Documentary

Documentary is representative of a person being documented in the home mode and made into a subject. It is a response to Moran’s "There’s No Place Like Home Video", showing the destruction of subject through documentation in the manifestation of physical violence and the theoretical death of the subject. The audience is watching someone, represented as pure through coding of white and child-like dresses, be subjugated to violence through video as a form of entertainment, and as the subject gains agency and spreads the cycle of documentation through violence, they point their camera at the recording camera, switching the viewer to the role of subject, thus forcing them to recognize both sides of this transaction. The close-up shots when I would switch to the camera that I was holding in the shot were partially inspired by the close ups of body parts in Jollies, which is to me a beautiful representation of the artistic home mode. Moran’s text really stuck with me, particularly his idea that constant access to digital documentation, these days via cellphones, kills the art of video and turns everything into a subject to be documented. To address this, I went through my cameras chronologically, going from a film camcorder to an iPhone.
I used the modernist technique of alienating the audience to remove them from connecting with the characters. The alienation tools I used were the cult-like practices and dialogue, overt exposition that is clearly intended for the audience, the utilization of bright red paint as opposed to fake blood, and the breaking of the fourth wall at the end. The red paint is a reference to Jean-Luc Godard, who notoriously loved breaking the filmic illusion and would jump at any chance he had to say that “it’s not blood, it’s red paint.” The subject’s camera focusing on the filming camera was also a nod to Godard, who used shots of the director’s camera to break the illusion in multiple films. I want the film’s alienation techniques to be so off-putting that the viewer would partially like to get up and turn off the projector, but to still be drawn in by the concept, visual aesthetics, and camera technique.