Some comparisons of Inside Job and Capitalism: a Love Story

            Inside Job is a documentary that has taken a very complicated and ambiguously originated, still to this day disagreed about,  subject; the mid-to-late 2000s financial crisis/meltdown. And compared to, say, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, this film attempts to be as fair as possible in how it deals with the subject. Throughout this exchange fairness and balance shall be discussed and numerous comparisons/contrasts shall be made between Inside Job and Capitalism.

            Now first, it might be pertinent to talk about similarities between the two films, so there is some familiar footing with which to work. Both films attempt to analyze and pin down an understanding of the financial crisis that rocked the global economy in the mid 2000s. Formalistically, both films accomplish this by contextualizing the crisis by talking about the years leading up to the collapse. They both pretty well cover the financial era(s) preceding the events, particularly the deregulation of savings and loans associations and the consolidation of a few financial firms in the 1990s. What Inside Job does, with great efficiency, is that it uses the words of the people involved in the crisis as a means of evidence and a tool to expose hypocrisy or naivety. And while Capitalism performs similar acts using similar tools, and in some cases the very same tools,  it uses it for more sardonic enterprises. While these two utilize similar tools for, ostensibly, the same goal, it is the deviations of the two that show which film is a more organized narrative.

            One of the big differences between Capitalism and Inside Job is the scope each movie takes on the subject, and in their treatment of the subject matter. Capitalism tends to examine the culture of the US, which Michael Moore is firmly entrenched in the idea that blame rests solely upon the bankers’ shoulders. Moore, also takes politico-economic jabs at individuals on the conservative side of the spectrum, using sarcasm and propagandistic sensationalism as tools in his call to action. Overall, it is this kind of sarcasm and sensationalism that presents Capitalism as the filmic equivalent of a punkish teenager, who has cracked open an economics text.

             Inside Job on the other hand, is much more focused in the scope of the subject. Rather than analyzing a culture from which the crisis might have had a partial impetus in, Inside Job stays focused on the financial crisis as an event caused by lackluster and amoral individuals who knew full well the consequences of their actions. This makes the film, although much less sardonic, it actually creates a gravity which makes the film more angry.

            I think that Inside Job, in this case, proved to be a stronger text on the subject of the financial crisis, mostly because of the maturity in its anger and the force of its formalistic elements of documentary.

About "The War Room"

           

             D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus collaborated to direct The War Room in the 1992 Democratic primaries and the general presidential election, and it was quite a humdinger of a movie let alone a documentary. The main thing that made this film extraordinary was how it created characters to follow and who it chose as characters to follow.

            The two men chosen to focus on for the film are George Stephanopoulos and James Carville, the Communications Director and Lead Campaign Strategist, respectively. The reason why these men are compelling in the first place, is their position in the campaign. I think it would be tempting to do something like focus on either the face of the campaign, Bill Clinton, or to take a single volunteer, intern, or state supporter, someone who does a great deal of leg work but not a lot of planning, because it is a political documentary. However, James and George are ideal characters because they are consistent throughout the narrative, they aren’t as visible as Clinton, which still gives the film a revelatory kind of air, and because they extraordinarily vivid and complex people.

            A credit to D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus has to be editing the film and carefully creating personalities for Carville and Stephanopoulos for most of the film, but then carefully rounding them out as the movie draws on. Let’s look at how Pennebaker and Hegedus accomplish this for both people. In James Carville’s case, they play up his nickname “The Ragin’ Cajun” and they shape his footage to show his brashness, sarcasm, wit, and tenacity in the face of different adversities. But as the film goes on we discover that Carville is in a serious relationship with Mary Matalin, the campaign director for Clinton’s opponent in the general election. But the completion of Carville’s rounding is on Election Day. He no longer appears confident and witty, he despondently predicts a loss and comments how he hopes that the loss won’t be by a landslide. While the Clinton administration is evidence that they won, at that moment in the documentary the filmmakers chose to attend to their characters and complete rounding them out.

            As for George Stephanopoulos’ portrayal, the filmmaker’s perform a similar action to Carville’s character creation. The filmmakers take special care to construct Stephanopoulos as the pretty-boy numbers man of the Clinton campaign. He is shown to often be even tempered and the one tasked with providing the hard evidence to back up jabs or defenses that Carville constructs. But again, like Carville, the filmmakers round out this character they created and, in fact, they do a great deal of rounding out near the end. In the film, while Carville is despondent, Stephanopoulos is managing the campaign headquarters, in the afternoon/evening the headquarters receives a phone call, the caller begins making claims that could be damaging to Clinton and the campaign. In one, fell, swoop Stephanopoulos changes from even-keeled and calm to a cold aggressor. We even hear him say to the caller that the tactic is foolish, ill-timed, and finally Stephanopoulos threatens that if the caller carries out their plan that he will ensure he “never works in “Democratic politics again”. It is a chilling moment where we see that the handsome faced, numbers man also can be calculating, and just as aggressive as his counterpart.

            It is because of the creation of these two characters that The War Room has become a classic, not just amongst documentary film lovers, but also amongst general movie connoisseurs. It provides the film a base which the viewers can attach themselves to while there is a swirl and melee of action and people entering and exiting the film.  

Some thoughts on documentary in a participatory culture

     How to make a documentary? Although a fairly simple interrogative sentence, it is a very multifarious question. It can certainly be talking about documentary production, and that is an aspect of making a documentary. However, I think that what this question is asking implicitly is, what subject makes a documentary and how does the documentarian decide that? In our 21^st Century media creation and sharing amongst non professionals and professionals has become easier, democratizing media. But for many media creators, especially younger creators, the issue seems to lie in the perception of documentary rather than in the actual production. The main sticking point behind the inhibition of documentary creation is that the creator may have trepidation in choosing a subject to focus upon. Hopefully I can address this topic with brevity and with allusion to other related matters.

     One of the ways that younger media participants get hung up when trying to produce a documentary is that they become bogged down in answering some of the basic questions of why their documentary is the way it is. In a paper published for the MacArthur Foundation, Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, talked at great length about essentially, the same conundrum. While Jenkins was talking in broad strokes about applicability he did provide a list of 11 critical skills needed to overcome pedagogical challenges. They are: 

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving 

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery 

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities     

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

     Using these 11 skills it can become easier to know how to produce a documentary with more substantial weight behind it than polish. But that still doesn’t answer the issue of how young creators decide why to make a documentary. For that I am going to talk, somewhat, about a feature documentary by a writer, Josh Fox, called Gasland.

     Gasland, is a 2010 documentary directed by Josh Fox, the basic premise of the film is about how the drilling practice of “fracking” (pumping a cocktail of chemicals, solvents, and other such stuff, into oil wells to fracture the shale, thus releasing trapped natural gas to be pumped out) has caused numerous health problems by poisoning drinking wells of people who live near them. This might seem like a typical documentary fare and put down the hopes of younger, would-be documentarians, however, it might be a comfort to know the back story of the documentary’s production. The premise of the film was stumbled upon because the director, was living in his childhood home when he got a letter from a drilling company offering him money to put a well on his property. He decided to read up on drilling and came across the word “fracking”. As he learned more and more about the practice he decided to look up the effects of such a practice and decided to film his journey on a mini DV recorder. This whole, big process was kick started by simply wanting to find out more about something Josh Fox cared about, his childhood home.

     Now how does that relate to media creation and critical skills? Well, in simplistic terms, documentarians make documentaries about what they care about. What they care about doesn’t have to be covered in a feature length documentary. The Fit For the Kingdom series of documentaries on the internet is a perfect example of a collective of short docs that each have their own cares and desires. One, called Birdie, is about children’s reaction to the death of a, short-lived, pet bird. The documentarian’s main care is about his children seen through the lens of a somewhat traumatic incident where many perceptions about death and spirituality were called into question. Now this documentary’s purposes are neatly folded into the larger purpose of the Fit For the Kingdom series, but on its own, this short doc has all that is needed to be both informative and compelling.

Six Word, Illustrated Story

Any reader of the very first post on this blog will know that this place is inherently a scholastic endeavor, as well as a personal expression. So this following post is mostly under the scholastic commission, but I find that it is still rather personal. As an introduction, this is a six word illustrated story, as the title suggests. Now, this story is done in such a manner that challenged me artistically because I wanted to avoid use of video or pictures, since I have work with those on a regular basis. Instead I chose to use water color on paper, then scanned those images onto a computer. Now, these illustrations are somewhat in the manner of a Stan Brakhage film, i.e. Mothlight,Black Ice, etc., but I tried my best not to just copy another’s stylistic expression and call it done. Rather, I did several of these illustrations and then chose the ones that I felt best expressed the six word descriptions.

Now, this story is of a very personal nature to someone very dear to me, so I won’t reveal the nature of my relationship to the story’s subject. However, the story essentially is about a young man who went away to college. One day he returned home on a break by hitchhiking the couple hundred miles between the university and his home; it was bitterly cold. He wanted to borrow one of the family’s two cars from his older brother. His brother, somewhat angry that he had gone away in the first place, refused bitterly. They argued and the young man said very hateful things and left to return to university. Roughly a week or two later his older brother and a younger brother were killed in an accident in the very car they had quarreled about. What ate at the man was that he had never gotten the chance to apologize and make amends with his brothers, and that his last words to them weren’t of love, but bitterness and vitriol. He has carried this regret his whole life and even carries it to this day.

 

 

Now, of course there are some inherent difficulties associated with this format. For one, abstraction is a hefty, and thorny, obstacle to overcome here. For instance, these images aren't of any coherent object; in fact, they cannot even be presented as Impressionistic renditions of tangible objects. But that is the very support for the form these images have taken on. There are complex and deep emotions at play, not just for the subject but by my relationship to the subject. So, these are my personal feelings about the story in part, but mostly it is how I feel about the subject's feelings about the story. But this is helpful because it is a way to show how avante garde-ism and abstraction aren't excluded from a documentarian angle on a story. The images and words tell a story that actually happened, it is simply the form of the images that has been subject to the creator's ideas and desires.

A post about story

            This past week proved to be very substantial, in large part because of an interesting read; Peter Forbes’ lecture titled The Power of Story in an Age of Consequence.  This talk mainly discusses how stories affect and are affected by people’s ever changing lives and ideologies. Forbes’ intent with this discussion is to try and tie this idea to the global issue of environmentalism and conservation. Being of certain religious/ethnic/occupational persuasions, I found that I held some disagreements with Forbes’ semantics, but that I agreed a great deal with his intentions and assertions.

            Besides discussing how stories can strengthen the cause of environmental conservation, Forbes first discusses how stories are the vessels which we use to share our values and beliefs. Hopefully not to be too personal, dear readers, but it is important to know that I am a Mormon. Now, being Mormon means that we have a subset of narratives (both of an apocryphal and factual nature) which, like stories are often used, we use stories as tools to bridge divides of doctrine, culture, and/or generation in order to relate to one another or people not of our fate. For instance, a friend of mine once commented that Mormons were very “tight wad-ish”, that there was no self effacing nor ability to view themselves as people sharing this world. As a way to counter balance this I can recall telling a Mormon legend concerning Brigham Young and bobsleds. This narrative wasn’t meant to illustrate any doctrinal inclinations, nor would it probably have been the best example to use, but nonetheless it was an attempt share the humor that people have about their own cultural roots.

            That being said, as I read this lecture by Forbes, I began to think about stories I’ve heard in my life and how they hold my values. Something that I considered was how stories told from my Navajo side of the family often held certain thematic similarities. As a generality, Navajo people tell stories that are didactic, and rarely feature people either real or fictional. These stories are necessary for a Navajo’s identity, as Forbes quoted from Nigerian novelist Ben Okri, “Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves”. However, something that nagged me was that Forbes seemed to prefer oral or printed mediums of story. In the case of Navajos, there is trouble with this preference; for the most part, there is a generational gap of linguistic and ethical knowledge. This gap wasn’t created through introduction of any commercial enterprise or through trauma, but rather it the process that happens between parents and children, no matter the culture. In this case stories cannot be related with efficiency through oral means. And, since Navajo didn’t have a written counterpart until the 20^th Century, printed medium causes confusion even amongst native speakers. How then should these stories be preserved? The use of media that Forbes might consider commercial becomes one of the only viable solutions to this predicament. Where oral stories once were the norm, podcasts, vlogs, and other visual/aural methods can now codify principles that were threatened.