Audio Doc. "Sound" Board

An Image! It's Distribution and Circulation...

ON A GLOBAL SCALE!

Artwork a product of Jeremy and Gabrielle's imaginations.

Documentary

The documentary genre is a combination of capturing a slice of life, and manipulating it to be aesthetically pleasing as a presentation of its subject. Fiction is not too different; it captures a subject, and seeks to present it in a captivating way too. What makes documentary and fiction different, however, is fiction’s creation of a fabricated subject. Even documentary with a strong political agenda concerns itself with tangible subject matter as it exists in the non-fiction world.

Some other elements are exclusive to documentary film. The capturing of the subject, either with audio recording, video capturing, or photography, is different than the invention of fictional subject. Since documentary does not require the creation of a fictional subject, creativity is expressed in visual angling, audio filters, clipping and editing, and countless other techniques. In fiction, creativity can be applied to style and form as well as character traits and clothes. The palette for expression is quite different from one to the other.

My definition of documentary would not allow Parks and Recreation or Pirates of the Caribbean to be classified as documentary features or programs. The television program seeks to emulate the format, but it has created its characters, and it has created a fictional universe for them to inhabit. As such, it is more mockumentary than documentary. Similarly, although Pirates convincingly creates a romantic swashbuckling past, it is essentially an invented one.

Google Doc

Here's the google doc representing our class's collective intelligence

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tA6rQUe3Cv_8CPMLX3EC7b99aadZK0_VpHegRSXJpIQ/edit

PARATAXIS VIDEO!!!!

http://youtu.be/XPafDC0N4_A


Gabrielle and Jeremy and Rashmi and Mark!

Parataxis

Much of what I've learned from Walls' video short on authenticity and the New London Group's writings on Pedagogy is that at a very human level we have selective awareness. For this reason, agents such as advertisers or teachers can emphasize key important aspects of a specific theme. The ramifications this has on culture spans modern colonial history, as cultural, linguistic, or racial others were tokenized by what seemed to be defining characteristics of them, when in fact what was represented was a simplification or an exaggeration of some larger trait. In this way, "authentic" can lose its literal meaning, and instead it can be used as a symbol to introduce ideas that could be a selling point.
This means that we are capable of understanding language in multiple ways, and that sometimes this can happen outside of our control or awareness. Our instinct to see a symbol and associate it with a concept proves that we are multilingual creatures, and that we communicate in ways besides our most obvious uses of language and body language. Our brains analyze, interpret, and offer our bodily selves a mash of things we can recognize, so conclusions are drawn instantly.
What we can do, despite what seems to be totally out of control, is work within intellectual thought processes to unpack what it is our brains are doing to us. We can realize that conclusions may be rashly made, and like Wells says, we can actively pair advertising words with products that don't agree, and see how the effect can be tonally dissonant. By feeling this reaction as instinctively "wrong" in the same way that authentic Mexican feels instinctively "right," we can understand the "authentic" provides a superficial satisfaction.