Caroline's Midterm

INDIA IN PROVIDENCE

For my midterm I decided to focus on a documentary piece which would blend both journalistic and artistic codes. I envisioned this documentary as a short "reportage" and I wanted to focus on something of general interest but expressed through the lens of the intimate and the familiar. 

Because the notion of place was so prominent on the prompt, my idea was to explore a particular location in Providence. I picked the setting of a house on Benefit street, whose inhabitants have named "Asia", and filmed  interviews of the three people that live there, as well as some of their day to day activities. I was very concerned about being very true to their sentiments, and the whole process of editing and putting together this mini documentary was guided by this idea.

The whole montage of this documentary was built upon my subject's views, their speech, and the general feeling and I got from being with and talking to them.  In a way, this project was heavily influenced by my interest in ethnography and social sciences.  I was very careful to not impose any personal agenda or influence them in any way during the interviewing process,  and while putting everything together I strived to maintain the integrity of their speech while blending it with the images I was able to capture. 

Of course, there is an inevitable tension between complete truthfulness and the montage of a film: the narration is only a fragment of the interview with one of the subjects; some parts of this documentary had to be crafted or re-staged, as, for instance, the initial walk home and the entering of the house. Also, through the use of music tracks and obvious image manipulation, there is also a clear dramatization, or poeticization, aestheticization, of what is being said and reported.

 Can we make something that is ethnographically sound and relevant -- with all the rationality and emotional distancing that collecting scientific data involves-- and at the same time touching and story-like?  My hope is that the transparency of the montage and of the artifices using to create a compelling narration reconciles this tension between that which is meant to be analyzed at a distance and that which is meant to enrapture us. 

Click-through on the image to watch the video: