Reality Fiction

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Reality Fiction
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• I'm interested in complexity and ambiguity
  Fred Wiseman

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Lecture Outline

• Auteur Theme, Style
• Voyeurism
• discipline punish
• Structure
• Wiseman Baudrillard the hyperreal

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Theme, Style

• control authority institutions
• 1) medium to close shot scale 2) long take 3)
  subject matter 4) effacement of camera
  consciousness on the part of the subjects 5)
  continuity editing 6) no voice-over narration,
  non-source music, interviews
• "internal" and "external" editing

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Voyeurism, Privacy

• legal disputes
• Details of legal history in Toby Miller article
• High School (1968)
• Primate (1974)

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Discipline Punish

• Foucault Discipline and Punish The Birth of the
  Prison
• micro-institutions of power/knowledge
• normalizing regime
• power, knowledge intervention

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• identity produced within across institutions
• Panoptic apparatus
• surveillance discipline
• dissymmetrical relations of power/knowledge

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Structure

• Every aspect of the film represents a choice

• associational narration
• sequences fold back onto one another
• un-staged actions
• Selection
• point of view

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Operation of the Look

• recurring theme controlling power of the look
• eyeline match - Exchange of looks
• narrative structure
• just another form of fiction -
  reality-fictions
• Collapse of documentary?

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Wiseman Baudrillard

• collapse of opposition between reality
  fiction
• collapse of meaning, truth, reality
• impossibility of documentary
• crisis of representation
• no guarantees

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unstaged events

• William Rothman cinéma vérité in general, the
  noncandid, the nonspontaneous the theatrical
• cinematization of the social
• hyperreal - everyone is an actor

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Bibliography

• Carolyn Anderson, Thomas W. Benson, Documentary
  Dilemmas Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies
  (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).
• Dan Armstrong, Wisemans Model and the
  Documentary Project Toward a Radical Film
  Practice, Film Quarterly, Winter 1983-84.
• Thomas W. Benson, Carolyn Anderson, Reality
  Fictions The Films of Frederick Wiseman
  (Southern Illinois University Press 2nd edition,
  2002)

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Bibliography cont.

• Alan Cholodenko, The Borders of Our Lives
  Frederick Wiseman, Jean Baudrillard, And The
  Question of The Documentary, IJBS Int Journal
  of Baudrillard Studies, Vol 1, No 2 (July 2004),
  http//www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/c
  holodenko.htm
• Liz Ellsworth, Frederick Wiseman A guide to
  references and resources (G. K. Hall, 1979).
• Barry Keith Grant, Voyages of Discovery The
  Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (University of
  Illinois Press, 1992).

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Bibliography cont.

• Toby Miller, Historical citizenship and the
  Fremantle Prison Follies Frederick Wiseman comes
  to Western Australia, Australian Journal of
  Media Culture, vol. 7 no 2 (1994).
• Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image, Chap.6 7
  (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1981).
• Bill Nichols, The Voice of Documentary, Movies
  and Methods 2, Ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley
  University of California Press, 1985).