Scene Dissection - Tell No One

Edit: here’s the link to the video. 

I watched the French film Tell No One via Netflix this past summer and was enraptured by its excellent directing by Guillaume Canet. The premise is this: eight years after the murder of his wife, doctor Alexandre Beck is slowly recovering until one day, he is implicated in the murder of two people - a case he is not familiar with at all; his situation becomes additionally more complicated when he receives a mysterious email which appears to be from his deceased wife. As with many thrillers, Beck finds himself on the run to prove his own innocence and to unravel the mystery surrounding his wife and beyond.

One scene particularly caught my attention, most distinctly for Canet’s directing choice on subject focus and framing. It takes place when Beck goes to confront a man associated with his wife; at the moment, he is being helped by Bruno, a gangster who feels indebted to Beck (as I’ll show and narrate below with pictures). 

For most thrillers, the directors tend to make the film protagonist-centric, where the central character tends to dominate the screen whenever a scene involves him. However, Canet deviates from such tendencies in this particular sequence: while small, its a significantly different directing choice that even now, I find it interesting to look at consider. Here goes: 

We first see Bruno’s friend go out, establishing where the scene is taking place. There is a distinctly observational POV since we are seeing movement taking place from afar; that is, Canet chooses to frame the scene from afar instead of closer up. 

The camera switches focus to the interior of the car, specifically the sound system/radio where the time is clearly displayed. This further establishes the context of the situation with regards to location, space, and time. 

We now see Bruno and Beck. Beck is the main focus, but Bruno does the most speaking in this frame (in fact, Beck only says “no” in response to Bruno’s question). 

Both spring to action at the sound of whistle, most likely sounded off by Bruno’s friend. The whistle is off screen, which adds to the unexpectedness and sudden springing of events. 

The camera focuses again on the group of people, now conglomerated into a distinct circle. Again this from the POV of sitting in a car: this is a very observational choice, which adds to the sort of ambiguity as to what exactly is going on since we don’t see up close how the group afar is interacting with one another, or how they may behave. 

Beck immediately gets out of the car and closes the door, leaving Bruno behind. Here’s where it gets interesting: instead of following Beck as he walks towards the group, Canet instead chooses to situate the camera from the POV of Bruno and his friend, thus maintaining the observational (even voyeuristic) aesthetic of the entire scene. The conversation between Bruno and his friend goes as so: 

The camera is still from the car’s POV, except even further away as it now resides and films from the backseat. Now we are observing not only Beck from afar, but Bruno (and his friend) slightly distanced away as well. 

Bruno’s friend asks why they are helping Beck…

Bruno explains that three years ago, Beck helped his son. 

The police believed Bruno had beaten his son, while Beck observed carefully that Bruno’s son was a hemophiliac and that Bruno was wrongly accused. 

At this point, we (as well as Bruno and his friend) observe something is going wrong from afar: first there’s a shout, and then there’s a tussle. 

These last three screenshots demonstrate a noteworthy choice on Canet’s part: the camera is still situated in the car’s backseat, concluding this entire sequence with the same framing aesthetic it began with - that of impersonal observation. While common school of thought would be to keep the action and intensity going at full throttle – easily accomplished with frequent close ups and tracking of the main character’s actions and movements - Canet instead chooses to place us in a moment of quiet observation while something is going on: we don’t know what exactly happened between Beck and the gang, but the movements leading up to this conflict are quiet and relaxed enough to jerk us back into action and attentiveness - just like the whistle the beckoned the doctor to get up and confront the gang. 

Canet’s directing choice in this scene also does something few directors do, which is to subtly imply the voyeuristic aspects of film and narrative: we are observing one man’s confluence of confusion, ambiguity and mystery; while he and others may be negatively affected by events within the universe we the viewer are safe and sound in our seats, free to watch and observe voyeuristically their ordeals and troubles until the very conclusion of such. Similarly, this voyeuristic aesthetic was also explored (much more heavily) in another French film called Caché – a film which I will leave for another time once I (re)watch it, notes and thoughts and all. 

Ghosting

‘Yes, but they – Wurst, and Knaust, and Pripasov – will tell you that your consciousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations – is, in fact, the result of your sensations. Wurst even goes so far as to say that where sensation ceases to exist there is no consciousness of existence.’

'I would maintain the contrary,’ began Koznyshev. 

But here again it seemed to Levin that just as they were reaching the root of the matter they again retreated; and he made up his mind to put a question to the Professor. 

'So if my senses are annihilated, if my body dies, no further existence is possible?’ he asked. 

– Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy

After reading this passage from Tolstoy’s masterpiece, I stopped and pondered for awhile on the entire discourse and its implications. The idea of existence has been broiling in the back burner of my mind for quite some time, and this small portion from Anna Karenin amped me back into full throttle. Likewise, I decided in lieu of Levin’s question – no, if one’s senses are annihilated and one’s body dies, existence is still possible. 

The professor in Anna Karenin assumes that sensory experience shapes and defines one existence, which is a fairly reasonable assertion. However, when you consider the assumptions the statement, there are implications rather questionable regarding basic humanity and human conditions: essentially, the professor assumes that existence is directly related to how much we can sense and feel from our immediate environment – assuming, of course, the professor equilibrates all sensations as equal (non-equal considerations of sensations are too subjective to really add or detract from this statement). This linear relationship is really the downfall of the sensory-existence argument for a few reasons: 

If this is the case, then those who have lost some amount of sensory function are less of an existing conscious. Take for example an amputee: now that they’ve lost an appendage, compared to their former selves these individuals are less of a conscious existence by virtue of having less surface area of their sensory nerves (while there is the phenomena of “ghost limbs,” strictly anatomically amputees have lost a certain amount of sensory functions). We could also look at paraplegics, who can no longer use their lower limbs – according to the professor’s assertion, these individuals are only half the conscious of a non-handicapped peer. We can easily look at other physical conditions that render individuals into relative handicapped status – blindness, hearing loss, anosmia, burn victims, etc – and see that the professor’s statement, while intriguing, is short-sighted: it essentially states that a existence is solely dependent on the cumulative sensations one is able to acquire and experience; on the latter fold, those who are not a normal physical condition are essentially “lesser” consciousness since their cumulative sensations are comparatively less by virtue of their own physical condition. The professor’s logic equates public figures like Stephen Hawkings and Roger Ebert as “lesser” conscious existences because both rely on artificial means to articulate their thoughts to the world. The implications of his argument extends to cases individual who is in a vegetative state, where their bodies still function biologically but the probability of them ever regaining conscious thought or cognitive function is less than the an elephant suddenly appearing in your living room out of thin air by virtue of metaphysics – according to him, they are greater conscious entities because their bodies can still pick up sensations. 

I disagree with the professor’s statement, simply because I define existence slightly but significantly differently: that one’s root existence is the conscious thought, and that this root existence manifests into the physical condition of a body that one’s cognitive function puppeteers and performs with. Additionally, if someone is effectively brain dead without any chance of recovery – then I believe this individual has effectively died, regardless of their body’s physical condition. This distinction between one’s conscious and one’s physical manifestation relates to the prime idea of this article: ghosting. 

I’ve watched Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (and 2nd GIG as well) on-and-off for a few years, and this past summer I rewatched some episodes again with my older brother. Each episode is dense, complex, and philosophically intriguing – so much so that if you stop paying attention for a few moments, you’ll likely be lost as to what’s going on and what the character’s are thinking. 

GITS: SAC take place in the future, where cyborg technology is sophisticated and commercial. It’s not uncommon to see someone with a cybernetic attribute walking around and living everyday life as per usual (in fact, nearly everyone has cybernetic eyes and chips in their brains, enabling them to receive information without a screen and so forth). This cybernetic society essentially ties everyone together on a metaphysical-like technological net – almost as if you could access the world wide web anytime, anywhere. Likewise, this means capable hackers can cause societal mayhem if unchecked – which is where Public Security Section 9 comes in, led by Major Motoko Kusanagi. 

Motoko is a unique character in the GITS: SAC universe because unlike most others, her body is completely cybernetic – she possess no natural biological function. Her condition is a result of a plane crash she was in when only six-years-old: she was in a coma until it became obvious she would die unless she unwent full cyberization. This process forced Motoko to completely separate body and mind to the extreme; unable to feel real sensations as a cyborg, she regards her body more as a shell her true essence resides and acts upon within – her ghost. 

Theoretically, in the world of GIST: SAC you could surpass “dying” by uploading your conscious into the collective technological “net”; and while your body would decay, your conscious still exists, and therefore you have not necessarily died (however, in the unfortunate case the server somehow crashed and wiped out all data, you really would cease to exist). More pressingly however is the idea of one’s ghost and shell being separate entities, that the relationship between mind and body is not entirely necessary for one to still exist. 

Here’s a thought experiment: say somehow, in some dimension you were able to separate your conscious from your current body and then occupy a different body – are you still the same conscious, the same person? 

I believe that if one still acts out certain behavioral traits and personality quirks unique to themselves regardless of what body, what shell they occupy – they are still that same individual. They still exist as a distinct conscious. 

In one episode of GITS: SAC, called “Runaway Evidence – Testation,” a rogue tank runs amok the city, hacked into the by recognition code of the tank’s designer, Kago Takeshi, who had died a week earlier. It turns out the “ghost” of this tank is actually that of Kago’s: due to religious reasons, his parents refused to let him undergo cyberization despite his serious medical problems, which invariably led him to physical dying at a early age; however, he manages to transfer his ghost into the tank, and before Motoko short-circuits the tank’s brain she discovers in a brief moment that Kago simply wanted to show his parents his new steel body. 

“Runaway Evidence” is an intriguing episode because it really addresses the core argument of whether one’s existence solely depends on the physical medium upon which they act out their conscious functions. While we never know if the tank performed similar personality traits Kago performed while biologically alive, its clear that the tank’s motive derives from Kago’s conscious, his ghost. His action are no different than a hermit crab migrating into a different shell. 

This all leads to the final portion of Tolstoy’s passage in Anna Karenin, where Levin asks if one can still exist if their physical being is somehow exterminated – that is, can one still exist without a shell? 

I believe yes, for various reasons. If you look around you, their a billions of information and narratives documented into multiple media forms – books, film, painting, photography, everything. Every word, every letter, every frame and every brush stroke that goes into each of these mediums was done by someone, a distinct somebody, and as we gloss over and intake the contents of each medium we invariably soak up the presentation, wording, dilution and creativity of this unique and distinct somebody. In the midst of these actions, we experience the remnant pieces of one’s ghost. 

In a less abstract level, you can easily consider the internet as a prime example of separating one’s ghost from their shell, mind from body. As a distinct individual on the net, you define yourself either which way you want, whether it be by writing, subject, ethnicity, age, interests, purpose, and so on; but, unless you know the unique user in real life, there’s no real way of confirming one hundred percent what a user says they are is really who they are in real life. On the net, we are defined solely by how we want to be, independent (not mutually exclusive) of who we are in real life. 

For instance, I could easily say that in real life, I look like this: 

Or this: 

Or even this: 

If I were savvy, charming and mischievous enough, I might actually get away with claiming my genetic origin as a Timelord, with a TARDIS and Sonic Screwdriver and all. 

More seriously though, is that our existence on the net is defined more or less by how we present ourselves in writing (and perhaps photography or video, inclusively). This is wholly separate from our physical being, our shell – yet we still exist in our the form of our distinct internet avatars, cached and all. We still communicate to one another via the internet medium: from the established email to live tweeting, we are speaking to one another, directly and indirectly so, distinct conscious entities in mental collision – and all of this independent of our bodies in the physical world. 

So to finally answer Levin’s question: yes, I believe you can still exist if your body has deteriorated or been destroyed, so long as your ghost remains a distinct entity through whatever natural or artificial means possible. This is the ultimate philosophical implication of ghosting, of one’s ghost of existence. 

The Terrible Power of Memory Manipulation

If there ever was a deadlier power over humans, memory manipulation stands alone as a deeply personal one. 

Many famous serials and stories use memory as a premise for their plots and people, which is unsurprising: immediately there’s a plot device of mystery and intrigue surrounding the character – whether it be internal or external – and for the rest of the story we want to see why, what, and how it all happened – the genesis, the origin, the forbidden fruit, we’re hooked on piecing together what exactly is going on. 

Memory manipulation, of course, occurs to varying degrees. There’s the traditional all-out amnesia, which can be seen all the way back from old folk and fairy lore like princes who forgot their true beloved in stories collected by the Brothers Grimm; there’s classic science fiction elements of wiping out a personality and replacing it with another, as seen in Total Recall starring Arnold Scharzenegger (“If I am not me, then who the hell am I?!”); the selective erasure from a portion of memory, which drives Jack Harkness to pursue and find out why a previous organization did so to him; residual memories that are passed onto the next generation by unique means, like in The Giver; stories that deal with real world medical issues of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s in Away from Her; and then the murky past that serves both as a beacon of light and a haunting, driving obsession to either resolve or run away from it, seen all too often in serials like Jason Bourne. 

Why are memory narratives so engaging? Foremost they are psychological: more than the physical actions at hand are the underlying pulsations of nerve signal, the undulating nuances of electrochemical messages spiking back and forth, to and from somas to axons to dendrites of neurons; yet beyond these neurobiological bounds there is something more science has yet (or if ever) to fully encompass and objectify what exactly composes the arena of irrational emotions – the enigma of psychology. 

We can never be sure if our memory is 100% accurate. Details are lost, omissions are consciously or subconsciously made, facts vary slightly, retellings and subsequent recounting dilutes the actual event more and more: it’s a very fickle component of our cognitive existence – essential, but fickle. Evolutionary, memory serves as a compilation of survival and social skills needed to get by – instinctual muscle memory and habitual memory, you could say. And while humans have evolved to exist on secondary resources (e.g. money) as a means to indirectly survive off primary resources (e.g. soil, water), thus leading to cultural and infrastructural development as we know it, memory still plays an integral part of our daily lives. Whether it’s habitually checking your car mirrors,  playing a piano piece without sheet music or even balancing on your bike – memory is all over the place, instinctually and habitually so. 

Memory is more nuanced than instinctual and habitual tendencies. There are instances we remember for various reasons. From what your boss told you this morning (“Do you still have my stapler?”) to how beautiful your spouse looks on the eve of your honeymoon, what we choose to remember is essential to how our lives function, and invariably these memories – regardless of intention or purpose – are driven by deeply personal reasons. After awhile, the truest aspect of memories is the emotion associated with them – emotions of love, hate, happiness, pain, joy, sorrow, wonder, trauma, all of it. In this sense, memories are incredibly raw in the undulating, hidden reservoirs of our cognitive conscious. This is why memory manipulation is such a engaging and haunting narrative premise to play off of. 

Take for example Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. John Anderton, upon discovering a glitch in the pre-cog system, soon learns that he will kill a man he has never met. Despite great efforts to evade a highly computerized (optimistically futuristic) society, Anderton eventually finds the room of the alleged victim, Leo Crow. 

This scene is crucial: Anderton sees the man’s bed covered with pictures of children, one of which is of the man with his missing (and likely deceased) son, Sean. Upon seeing these photos Anderton completely breaks down, and when Crow returns into the room Anderton violently rushes at and brutally beats down Crow in a fiery rage and passion. 

What’s noticeable about this climatic scene is that up until now, Anderton methodically and cooly found clues to who could possibly be framing him. Yes, there are moments of action, but nothing compared to the almost bestial fury he unleashes when he’s led to believe Crow was the pedophile who kidnapped (and probably killed) his only son years ago.  And despite the orgy of evidence evident upon the scene (as Danny Witwer later determines, “this [was] a set up”), Anderton lets go of logic to act upon his primal emotions of anger and pain, to unleash upon this alleged man all the emotional scars that never found solace or closure for all these years. Haunted by guilt and long, long episodes of desperation and disillusionment, Anderton holds his memory of Sean so closely to his heart that in a moment of weakness, he loses all his cool and nearly fulfills his own predicted destiny. 

Anderton’s reaction results from an external and intricate manipulation of a memory deeply personal and painful. It’s a very low blow, but considering the perpetrator accomplished other personal goals prior and after it’s not surprise they used such effective and cruel psychological puppeteering. His emotional response is a powerful one not because of what happened, but because it is raw and unrefined beyond any measure of objectivity. 

While Minority Report explored the consequences of a memory past, Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough Memento explored individual fragments of memory leading up to the final consequence. 

Structurally, Memento is one of a kind: it begins with a man being shot, and then a backwards (and eventually forwards) progression to where it all began, where we the viewer finally piece together what has happened to the character of Leonard Shelby, who suffers from anterograde amnesia (the loss of ability to create new memories after the event which caused amnesia due to damage to the hippocampus or surrounding cortices). 

Shelby is haunted by memories of his wife, who he believed was killed by the same burglars who caused him to suffer from retrograde amnesia. He gets by by taking pictures of people and scenery, and then writing himself notes about what he feels or knows about the subjects in the moment he can still recall these feelings or knowledge; that way, he hopes, he progress forward and not start over again from scratch. Lastly, the most important information that he can absolutely never, ever forget – he tattoos them on himself. Fool proof, right?

Wrong. As we can see from an outsider’s objective lens, the people around him manipulate Shelby’s artificial memory mechanism for their own exploits: Shelby’s landlord charges him for two rooms while he only occupies one; Natalie uses him to drive out a man Dodd from town; and Teddy uses Shelby’s investigative vigor to track down his own set of criminals (or so he says). 

There’s a lot of discussion about the fabula and sujet of Memento, but for writing purposes I won’t discuss them here right now. Instead, I believe the implications of Nolan’s breakthrough indie speaks volumes for a few reasons: 

As I’ve said before, memory is not 100% valid: it is a figment of collected information stored in our brains, clipped and edited to our needs and liking. Even if we document the actual events via writing, photography or film, there is always the question of who’s perspective these forms of documenting come from, and whether or not they capture enough of the whole event to merit factual validity. We don’t necessarily need these types of documents to remember an event, but they very much help us remember certain details and emotions that would otherwise be lost to the crevices of cognition. In Shelby’s case, he takes polaroid pictures because he needs to write down his thought process immediately: he relies on a artificial means of memory building, and though it is quick it is no where near the processing speed of the human brain. This limited time frame is just enough for people to take advantage of him for their own needs – and by extension, this time frame is the same time for something to seep in and “tamper” our documenting process. 

Minority Report masterfully combines film noir aesthetics with chique science fiction elements, highlighting a very classic form of memory manipulation – the haunting effect that drives the protagonist to act the way they do, an echo from the past leading to the ultimate conclusion. Memento, on the polar opposite fold, is a generously unconventional film that explores memory manipulation in the opposite way, where we know the conclusion but not the beginning, the echo from the past. Both films were released around the same timeframe (Nolan in 2000 and Spielberg in 2002), so it’s especially interesting to see how two films that explore memory resonate and diverge so much from one another. 

Memory is a very intricate arena of the mind, and any tampering of it invariably violates our own identity. At its core, memory manipulation is incredibly intriguing, terrifying, and deeply emotional – enough to make it a terrible power to have over another. 

Additional Recommended Reading

• Is There a Minority Report? (or What is Subjectivity?) – by Matthew Sharpe, PhD in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne. 

Hedgehog in the Fog – A Masterful Short Film from Soviet Russia

Yuriy Norshteyn’s Hedgehog in the Fog in 1975 is what Walt Disney hoped to achieve when he first released the classical compilation of the animated Fantasia in 1940. In Hedgehog, Norsteyn creates something so magically enchanting and eerily phantasmic that in a mere ten minutes, you will be completely awe struck by the artistry that went into each frame. Recommended to me by Allan Estrella, I finally watched this little gem of a short film after a long day and contemplation about what write about today; and frankly, I couldn’t be thankful that on a whim, I perused my film collection and clicked on this title out of sheer curiosity – and what a stroke of luck it was. The premise is this: 

On his way to meet his friend Bear for star gazing, the little Hedgehog sees a magnificent white horse in the thick fog, and wonders if if would drown in the chance it fell asleep in the white of night. To satisfy his curiosity, Hedgehog goes on in to explore it for himself – amongst which he discovers beautiful and frightening aspects of the unknown. 

What’s so intriguing and engaging about Hedgehog in the Fog is that contrary to Norshteyn’s American colleague Disney, the Russian filmmaker indulges not in the appeal of bright colors and friendly looking anthropomorphic characters, but instead draws out a darker palette and rougher animation style. Amazingly, the entire film is stop-motion – more specifically, it’s cut-and-paste stop-motion, where characters are animated by drawings that are cut out, captured on camera, and done again (this is a similar to how the original South Park episodes were animated before they received a mega computer from LucasArts). Like all stop-motion films, the entire process of creating Hedgehog was, as I can imagine, tedious and exceptionally time consuming. Similar to Disney’s Fantasia, Norshteyn’s Hedgehog in the Fog is heavily dependent on the musical composition to convey the colors and sounds of emotions – from the light flute of fantastical to the harsh strings of scares, the Russian film could easily be considered a music-based film interspersed with short dialogue and a overseeing narrator to inform us of key details. Most of all, it makes Norshteyn’s ten minute film a uniquely auteuristic gem in the small world of animated shorts. 

I say this with the utmost confidence because besides The Very Hungry Caterpillar, there are very few cut-and-paste stop-motion films I can think of off the top of my head. Cut-and-paste animation is incredibly elementary, yet it speaks volumes when an animator can create such an engaging story that aesthetically diverges from comforting feel-good Disney fare. More importantly, Hedgehog is really a story that resonates deeply from childhood memories: we can all remember those times we went exploring beyond something normal, to find something awe inspiring and terrifying at the very same time. Reason and logic leave us: this is something new, undiscovered, mystifying – our emotions run amok, dominating the very way we perceive something to be or not to be. A normal tree becomes a overbearing entity; a squirrel is really a mischievous, plotting squabbler; a leaf turns out to be the deadliest weapon in the entire world; a tiger appears out from the corner of your eye, regardless that you’re actually in North America; and so on. 

There are, of course, common motifs that we can see in Norshteyn’s story. The white horse in the fog is one of purity and mysterious evanescence, blending into the white fog so easily and instantly emerging as a solid entity the next second. The eagle-owl is one of judgement, its bulging eyes constantly alert in case Hedgehog makes a mistake; the dog is one of loyalty and trust, a do-gooder during a time of clout; and the mysterious Somebody in the river, the entity that selflessly aids the protagonist in a moment of need for no other reason than to be kind and helpful. These character archetypes are all too familiar to many of us, especially veterans of Western mythology. Simultaneously, these characters also resonate ever so strongly with childhood enthusiasm and fears, the primal emotions that define our young adolescence so definitively and strongly into black and white, good and bad, yes and no. 

When we are young and know less of the world than eventually will become integral of our minds, the world itself is something of colors and sounds, of highs and lows in the spectrum of amazing and frightening entities. We know not of the in-betweens, the subtle nuances that make up a individual or situation that otherwise discolor the black or whiteness, good or badness. We experience sensory stimuli from our environment, taking in everything as we perceive them to be. The way green grass smells after its freshly cut, the airlessness of swinging oh so high, the unimaginable ghosts and demons that lurch out from the dark, the comfort and familiarity of a home and soft, inviting bed – childhood is extremely visceral, and its oftentimes why we tend to remember it in an exaggerated light relative to the events that actually took place around us. 

Hedgehog dives into this viscerality of experiences and emotions, utilizing the white of fog as a smothering of judgement, rational and logic. We’re tossed into the unknown and bewilderment along with Hedgehog, episodes of fright and awe and all. And by the time we’re released from the fog, we can’t help but feel a little shaken – both good and bad, but mostly a strong shake from childhood past. 

Upon further reading, I learned that the esteemed Hayao Miyazaki considers Hedgehog in the Fog one of his favorite animated films, and that Yuriy Norshteyn a great artist. And after watching ten minutes worth of haunting auteurism and resonating storytelling, I can definitely relate to why Miyazaki considers the Russian film and filmmaker with such high regard. 

Additional Screenshots with Small Descriptions

The opening title that instantly caught my attention. Its silhouette aesthetic with the deep blue night sky with small, shimmering stars is something I rarely see in many animated features. 

This is a very nice screenshot that shows the rougher, sketchier style and darker coloring of Norshteyn as compared to his contemporary, Walt Disney, who opted for cleaner lines and brighter palette. 

I thought the fog effect was brilliant throughout. It has a delegate painter’s touch – almost airbrushing, to that extent – and it was lovely to see how Hedgehog and other environmental aspects merged and faded in with the overlapping fog. 

A small, glowing firefly amongst the confusion and thickness of clouting, white fog - a beacon of light and guidance, essentially. 

It’s difficult to see here, but the animators managed to incorporate realistic water footage into the scene where Hedgehog floats down the river. The effect is both realistic and animatedly stylized. 

A sweet moment between Bear and Hedgehog as they gaze up upon the beautiful, star shimmering skies of the navy blue night. 

The last shot of the entire film, focusing exclusively on the beauty and ambiguity of the white horse of the white fog, and appropriately left unanswered. 

Additional Links

• Hedgehog in the Fog – you can watch this short film on YouTube

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar – another classic cut-and-paste stop-motion short film that you can watch on YouTube as well. 

Documentaries and their Implications

I’ve been watching Michael Moore’s most recent documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story on-and-off for awhile on Netflix. It’s entertaining in a way, knowing full well that Mr. Moore is essentially a brand name for modern American liberalism and that invariably the documentary would appeal to likewise minded individuals and bewilder and appall others; in a sense, I sort of know what to expect – that the film that highlights the downfalls of capitalism, many of which I know full well of – yet at the same time, it’s interesting to see and dissect how he frames his argument and how he uses emotional appeal to win over the viewer’s attention and sympathy. It is, in a sense, almost a narrative in itself – enlightening, entertaining, and emotional, yet still very much rooted in the relevance of current global issues. While mulling over this, a thought popped up in my head: at what point does a documentary about a controversial subject become biased, and what is the ultimate responsibility of a documentary filmmaker? 

This thought is a residual fragment from a lengthy discussion I had with some nuclear engineer students – undergraduates and graduates – back in March this year after watching the french documentary Déchets: Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire, translated “Waste: The Nightmare of Nuclear.” The synopsis of the film is this: 

Nuclear power is not without risks, its Achilles heel being nuclear waste. People are afraid of it, scientists cannot find an acceptable solution to the problem, industry companies are trying to reassure us and politicians avoid talking about it altogether. 

But what do we really know about nuclear waste? How can people have a clear vision of something that has always been shrouded in secrecy?

Looking at the cases of France, Germany, the United States, and Russia, this scientific and political report explores the taboo subject of nuclear power, particularly the darkest aspect of the latter. In seeking “the truth about waste,” this film aims to provide, for the very first time, the keys to understanding the choices which weigh heavily on the future of humanity.

If it’s not already obvious, the documentary was heavily anti-nuclear anything. The interview subjects were often unable to answer framed questions, and the footage showed devastating results of poor regulation and exceptionally poor safety inspections. In short: it was a very, very unflattering portrait of field that has received flack and a bad name post-WWII. 

I participated in the discussion afterwards, which was enlightening, thoughtful, and calmly passionate; in fact, the most heated response I heard was that the film “is pure propaganda.” The moderator – a graduate student in nuclear engineering – did an excellent job in asking specific questions, like why certain footage was chosen, how questions were asked, and most importantly how statistics and technical aspects were explained (if at all), presented, and if they were put into context. I felt the filmmakers were being irresponsible by framing information in a way that favored their assessment – that nuclear is bad – instead of being holistic and putting data into context. It was almost as if the filmmakers picked and chose what they thought sounded “bad” and splashed it on screen with foreboding expositions and emphasis on choice words; the film would have made a much more powerful statement if they had instead tried to do further research to understand the full extent of the technical aspects and clarify them for public understanding – instead, it only muddled public understanding of nuclear energy even further, piling anti-nuclear hippies against cold cut corporate heads. 

Thinking about it now, I still agree with my statement back then, but am unsure as to how one assesses the true validity and bias of a documentary on a subject they may not completely understand or know about. However, I think there are always a few key characteristics to look for if you want to get a hint of where the filmmaker may be coming from: 

• Adjectives are an absolute key. The choice words the filmmaker chooses to narrate the information and what’s going on are so personal that any non-neutral term (i.e. horrendous, petty, beautiful, dubious, malicious) is like a giant billboard of neon lights indicating editorializing. It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t agree with the viewpoint – editorializing indicates an objective on the filmmakers part that is otherwise not completely neutral. 
• Are personal, non-professional stories included? And if so, why? Oftentimes these interviews and segment create a much more human story that a viewer can sympathize with and connect the overarching subject of the documentary to. While these are emotionally effective, they may not necessarily be an objective lens into what the filmmaker wants you to understand; in a sense, seeing emotionally driven stories puts everything into context, though editorializing is invariable given the nature of these segment (I’d argue that this kind of editorializing is necessary to an extent; no one wants to watch a documentary that’s cold cut turkey tryptophan). 
• Who and which professionals are being interviewed, what are their qualifications, and what occupation do they work in? At this point, during the viewing you either know or you don’t know who the people are (though I think it’s invaluable to look them up afterwards to see how the filmmaker could have possibly framed their answers differently). It’s also important to see what relevance the individuals have (beyond what the filmmaker narrates). 
• How and what questions are being asked, and whom are they being addressed to? One of the biggest issues I had with Déchets: Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire was a segment where the filmmakers interviewed a PR guy for a company on questions that were out of his field, and nonetheless asked him in a field rather than an office. Of course he looked terrible – who wouldn’t be if you were probed with questions that weren’t part of your expertise and in an environment you’re not even familiar with? Additionally, the way questions are framed and phrased are incredibly important because they have multiple implications regarding the interviewer and the interviewee: for instance, whenever I see make up commercials saying things like “make yourself more beautiful,” I can’t help but think they’re telling all the women in the world that their product will make them “less ugly” – it’s the same exact idea, yet the framing and phrasing create completely different effects. 
• And most importantly – is the purpose of the documentary explicit or implicit? I feel this is extremely important to consider because it brings to question the validity of a documentary that, for all its evidence and research, has a specific goal in mind that can either directly or indirectly affect viewers’ perceptions and understanding of the subject after watching the film. 

Documentaries are journalistic by nature; however, editorializing occurs to certain degrees (it’s only natural – we’re human after all), so this last point about the explicit or implicit thesis of a documentary is really about validity. For instance, I felt that Déchets: Le Cauchemar du Nucléaire – despite its good intentions – was so explicit in its anti-nuclear approach that a good portion of the evidence and data they presented was framed in a inaccurate light. My same sentiments lie with Capitalism: A Love Story, based off the footage I’ve seen so far: already I know it subscribes to a bias, and invariably evidence will be framed to appropriate Moore’s thesis; while I do agree with his arguments about human rights and equality in lieu of money mongering corporations and corruption, from a more holistic standpoint I can’t help but feel that there’s much, much more to the story than painting corporations completely bad.

Let’s take, for instance, the recent clusterf*ck of British Petroleum in the Gulf: they are unequivocally at fault for everything – horrendous safety inspections, failing to meet regulation standards – and I was appalled by the money they funneled into positive PR commercials instead actually cleaning up the Gulf as thousands of marine fauna and flora died; yet realistically, I can’t paint BP as a wholly evil corporation – like other corporations, they’ve donated money to universities for energy research, and whether or not you agree with such donations and grants all universities need money to run ship shape research facilities; otherwise the money runs out and the university can’t support itself (it must be noted that after Reagan slashed budgets to universities during his presidency, public universities such as the University of California had to resort to the Yale model in order to keep funding themselves – thus began the inflation of tuitions and growing needs for student loans). Another documentary that I’ve yet to see, The Cove, is about the annual killing of dolphins at Taiji, Wakayama, Japan, and based solely off the commercials, I can already tell that it’s very heavily anti-dolphin-hunting; and while I share this sentiment, I worry a bit that the film itself will be too heavily skewed that I may begin questioning its validity at large (this pure speculation: I’ll need to see the film in order to make my full assessment). 

In short: there are always two sides to the story. Personally, I think the most effective documentaries are ones that do not explicitly state their thesis and position on the subject matter, instead relying solely on the viewer’s ability to infer and digest the information presented in a level-headed, even-handed manner – that is, with minimum editorializing as possible. The best example I can think of so far is the award-winning PBS documentary Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making us Sick? I admire this documentary not only because of the ideas it presented – which are revolutionary and still mind boggling – but that it introduces us to a question rather than an assertion. And while the premise is that socioeconomic and racial differences contribute to outcomes of health the film does so in a way that it piques our interest (“there’s something else that contributes to poor health?”) and allows us to see the full extent of the theories: from racism to occupations to social stigmas, the presented data, interview subjects and personal stories are so thorough that by the end of it, you can’t help but wonder what other factors we simply take for granted in life as we know it. Most impressive is that its main idea – that there are unnatural causes contributing to poor health – is very much implicit and inferred rather than in-your-face; it allows the film to maintain a holistic point of view while simultaneously presenting an argument that could be argued for and against. 

It’s always difficult to assess the validity of anything these days: we’ve got nice politicians posting “refudiate” here and there, and some nice TV commentators spewing about walls of insanity they manage to past through on occasion, skeptics who go by their gut feeling to determine that anything can be false – hell, the whole “how do you know that you know that you know that you know” argument becomes a endless whirlwind of who’s right and who’s wrong, etcetera etcetera. These days, it’s so much easier to label everything right and wrong, black and white, blue and red, left and right, hippie and redneck, ceiling cat and Maru – the gray in betweens, the subtle nuances of discourse and discussion that doesn’t involve party animals of tea or proving Godwin’s law again has become like a lost art in this era of digitalization and twitterifying. I think it’s important to look at the gray areas, the areas of uncertainty and discussion and discourse, and to try and be holistic in the scheme of things – even if it means additional research and trying to learn a bit more about things outside your field of expertise (for instance, I have recently begun directing some more mental power towards why a raven is like a writing desk). And given all the hype about 2010 being a terrific year for documentaries, I feel that trying to assess the validity of an argument and presentation – whether or not we agree with it – is all the more important now. We’re in the internet age of Google and Wikipedia, so there’s really no excuse on any of our parts – unless, of course, you are a cat, then you can get away with pretty much anything. 

Documentary Films I’d Like to See (feel free to leave me any recommendations in the contact form or comments!)

• Man on Wire

• The King of Kong

• March of the Penguins

• Food, Inc. 

• The 11th Hour

• I.O.U.S.A.

• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

• Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

• Monty Python: Almost the Truth

• Waking Sleeping Beauty

• Unmistaken Child

• Can Mr. Smith Get to Wasington Anymore? 

• The Devil Came on Horseback

• Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

• Michael Jackson’s This Is It

• The September Issue

• The Cove

• Exit Through the Giftshop

• Catfish

• Freakonomics

• Inside Job

• A Film Unfinished

• Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

• The Tillman Story

• Encounters at the End of the World

• Sicko

• Jesus Camp

• Murderball

• Daughter from Đà Nẫng

• Sound and Fury

• Last Train Home

Recommended Article

• Should Documentaries Be Excused From the MPAA?