I have been in a race against the clock as I begin production on my documentary on August 6th! In the past month, I have continued my research on the Bay Area tech industry by reading Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris and A Pre-History of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu. (The images accompanying this blog post are photos Hu took of data centers in the Bay Area. I hope to include similar images in my documentary.) I have also been paying increased attention to form by considering the works of James Benning and Chantal Akerman as both emphasize place in their work.
James Benning uses a formalist approach, often making all the shots in his films the same duration as in his California trilogy, each film contains 35 150-second shots. Like Akerman, Benning uses duration to create a sense of estrangement in the audience, pushing against the narrative principles that dominate mainstream filmmaking. While Benning sometimes employs actors in his films, his films maintain a heightened sense of realism often due to financial constraints. He describes a “hit and run” quality of filmmaking as he is unable to rent out space and must work around his environment which may contain hostile security guards or big crowds. Rather than seeing this as an impediment, Benning argues that this adds excitement to his films. I will encounter similar challenges to Benning when creating my short, and I will try to embrace his perspective.
Akerman’s documentary work has also proven to be quite topical. This project is inspired by News From Home, an experimental documentary in which Akerman reads her mother’s letters over footage of the streets of New York. I have also been thinking about her film No Home Movie about Akerman caring for her aging mother and the role of the internet in connecting them. Akerman also has a book from that same period My Mother Laughs which I have been reading. Despite the overlap in content between Akerman’s work and my own documentary project, I am most interested in the tone of her films. News From Home and No Home Movie are both excellent first-person documentaries as they explore such intimate parts of Akerman’s life indirectly. By learning about her mother or the place where she is living, you learn about her. I hope to use a similarly indirect approach that looks out into the world and considers how what I find might reflect myself back.
First Image: “Market.” Image Courtesy of Tung-Hui Hu.