If Postmodernism Were Pregnant, It Would Give Birth to Something Resembling Me

A friend of mine and I were discussing a movie we just saw in my dorm when we heard a grunt of frustration come from my roommate. We both turned and asked what was wrong.

My roommate: "I've read this damn sentence 15 times in a row because you guys keep talking and I can't concentrate."

Me: "Well you better learn to concentrate now man. What the hell are you gonna do when you're deep in enemy territory trying to write an essay while under heavy fire from Charlie?"

My roommate became very offended at this point, citing a friend fighting overseas in Iraq and telling me there is absolutely no humor in joking about war. I thought about his words for a minute. No great moral epiphany and regretful sorrow followed but I did realize something else: I'm the poster child of postmodernism.

Nothing is sacred to me. As stated in a recent cinema lecture, postmodernism has "no respect for integrity." It's not that I'm a disrespectful, tactless demon child. I'm just too jaded to care. I know war is bad. I read it in history textbooks, I see it in movies, I hear about it in songs. It's just easier to get across a point when you can communicate via analogies and allusions. My generation's reliance on a common pool of knowledge to speed up communication makes any well-known piece of news, film, book, or any other medium fair game for reference, regardless of that pieces original integrity or purpose.

Is this a bad development? Is history losing its meaning? Have I contributed to the cheapening and degradation of culture? Maybe. But in another sense, I'm enriching history by adding my own meaning. If history is for teaching lessons, isn't the Vietnam War twice as useful when it can teach us about the pitfalls of foreign intervention AND the importance of good concentration skills?

Reflections of a Documentary Virgin

When we were handed the surveillance project, I figured it'd be a cakewalk. Our story was already written, our sets were already built, all our content already existed. Documentary was just plagiarizing life. 20 hours of grappling with Final Cut Pro later, I think I've had a change of heart.

What makes documentary hard is exactly what I thought would make it easy - you can't make everything up. In narrative, if a bridge between two events doesn't work, you build it yourself. In documentary, you actually have to go out and find that bridge. But that doesn't mean the imagination has no place in documentary. The creator still has to organize the facts and decide how to present them. Seeing the range of documentary styles presented in class only reinforced the importance of these choices to me.

Our group's single biggest difficulty had to be incorporating our interviews. Don't get me wrong - we had two well-spoken, knowledgeable subjects, but there's a difference between a good argument in person and a good argument on camera. Much of our content was unusable because it wasn't self-contained. If every sentence relies on the previous sentence for meaning, then the editor is forced to treat the entire speech as a single unit and include or exclude the entire thing. While

• Have the interviewee repeat and summarize all arguments in two or three sentences
• If you plan on featuring the interviews by themselves, make sure the interviewee doesn't refer to "you" the interviewer who doesn't exist on screen.
  
• Shoot interviews from low angles (it makes the subject look more authoritative)
• Shoot B-roll - random shots to fill time - ex: shots of surveillance cameras, students, etc. (montages of Googled images look obvious and often unprofessional)
• Stills are usually boring on-screen (shoot videos of still objects or create pans and zooms in the editing room to keep things interesting)
  
• Don't shoot in front of windows or reflective surfaces (sunlight blows out and ruins an otherwise good shot)
  
• Don't have the interviewee talk directly into the camera (this is awkward for the audience and will make them uncomfortable)
• Check to see if your battery, camera, and mikes work when you check them out (sounds simple but can save you two wasted round trips to the IML lab and the embarrassing cinematic equivalent of performance anxiety)

And most important of all, if you're going to shoot a documentary, pick a topic that interests you... a lot. Shooting a documentary is like getting married. There's a lot of good choices out there, but take your time because once you pick one, you're stuck together for a long time.

Oh man, Sudan is so out of Jan Pronk's MySpace top 8!

Although it may be difficult to imagine UN ambassadors arguing over who made fun of who in their blog, Pronk's blog was apparantly so offensive that Sudan demanded he immediately, "flap his eyebrows and fly home."

Bush Comes Clean

I somehow missed this State of the Union address, but I admire Bush's honesty.