A-Level Film Studies - Daniel Kallin

 To what extent can it be said that your chosen documentary is shaped by the filmmaker's approach?  Refer to at least one filmmaker's theory you have studied. Kapadia’s documentary Amy demonstrates that the filmmaker’s approach is instrumental in crafting audience perceptions to the events of the film, allowing Kapadia to create a narrative around Amy, whilst only using footage already made to give Amy the space to, as it were, tell her own story. Through this, Kapadia’s style of filmmaking is slightly removed from the more conventional extremities of documentary, seen through Longinotto’s observational style of letting events play out organically without any involvement from her, and Broomfield’s participatory style of putting himself onscreen to become a part of the story. Kapadia still uses elements of those theories in his editing of the footage, but his complete non-presence visibly in the documentary, in any form, hints at a level of separation between the content of ...

Amy (Kapadia, 2015) Observational Kapadia is hidden/not visible - Spectator can observe events and arrive at their own understanding of the events, or the 'truth' - No interfering voice or authorial presence DEBATE: Who is to blame for her tragic death? Scene observations Flashing cameras from paparazzi - makes spectator feel as uncomfortable as Amy, serves as a transition: she never catches a break and nor do we, questions whether the viewer is also complicit in how the world saw her - Spectator always expecting her death, mistrustful of everyone - Amy's music is heightened by lyrics on screen drawing connections between her life and her songs, and creating a poetic element to the documentary

  Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Herzog's 16th Century Documentary As if Herzog and his crew had travelled back in time to the 16th Century to make a documentary, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is a shakily-shot and unreliably-told tale of the delusions of power, the mania of religion, and the pointlessness of hasty warfare and colonialism. Power-crazed Aguirre, played by the brilliantly creepy Klaus Kinski, is willing to destroy everything and anyone, including himself, in order to achieve fame and glory and riches and, in a landscape rooted into the reality of actual Spanish colonialism at the time, fails to reach the supposed grandeur of his Cortés-like predecessors.  Comically absurd and increasingly insane, Aguirre, is a film which makes you feel like you are actually there in the jungle, slowly losing faith in reality and God as the old hierarchies and laws don't make any sense once any semblance of a power structure fails to work. The faux-documentary style leads to a greater c...

  Amores Perros:   Alejandro González Iñárrit u's hyperlinked canine triptych   Iñárritu's incredibly assured debut film, Amores Perros - hastily translated as Love's A Bitch in English which, in all fairness, does retain the general pun of the original, despite not being a great title - is a violent, tragic and dogmatically passionate anthology of three stories revolving around interconnected people in Mexico City, centering on a devastating car crash and a very powerful dog. The beauty of Amores Perros is that, in its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, it makes sure that everything and everyone is important; a sentiment which contrasts the disregard towards life within the film, with characters showing no compassion to their own family, or their own dogs. Mexico City is portrayed as a criminally violent dog-eat-dog world, and the biggest moments of love and compassion in the film are undermined by further context later on. That is, until the final moments of th...

  Cleo From 5 to 7: Agnes Varda's Superstitious Parisian Feminist Masterpiece Paris in the 1960s was a melting pot of groundbreaking intellectualism and cool rebellion, with the critics of the older generation becoming the forefront of the new generation, and using their love for cinema, which many developed as writers for Cahiers du Cinema , to put their existential views of the world onto film. Forerunners of this movement, come to be known as the Left Bank or French New Wave, were Jean Luc-Godard and Francois Truffaut, whose debatably pretentious musings on their resentment towards the older generation manifested itself into some of the most lauded films of all time, with films like The 400 Blows and Breathless defining a generation and pioneering revolutionary filmmaking techniques, such as shooting on location with barely any budget, or elliptical editing. Besides them, was someone who brought one of the most unique perspectives of the French New Wave: Agnes Varda. Someo...

-  Documentary endeavours to document rather than fictionalise - Ideas of representation and the 'real' - Reality and Realism - Art: Realism vs Impressionism - Produced with choices, with conscious and unconscious bias Bill Nichols: 6 modes or styles of documentary: - Observational - Participatory - Poetic - Expository - Reflexive - Performative Observational:  - Emerges in the 1960s with the rise of new production technology - Notion of the hidden camera and camera-person, aided by lighter and more portable equipment for being in the field - Hidden process of filmmaking - in order to observe 'real' life unobserved - 'fly on the wall' - Idea that reality emerges when it is not produced or re-created artificially - Examples:  100% White (2000), Sisters in Law (2005), The Family (1974) Performative: - Questions raised about knowledge - Material gathered from wide-ranging sources - Idea of knowledge and meaning as subjective rather than objective Poetic: - Document...

  Evaluate the usefulness of a critical approach you have examined, for an understanding of Sweet Sixteen . (20 marks) In Loach's Sweet Sixteen a Marxist critical approach is very useful for understanding the film, as it contextualises the reasons for Liam ending up selling drugs at only fifteen as a wider societal issue based on class, and therefore capitalism, leaving the working classes in poverty, without the proper support to leave it. These ideas are made apparent through the setting of the story, in one of the poorest parts of Glasgow, and through key sequences throughout, such as Liam's interactions with Tony, or the ending scene. The Marxist critical approach also allows Sweet Sixteen to be political, rather than humanist, and subvert narrative theories, such as Todorov's, by not allowing for resolution and a return to equilibrium. However, one shortcoming of a Marxist approach is its lack of focus on gender issues, something that a Feminist critical approach would...