The Ernie Kovacs Show ( for Percy Dovetonsils) by Bob Holman -A Film By Antonio Ferrera

Director’s Statement
As far as nonfiction films , I value the first-hand experience of filming unscripted material from life by myself or with a sound person in the tradition called Cinema Verite. My specific inflection of this is with an emphasis on using the most basic means of telling my stories from this work. In the same way Jerzy Grotowski advocated a “Poor Theater “in the 1960’s and seventies when the theater was overrun by projections, music and spectacle, all elements that were additions to the basic dynamic of an audience and the performers working with their bodies, breath and voice that went to the beginning of performance. My cinema relies solely on straight forward editing-no animation or re-enactments and devices from fiction filmmaking and most importantly I use only diegetic music. That is not to say that I have not strayed from these basic values in some work but only because the context demanded those uses. Even in a fiction film I am very turned off when I hear a score because I feel I am being played and the director did not have faith in the actors to evoke the necessary feelings. In a documentary it is especially dangerous because it’s a very manipulative propagandistic device and I prefer not to undermine the film’s validity by such manipulation and in a verite film they can get in the way. I want you to see as close to real time in a single take as possible. I am present with my camera, and I want to translate the embodied feeling of being there cinematically where the camera is records the intentionality of consciousness that is life itself. The seeing of seeing and the feelings as they happen once and never again. I include myself ever so gently into the film so as to remind the audience that they are viewing a construct made by a human being and they need to remember that this is one person’s view at a certain time and place with a certain access but it is not “the Truth”-at best it is a text that can bear meaning to the viewer that is part of the greater text of the lives depicted.
My work in this regard is influenced by my studies of the Existential tradition from Blaise Pascal to Soren Kierkegard ,William James/ John Dewey (Pragmatist), Edmund Husserl though Heidegger and De Bouvoir, Merleu- Ponty and Samuel Todes. My raison d’etre is to bear witness to the lives of people especially who have no voice or are least heard not just because of their identity but also because their stories are so common that they are lost in today’s high octane need for high drama and fame in nonfiction films. The heroic act of the people in my films is being able to talk before an audience for the first time, learning the result of a marriage proposal, the first day of school...the human moments of life. The scene of the young boy in Tree of Wooden Clogs by Ermanno Olmi where his shoelace breaks on the way to his first day of school was a great inspiration to me along with scenes from films like L’Aventura and the movements of people unable to connect with their emotions inspire me. Antonioni’s documentary in China of 1972 where he visits and community that has never seen westerners all recorded in observational form was an important influence because it was seeing a person encountering another consciousness but with a camera and no narration to tell me what to feel or think.
The act of engaging the day itself to live interests me most and especially as it informs and inflects understanding on one of the most important questions that I want see from every angle possible and that is the question of Free Will and Determinism relationship to people and society. To what extent do we have free will and how does it conflict with determinants whether social i.e. class race gender sexuality biology etc. or just chance itself? People finding a glimmer of agency and that struggle of our common human condition are important to me and relatable from kindergarten teacher to rock star for me. What do we value and why? Most importantly I am inspired to inquire into the struggle to find and support an ethos of care and humanism in our ever more mechanical-digital-fame game culture age.
To re-iterate, my work is purposefully kept to the basics of filmmaking – I use no music unless it is diegetic, and my editing is straight cuts and my approach is through the use of a Mise en Scene. The Mise en Scene provides the context for the compression or expansion of time in the editing and the wide objectivity to work from as far as our proximity to what we are experiencing together. We are not flies on walls. We are present. My camera is handheld and a single camera unless it is some kind of large public event where multiple cameras might be required. I am interested in the hermeneutic inquiry of the text of life as it relates to history and ourselves to understand its endless connotations and meanings to ourselves and time to foster an appreciation for the fact that what we are reading or watching- hearing is a human construct that is a layer of layers. This excites me.
It is a cinema to de mystify to invest us with the wonder of our life and not distract us with the fantastic plastic creations for entertainment but rather the engagement in life itself at 24 frames per second. I am not going to play your emotions and use catharsis so you can leave the film satisfied while what you just watched still goes on in all its complexity. I am against that with my complete being for its dishonesty and manipulation. My cinema is a cinema of emotional honesty that is theatrically sober of bells and whistles and in the human scale and on the scale of the earth. I am not going to give you a conclusion to feel good about or bad for that matter, but it will be ambiguous to keep you wondering for yourself what this means to you because I respect your agency.