Skipping Stones Across the Pacific
Documentaries don't always present reality as some stage observed in presumed total objectivity. The documentarist has a point of view based on personal beliefs, thoughts, opinions held at the time of the film's creation. Even in Direct Cinema, an objective style that shows its images and records its sounds without any apparent authorial intrusion, is made subjective by what the cameraperson aims the camera at. Point of view is hard, maybe impossible, to escape. Even a space probe sent to another planet, a robot explorer that loses operational touch with Earth-based communications and then takes a series of random images, can be regarded as non-objective since it was built by humans and sent into space by them. Total objectivity implies a vast awareness attributable to God, perhaps, but even God, in the Old Testament for instance, is not objective, interfering in human affairs often, communicating with prophets and making nations fall and rise, even becoming a human being in the Old Testament's sequel, to experience the human condition.
The strangeness of the above paragraph was inspired by the unique documentary style chosen and executed by Jean-Pierre Gorin in his 1992 film about a Long Beach, California, American Samoa-origin gang, My Crasy Life (misspelling intentional).
Gorin combines what appear to be fictional scenes with a more traditional documentary approach (interviews, candid moments of gang members and sometimes their families). A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy takes a special caring interest in the welfare of at least one gang member serving time. He's concerned about what the kid will do once he gets out of jail. He's supposed to go to his family in Hawaii. Other former members of SOS, the gang in the film, have relocated to Hawaii to work and live a legal life. Images and scenes from the home territory of American Samoa intersperse with Long Beach, a place that SOS has made theirs.
Their guns, their philosophy based on revenge, control of territory, their seemingly endless card games, their slang-filled conversations, their quite good rapping, their pride in their gang and in their being Samoan, all occupy much of the film's length. In quieter moments they talk about parents and grandparents still in Samoa, their reverence showing through, a respect for the old ways that indicate why they stay so true to the brotherhood of their own group--a sense of tribal connecting.
The Sheriff's Deputy's patrol car's computer speaks back in a HAL-like voice, offering statistics, related facts about what's being dealt with on screen (like the necessity of pulling over and questioning young men wearing Raiders jackets and/or hats). The computer sometimes gets so deeply into the weeds of a subject--displaying, for example, every book or scholarly article on a certain type of ritual behavior in Polynesia--that what we're seeing on screen tragicomically contrasts with the data, all delivered in a soft, reassuring male voice; the voice of a technical system that's the opposite of the vital and strong voices of the SOS gang, especially when they're skillfully rapping.
Gorin, the director, worked in the late 1960s and into the 1970s with Jean-Luc Godard, cofounding the Dziga Vertov Group, a filmmaking collective dedicated to making non-commercial films on difficult political subjects. After Godard was injured in a motorcycle accident, Gorin took on most of the directing duties of their film in progress, Tout va bien, starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. Still in his twenties at the time, the Sorbonne-educated Gorin displayed a fine competence and creativity that earned him a cinema studies job in California, where he made three documentaries, My Crasy Life being the third.
I was impressed by Gorin's facility with blending documentary and fictional scenarios, with his practice of not overly explaining anything. He creates not a dream realm, but a realm of many people's dreams, these young men living according to their own code, their fingers forming signs they understand, as we outsiders can't participate in knowing what they're saying. A deliberate group isolation, for self-protection, putting into question all ways that groups, even nation states, isolate themselves by using forbidding and coded language--performing actions that create barriers, rather than communicate with the commonality.
Vic Neptune
Documentaries don't always present reality as some stage observed in presumed total objectivity. The documentarist has a point of view based on personal beliefs, thoughts, opinions held at the time of the film's creation. Even in Direct Cinema, an objective style that shows its images and records its sounds without any apparent authorial intrusion, is made subjective by what the cameraperson aims the camera at. Point of view is hard, maybe impossible, to escape. Even a space probe sent to another planet, a robot explorer that loses operational touch with Earth-based communications and then takes a series of random images, can be regarded as non-objective since it was built by humans and sent into space by them. Total objectivity implies a vast awareness attributable to God, perhaps, but even God, in the Old Testament for instance, is not objective, interfering in human affairs often, communicating with prophets and making nations fall and rise, even becoming a human being in the Old Testament's sequel, to experience the human condition.
The strangeness of the above paragraph was inspired by the unique documentary style chosen and executed by Jean-Pierre Gorin in his 1992 film about a Long Beach, California, American Samoa-origin gang, My Crasy Life (misspelling intentional).
Gorin combines what appear to be fictional scenes with a more traditional documentary approach (interviews, candid moments of gang members and sometimes their families). A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy takes a special caring interest in the welfare of at least one gang member serving time. He's concerned about what the kid will do once he gets out of jail. He's supposed to go to his family in Hawaii. Other former members of SOS, the gang in the film, have relocated to Hawaii to work and live a legal life. Images and scenes from the home territory of American Samoa intersperse with Long Beach, a place that SOS has made theirs.
Their guns, their philosophy based on revenge, control of territory, their seemingly endless card games, their slang-filled conversations, their quite good rapping, their pride in their gang and in their being Samoan, all occupy much of the film's length. In quieter moments they talk about parents and grandparents still in Samoa, their reverence showing through, a respect for the old ways that indicate why they stay so true to the brotherhood of their own group--a sense of tribal connecting.
The Sheriff's Deputy's patrol car's computer speaks back in a HAL-like voice, offering statistics, related facts about what's being dealt with on screen (like the necessity of pulling over and questioning young men wearing Raiders jackets and/or hats). The computer sometimes gets so deeply into the weeds of a subject--displaying, for example, every book or scholarly article on a certain type of ritual behavior in Polynesia--that what we're seeing on screen tragicomically contrasts with the data, all delivered in a soft, reassuring male voice; the voice of a technical system that's the opposite of the vital and strong voices of the SOS gang, especially when they're skillfully rapping.
Gorin, the director, worked in the late 1960s and into the 1970s with Jean-Luc Godard, cofounding the Dziga Vertov Group, a filmmaking collective dedicated to making non-commercial films on difficult political subjects. After Godard was injured in a motorcycle accident, Gorin took on most of the directing duties of their film in progress, Tout va bien, starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. Still in his twenties at the time, the Sorbonne-educated Gorin displayed a fine competence and creativity that earned him a cinema studies job in California, where he made three documentaries, My Crasy Life being the third.
I was impressed by Gorin's facility with blending documentary and fictional scenarios, with his practice of not overly explaining anything. He creates not a dream realm, but a realm of many people's dreams, these young men living according to their own code, their fingers forming signs they understand, as we outsiders can't participate in knowing what they're saying. A deliberate group isolation, for self-protection, putting into question all ways that groups, even nation states, isolate themselves by using forbidding and coded language--performing actions that create barriers, rather than communicate with the commonality.
Vic Neptune
Comments
Post a Comment