Rather than talk too much about the story of Hoop Dreams (though that would be interesting in another setting), we will be discussing how it (and other documentaries) make meaning. That is, Sobchack (our author of the week) claims that with documentary we have a "subjective relation to an objective cinematic...text" (pg 1). What might this mean? Don't merely repeat what she's written but strike out on your own as to how we may have this relationship with Hoop Dreams. How does that film construct itself as an experience? What sorts of strengths and/or weaknesses can you find with the phenomenological model of cinematic identification forwarded in the article? How do our relations differ between fiction and non-fiction films? Don't mere state the obvious here but use advanced vocabulary to understand how these relations differ.
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I remember immediately after the screening my initial comment was that, "it was cool to have seen high school years through the eyes of someone else's experience." After reading the article and rethinking this statement, I think that the experience I was referring to was the subjective relation of the text. Sobchack mentions that a film can be a foto-souvenir while at the same time functioning as a non-fictional experience to different viewers. In functioning as a souvenir, Hoop Dreams served to not only remind myself of my own personal experiences in high school, but also as a "home video" recollection of someone else's experience. Basically, the William and Arthur will have personal memories to fill in the gaps that the audience won't experience. Our view of William and Arthur's experience is a doubly subjected one, viewed through the filmmaker's eyes, and then again through our own, however the original acts function objectively in William and Arthur's personal history. This brings in a comparable characteristic to Titicut Follies in that the presence of the camera may have altered the events occurring onscreen. Hoop Dreams differs from Follies in that because the camera crew was present for an extended length of time, the entire course of events may have been altered by the celebrity status most likely attained by William and Arthur. Arthur's decline in grades may have had as much to do with the additional attention he received from being selected to be filmed as much as his father's drug addiction, and I found it slightly misleading that the presence of the camera crew was never fully addressed, although a voice of god narrator occasionally stepped in every 20 minutes or so. In this way, William and Arthur's nonfictional, personal experience in Hoop Dreams has been somewhat fictionalized into a "true" story... with emphasis on the word story. The events definitely occurred, but the omission of certain details due to editing, etc. raises question as to how objectively William and Arthur's high school years were presented to the audience.
ReplyDeleteSobchack’s article includes information from an author named Jean Pierre Meunire. This information reveals the three modes of spectorial consciousness and their corresponding objective cinematic forms. The article also differentiates the quality of all three models and examines what the viewer subjectively takes up and what is objectively given to the viewer. The viewer’s identification with and appreciation of the documentary is highly dependent on this cinematic data.
ReplyDeleteThe beginning of Hoop Dreams involves many scenes that resemble home movies. This communicates to the viewer that the characters are real people with real ambitions. Viewers can identify with the young characters and their ambitions - forming a unique connection of empathy with them. This conveys a sense that the viewer is not simply watching a documentary, but witnessing someone’s life play out as though the future of the viewer was at stake.
Hoop Dreams seems to be a different and unique experience. It follows William and Arthur from their freshman through their senior year of high school. that means the film crew took four plus years to produce the film. We saw the boys change and grow-up or possibly slip-up.
ReplyDeleteMost documentaries show a specific time and follow that period. Hoop Dreams chose to show the boys’ whole journey about becoming college basketball players and dreaming of turning pro. I feel like we saw more into their lives and what they went through to obtain their dream and have the possibility of loosing it, whether it was Author’s grades slipping or William having a family.
From Sobchack’s article the film seemed to use two of the coconstitutes film-souvenir and documentary. The film uses film-souvenir because footage of boys before high school is shown. The documentary can also be considered a souvenir to the boys of their time in high school and trying to reach their ‘hoop dreams.’ it is the boys’ opinion whether they particularly want to remember or have documentation about that time period. The film is also a documentary. A film crew followed William and Arthur for four years documenting them through school, basketball, and home life. and after the footage was recorded it was made into a film.
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ReplyDeleteAccording the Sobcheck article, other people's home movies are boring because we are unfamiliar with cinematic objects, and thus, don't engage in nostalgia.
ReplyDeleteFrom that, I took away an understanding that it is the identification with the on-screen experience which evokes personal memories and lends to the "realness" of the images.
Also, she mentions how the viewers consciousness may shift from fiction to documentary by focusing our attention on the existential world and not the fictional characters. Based on some comments regarding how the documentary, at times, didn't feel like one, I began to wonder if this model can function reflexively. Because we centralize our focus on two "main characters" and their supporting cast, could it also be considered, as Kyle said, a fictionalization based on true events?
According to Sobcheck, Meunier says the form of cinematic identification doesn't depend on the type of film. With the way in which the story unfolded, it very much felt like a fictional narrative that was some ways real, and in some ways not. Yes, it is a true story, but it is a true story dictated by a camera.
Yeah, so to drive the point home, Hoop Dreams is a documentary that feels like a constructed narrative because we follow the characters as the events unfold, which elicits a different identification than say Titicut Follies. If the film chronicled the journey of William and Arthur after the fact, I think there would be a stronger resonance of the "film-souvenir" because of the mnemonic nature associated.
Meunier says that people are more "engaged" in films like documentary and home videos (films with real characters) because the characters are real and living in the "real" world. because characters are in the same dimension as the viewers they are able to connect more emotionally to the characters.
ReplyDeleteI agree in the sense that I also believe people's mindsets are different when they are told they are watching a documentary... because people know the people on screen are real they invest more emotionally... as I watched Gates and Agee on screen I could not but help root for them; I wanted them to make it to the NBA, and I wanted them to make it out of their bad neighborhoods. I even ended up watching the end of the film on hulu and I even googled to see what became of them.
Even though I am not an African-American boy nor have I ever been on a basketball team but I am still able to relate with the characters because I can remember being in high school and all the pressures one can feel not quite knowing what to do...
So to me Hoop Dreams seemed to be more of a film people could relate with than say Titicut Follies. Titicut Follies seemed more constructed; it seemed like a weird side show that I did not want to watch but something I could not look away from either. The camera never gets personal with the characters in Titicut Follies, but Hoop Dreams interviews and talks to the characters trying to let the viewers "understand" what they are going through hence achieving the effect of the viewer investing more emotionally into the film (the viewers are learning and experiencing at the same time).
I think what Sobchack means by this is that when one views a documentary film they separate themselves from the film in order to view it as an educational experience. The viewer is trying to learn something from the text, they know that the story has truth(although some may dispute the truth in say a Michael Moore film...) and therefore are trying to take something from the film other than the story line. However the viewer does become somewhat involved in the film because they do not know what will happen. There is a balance between detatched learning and attached involvement while viewing a documentary film.
ReplyDeleteI think what Sobchack means by a "subjective relation to an objective cinematic...text" is that in viewing images, we as the viewer associate with what we see on screen with whatever it is we know. In viewing Hoop Dreams, I was bombarded by glimpses of images and memories of my middle school and high school, of people I knew and experiences I had. I recalled playing basketball in a predominately African American middle school, remembered the best players back then and my relationships with them. I could see some of them in Arthur and William. In watching documentary, the viewer is conscious that what they are being shown is real, so they have to give themselves less to the text than they would at the fiction end of the spectrum, where the viewer must be convinced of the images they are seen so as to become submissive to the story being told and not challenge it. Hoop Dreams succeeds in both being a well made documentary, but also in its connection it creates with the viewer, if nothing else in the viewer's compassion for the boys that the film creates, because even though documentaries are real footage, they are edited into a story intended to move the audience in a specific way.
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ReplyDeleteHood Dreams constructs the story of William and Arthur by using different cinematic devices. After reading the article of Sobchack, I realize that the viewer is depend on the specific object in the film, which would cause them not to see beyond and challenges the screen's boundaries and the reality. As a viewer, we cannot rely on the film's perspective, we need to challenge the author and the messages that the film was delivering. The difference between non-fiction and fiction is the level of how we perceiving the world as a object. If we realize the object was artificial, we would care less; however, the viewer would engage with the subject more than the fictional film, because the subject and object is actually real.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of narration, the documentary film often has the 3rd person narrator, which gives the film more object look, but it also indirectly led and influence the viewer what to think. This notion also apply to fictional film, for example, when we see Spielberg film, like Dr. Roberts explained in class, he invisibly drew us into the text and the images by manipulating our eyes with flawless editing and big-time action sequence.