a peculiar way, building an appropriate atmosphere for the visuals of violence and death. However, it does not overpower or overwhelm the visuals or the narrative.  
The visuals in the film vividly support the audio with their starkness. The film consists of a mixture of stock footage and contemporary shots which portray with the dire conditions in the Nazi concentration camps and the despicable use of the gas chambers. The vivid shots of death and decay as well as humiliation add a strong support to the voice which decries the acts of violence committed by the Nazi. There is a switch between coloured and black-and- white images to depict the past and the present, respectively. The present depiction of the abandoned concentration camps echoes a false sense of peace which is almost eerie. The bare infrastructure of the camps with their barbed wire fencing, their cramped wooden berths and the hospital building is juxtaposed with horrific shots of dead bodies hanging on the fence and emaciated people dying in their hospital beds with their eyes bulging open or shivering from disease. This switching back and forth between the past and the present adds to the sense of terror of the past images because of their drastic difference from the deceptive silence and apparent harmlessness of the present landscape and infrastructure.
In “An Introduction to the Art and Politics of Representation of Film”, Professor Bob Nowlan writes “Documentary film makers decide:  what to include and what to exclude in what they show us,  from what distances and what angles, for what durations of time, in what Order,  through what kinds of lenses, in what kinds of light,  in black and white or in colour and in what shades and hues, with what degrees of sharpness, brightness, and contrast,  in What degrees of focus and exposure, and accompanied by what kinds of sounds. . . The "why" of representation is the "Politics" of representation.”5 As such, if we look at a documentary like Night and Fog, the reasoning behind the depiction of the Nazi concentration camps is interlinked with the question of whether it was the right thing to do. Herein lies the relationship between the ethics and politics of representation.
In Resnais’ documentary, the reasoning behind the effects of audio and visual is a very apparent desire to portray the ruthless and brutal violence committed upon the people at large in the Nazi concentration camps. The film is obviously an outcry against the atrocities of Hitler, Himmler, the S.S., the Kapo and the Nazis in general. The phrase “the camera never lies” can be considered redundant in the context of this heavily biased documentary.  The art of manipulation of reality can also be observed in the post production censoring of the scene where French officers are shown to be herding citizens towards the trains headed to concentration camps. Resnais painted a beam in the scene which would obscure the officer’s clothing. As such, it may be asked how far this manipulation of reality is ethical or moral. It is definitely a manipulation of reality to please the French government. Resnais’ goal was to show the morbid acts committed upon the prisoners in the concentration camps. However, this act of omission seems to undermine the vastness of the Nazi network which consisted of supporters and helpers from amongst the other nations as well.
Another angle from which ethics comes into play is the use of graphic detail which may seem invasive to the subject of the film, in this case the prisoners of the concentration camps. Their deaths are shown through photographs and video clippings of terrifying detail, along with the humiliation they had to face. The dehumanisation of the people in the camps also becomes obvious in the showing of how their bodies are used after their deaths to make soap or their skin acts as paper. The scene where the bulldozer shoves mounds of bodies to a mass grave was considered by the contemporary censor board to be too violent. Although a note of extreme sympathy for the prisoner and disgust for the captor rings throughout the documentary, it may still be questioned as to whether it is ethically right to show these people at their lowest points and as such invade their privacy. “With the development of lightweight equipment and the growth of an aesthetic of direct cinema, the ethical problem of the relationship of filmmakers to the people in their films became more amorphous. It is not quite so easy to condemn the work of men like Leacock, the Maysles brothers, and Wiseman. They have shown us aspects of our world that in other times would have been obscured from view; in this there is a gain. In gain there is perhaps a loss.”6 If such a view is held to be true, then the ambiguity remains regarding the question of morality. Resnais’ intention behind showing the film was to expose Nazi cruelty against the regular citizens who were herded off to concentration camps which he deemed was necessary in the contemporary context of a world reeling in the aftermaths of the war ten years after it is over. Therefore whether the seeming invasion of privacy of his subjects is essential and ethically right cannot be completely assessed objectively, more than a century later.
La Jetee is an avant-garde science fiction film. As such it is seemingly incongruent with the discussion on documentary cinema. However, even in this film, there is an attempt to replicate a reality of what may happen in the future. The style of this post apocalyptic film is almost like that of a direct-address documentary film with a narrator telling the story of the man who was sent to the past and future. La Jetee, despite being a film, is shown, almost entirely, through a series of still photographs, one succeeding the other to keep pace with the narration, the film continuing for twenty eight whole minutes. The effect is striking as it seems to take on the form of fell truth supported by pictures. The use of black-and white pictures instead of colour seems to add to this sense of authenticity.
 The events of the film take place at some time in the future after the end of World War III, during the course of which Paris was destroyed. The calamitous consequences of such a war are brought out when the narrator says with a touch of irony, “And sometime later, Paris was destroyed. Many died. Some thought they had won. Others were taken prisoner. The survivors settled underground. Above ground, Paris and no doubt most of the world was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity. The victors stood guard over an empire of rats.” 7 The film then takes us to the experiments being made on the prisoners of war and subsequently to the one prisoner who is the main focus of the film. He is taken to the laboratory for the experiments to take place. Since man is trapped in terms of space, the experiments are to send him back and forth through time in order to get valuable supplies and information. This man has been chosen because of the vivid mental pictures that he is capable of seeing and a vision of a woman and a man crumpling to the ground he had seen as a boy. The brutal experiments, in the form of injections and electric shocks to the eyes, send him first to the past where he meets a woman whom he seems to have been searching for. They meet several times through the course of the experiments and he finds himself falling in love with her, connecting on a level of complete mutual trust. However the first experiment is ended and the second sends him to the future where he sees a Paris rebuilt. When he asks the people of the future to give him information on how to survive, they arm him with this powerful knowledge. Once his captors have the information they need, he is taken to another part of the camp, presumably to die. However, he is rescued by the people from the future who ask him to go with them. He wishes instead to go back to the past to that day he had seen as a boy in hopes of seeing the woman again. It is only when he is on the pier and sees the man from the underground camp that he realises that the body he had seen crumpling as a child was the death of a man, his own death.
The film, though short, has an immediate impact on the audience with its realistic portrayal and unexpected ending. “This is a film that attains the precious combination of a narrative force as ineluctable as tragedy and a style as lyrical as haiku. Whereas science fiction as a genre tends to render human beings mere appliances for the true mechanical hero, technology in this film is poetically evoked, not transfigured. . .”8  The film, no matter how realistic or evocative, however, is not in any way a documentary which is a representation of reality. It is based on a hypothesis of a post apocalyptic world as a result of a Third World War that has not and perhaps will never happen. It is a mere interpretation of one mind about what may happen in the future. However, in such a situation, we may question whether it is truly so completely detached from the genre of documentary which is after all the film-maker’s interpretation of the present or past.
The question of ethics is not exactly something that comes into play in context of a science fiction film. The director of the film, while trying to coat the film with a sense of realism, has in no way made any kind of claim that it is based on fact or any kind of reality. Thus the moral question of one interpretation of the truth being shown as the whole truth does not exist in the context of this film. The question of invasion of privacy and voyeurism in the relation between the film-maker and his subject is also irrelevant as the torture inflicted on the man is not real, but acted out. As such, the actor, having read the script and listened to directions, is mostly aware of how he is going to be portrayed in the film. Herein lies its most fundamental difference from documentary cinema.
Both La Jetee and Night and Fog deal with the theme of the effects of the World War. While Night and Fog looks back to the holocaust in the backdrop of the Second World War, La Jetee looks to the future and the possible repercussions of a Third World War. They have a similarity when it comes to technique as both make use of black-and-white photographs or videos, whether to demarcate the past from the present as in the case of Night and Fog or to provide a sense of authenticity as in the case of La Jetee. They are also both based on the direct address style, with the voice of the narrator directly speaking to the audience. However, this is where the similarities end. While Night and Fog is a documentary, based on facts, interpreted by the director in a certain way, La Jetee is based completely on fiction, no matter how realistic it is made to seem. Still, whether it is the documentary of Resnais or the avant-garde film of Chris Marker, it cannot be denied that both films are a perfect blend of technique and aesthetic which keeps the viewer enraptured through from beginning to end.






Works Cited:
·         “A Movement is Founded- First Principles of Documentary”- John Grierson 2
·         “The Voice of Documentary”- Bill Nichols 1
·         “Ethics”- Brian Winston
·         “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming”- Calvin Pryluck 6
·         “La Jetee. Cine-Roman by Chris Marker” – Henry Pickford 8
·         “An Introduction to the Art and Politics of Representation of Film”- Professor Bob Nowlan 5
·         “La Jetee Screenplay” 7
·         “Night and Fog Screenplay” 3, 4
·         Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.htm