the documentary, the other side of cinema

History Of Cinema Alma Mater Studiorum – University

of Bologna
8 p.

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 Summary THE DOCUMENTARY, THE OTHER SIDE OF
CINEMA
FIRST PART

CHAPTER 1

THE OROGINI OF THE DOCUMENTARY

BIRTH OF A NOTION
- The '30s: the term "documentary" becomes commonplace the founder of the word is John Grierson: he makes use of
the term for the first time in the "New York Sun", on February 8, 1926, in an article dedicated to Robert Flaherty's
second film, The Last Eden BUT in France the term was already in use for about ten years. However, it was vaguely so:
the bulk of film production that intended to offer the public an image of reality, was reduced to current affairs and
travel films.
- photography knows the same phenomenon: an example is the photographic campaign launched in 1935 by the Farm
Security Administration that portrayed America in crisis
- main feature of the documentary: claim to realism: capture things as they are
- Document = serves as proof or information

THE LUMIERE INVENTION

- numerous public projections by the Lumiere brothers are grouped under the generic name of "current issues" (we
also speak of "views": the world appears as a series of paintings)
- fascination for the minimal movements that only the mdp could record and return: the movements of the world
become the object of contemplation (by the public)
- framing: the Lumiere brothers imposed on their operators a series of rules to frame something, which then became
the trademark of the beginnings of cinema (eg depth of field; escape line; men lost in a space are anonymous etc.)
- cinema = medium able to return reality, to reproduce it cinematograph has the precision of a scientific instrument its
virtue: objectivity

TWO TUTELARY FIGURES

- Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov detach themselves from ordinary production inaugurating opposite procedures: the
first favors shots of their explorations, the second focuses on editing and its immense possibilities

THE RIVELATION: ROBERT FLAHERTY

- 1922: Nanuk the Eskimo comes out in American cinemas creating a general amazement among viewers - a cinema of
ethnographic pretensions already existed: Curtis, an American photographer, in 1914 had made a film about the
Indians of Vancouver Island. However, In the land of the head hunters presented a mythological vision marked by an
anachronistic reconstruction not that Flaherty's films were less subject to the artifices of reconstruction.
- 1913: Flaherty had shot more than 15,000 meters of film on the Inuit: he had not filmed from the Western point of
view, but from that of the Inuit 1916: Flaherty accidentally sets fire to this first material being edited so thanks to a
loan, Flaherty starts again twice, in 1920 and 1921 and on these occasions experiments with what will become his
method each film rests on a main character and his family, whose facts and exploits are scripted around a story of
struggle for survival Flaherty invents the film during filming
starting with two cameras, a generator, a flying laboratory and a projector, he spends a total of 15 months in the
company of Nanuk and his people. He lives with them, shares their lifestyle, creates a complicity with the hunters the
protagonists, for this reason, become the interpreters of their own cinematographic life, and not objects of curiosity
Flaherty films everyday customs: the construction of the igloo, the seal hunt, the meal, the sleep, the cold editing: he
aims to echo the intensity of a moment

THE REVOLUTION: DZIGA VERTOV

- 1929: The Man with the Camera: Vertov opens a way towards a cinema both research, experimental, and towards a
documentary cinema the film follows a double thread: the progression of a day in a big city and the process of
elaboration of the film we are seeing
the realization of the film (shooting, editing, projection) is inseparable from the anonymous movements of the city: it is
a single and same energy that works
a change is underway as shown by the final framing of the Cine-eye (eye and optics are overlaid) new form of
subjectivity: autonomous and anonymous
editing: Vertov discovers a new way of connecting two shots that comes from a combination

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- concept of cinema-truth absent in Vertov's writings until 1940: privileges that of the Cine-eye: catching life off guard
(the mdp does not alter the particularity of a gesture): things speak for themselves, in fact the film does not have
subtitles
- recovery depends on technical skill

THE FIELDS OF DOCUMENTARY RESEARCH

- cinema = means of representation and understanding of the world
- filmmakers make the documentary the place of an awareness of the world, of its multiple levels of reality - distinctive
value of the documentary, that is, the vision of a wild and indigenous nature, continues to exist, but without escaping
the colonial imprint
- films set in the wilderness of Alfred Machin + The Black Cruise by Leon Poirier + films by Martin and Osa Johnson
filmed across the South Seas and then between the lands of Africa, do not avoid the clichés of a spectacular
representation of nature
- double career of Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper: after having ventured into documentary, they come to stage
the jungle, making in 1933 the most famous of their films, King Kong: fiction film here highlights the opposition of
Hollywood to the documentary
- Jean Epstein: goes to the Breton coasts to film the sea: The Sea of the Crows this film has greatly influenced the clarity
of Flaherty's The Man of Aran
- the film for filmmakers is a moment of an experience

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY

A TYPICAL CASE: JOHN GRIERSON
- John Grierson has left an imprint on the history of the documentary
- 1929: His first film marks the birth of what will become the British model: Drifters describes the operations of herring
fishing with the seine. Filmed with short shots, Grierson associates in a single presence the gestures of the fishermen,
the movements of the machines and the flight of the birds here we recognize the double legacy: from Vertov the
editing and from Flaherty the poetic conception of the world; and of the two together the attraction addressed to
men
Drifters: the result of the involvement of the British government: thanks to this financial support, Grierson sets up a
real production laboratory ranging from the training of technicians to the distribution of films in 10 years more than
400 films are produced
- Films become a bond between men, connect cities and unite classes
- Industrial britain by Flaherty and North Sea by Harry Watt: they are the most representative films of an idea of a
community of men

PROPAGANDA AND COMMITMENT

- figure of the environment: dominates the whole social documentary of the period
- communication is kept on the threshold of civic education: this is typical of all documentary cinema that aspires to a
social mission more famous case The River by Pare Lorentz: the film is intended to support Roosevelt's policy to revive
the economy of the Mississippi Valley with the construction of dams that should restore prosperity
Pare Lorentz was part of the group gathered around photographer Paul Strand who created a production facility called
Frontier Films, whose documentary activities will stop with the war and whose members will be persecuted by
McCarthyism.
- Borinage by Joris Ivens and Henri Stork: the two filmmakers film misery, expulsion, repression

A NEW WORLD
- many filmmakers, at the end of the 20s, were close to an avant-garde cinema: cinema = visionary medium of the time,
capable of perceiving the energies of the big city, its percussions, its sparks: the filmmakers make the jungle of the
cities their territory is the era of urban symphonies, the film Berlin – symphony of a big city (1927) by Walter Ruttman
is the guiding example
Douro, river work first film by Manoel de Oliveira is of the same genre
Nothing but the hours of Alberto Cavalcanti (1926): highlights the moments of the day of a girl and an elderly woman
marked by the passing of the hours
- Jean Vigo: he will reconcile the potential of cinema with a harsh social criticism in A propos de Nice (1930) comparison
with reality is the very principle of filming: the poetic interpretation does not lose sight of the political hook
- Men on Sunday (1929) by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer: make the documentary the renewal of fiction

CHAPTER 2

A NEW GESTURE

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 THE STATE OF THE PLACES
GETTING OUT OF THE WAR
- Second World War upsets the relationship that everyone has with the cinema news and information begin to
take on a falsifying character
- propaganda: appeals to cinema to strengthen its credibility: it builds a representation of the world that obeys
the rules of great fictional narratives e.g. series intended to support the entry into the war of the United States, Why
we fight coordinated by Frank Capra are editing films starting from shots from different sources linked by an
educational commentary

NEW ISSUES
- 50s: documentary takes flight
- 50s: documentary = crisis of the representation of the world: the question arises of the type of representation that is
given to the real and the form through which the real happens to the visible - with the documentary the filmmakers
become historians of the present

CINEMA IN THE PRESENT

THE MEANING OF DIRECT TAKING
- direct cinema: new equipment + new techniques
- Alexandre Astruc, in the article Birth of a new avant-garde, hopes for a "stylo camera", a fountain pen camera once
tested, an invention actualizes possible novelties: shooting without a script (this leads everyone to act as he wants
and in addition to be ready for all the unexpected)
- 1953: invention of a portable magnetic tape recorder, the famous Nagra (in Polish means "will record") - direct
cinema spreads all over the world
- same period: development of television that welcomes filmmakers capable of shooting quickly and without a script -
shoulder camera + sound synchronized with the images = create a whole with the filmed event the real does not
stand in front of the camera as a scene in front of the viewer, now the mdp can go to the center of an event: it gains
the tension of a present caught in its emergence

A FOUNDING GESTURE
THE CINEMA OWNED: JEAN ROUCH
- 1949: The sixteen-year-olds by Jacques Becker: stages a young ethnologist who works hard to go and shoot a film in
Africa ethnographic cinema: neorealism
- 1948: Initiation to the dance of the possessed by Jean Rouch: everything resonates as if one belonged to the event, to
be a participant in the rite
- 1954: Les maitres fous is the subject of controversy: the film shows a Hauka ritual (Ghana) in which the participants
impersonate their masters and eat a dog to exorcise the delirious colonialism that subjugates them the film is built
from short shots because the sound is recorded on half-hour tapes
direct cinema = co-presence of the filmmaker and what he films, but it is not a fusion: Western and Eastern meet
- Jean Rouch uses the voice-over a lot: a live commentary of the images (no didactic knowledge) this game between the
images and the voice produces the effect of projecting the viewer into the double present of the event and its
narration
- 1961: Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin: description of the company French

AT THE LIMITS OF DIRECT DRIVE

- documentary: gift you touch sensitive points (also touching on topics such as economic and political) - late 50s: free
cinema: you take a direction opposite to the traditional documentary: you put in the foreground the working class
cut off from English society you begin to show the daily realities
- documentary vs. reportage
documentary: tries to evade false evidence, to question apparent certainties
reportage: synonymous with "immediacy": records an action without trying to know what is illustrative shots
accompanied by interviews: the witness is subjected to continuous questions: the interviewer expects from them
programmed answers

HOW ARE YOU?

ALONG THE ROADS
- films allow you to follow the changes in society
- 1962: Chronique d'un été by Chris Marker: the filmmaker and his operator walk the streets of Paris asking the people
they meet "are you happy?"

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- 1974: Place de la république by Louis Malle: the filmmaker went around for about ten days in the heart of Paris at the
time of sexual liberation in search of someone to talk to about it
SILENSIOUS LIVES
- Agnes Varda: she launches herself to the exploration of her own way: the picture of an immobile country
looms, where neither time nor revolution have left their mark Daguerréotypes exposes to light lives that have arisen in
the form of absence, in which everyone does not know how to answer the question "What is his dream?" these streets
remain in the shadow of everyday life
- 1987: series of 24 portraits of Alan Cavalier: women who practice handicrafts that are disappearing every film
condenses a life in a few minutes women with a beautiful figure who however carry the sign of their labors Alan
Cavalier weaves his films following the thread of the meetings

HOMELESS NO LAW
- Denis Gheerbrant: realizes in two years Et la vie... , directly facing a world in ruins: it takes men scattered in a
vast periphery devastated by the economy of unemployment however talking to each other is the simplest thing in the
world mdp = meeting point
- by questioning the changes that are their contemporaries, filmmakers update the form of the bonds that unite
them to each other – the inhabitants of a country, the spectators of a film. The horizon of the documentary therefore
consists in highlighting these bonds, however fragile they are, that bring individual lives closer together

HOW DOES THAT WORK?

CAPTURE LIVE
- filming means observing
- camera: process of dramatizing zoom on a face or gesture: go to the heart of the action
- Primary by Richard Leacock: for 5 days, 4 teams of two men each follow Step by Step John Kennedy in the middle of
the primary elections result: one-hour film that reveals the tricks and follies that lie behind a campaign

LOOK NO FRILLS
- filming takes time: filmmakers live to the rhythm of what they shoot, they place themselves for a time
necessary to discover the invisible threads that circulate between individuals, between the shots often these films
testify to a tragic conscience (eg films by Raymond Depardon and Nicolas Philibert)
- Being and having by N. Philibert (2002): the director shot for 10 weeks in the single class of a school in rural
France film develops around the childhood test of growing up and learning everything at the same time along the
sequences appears what is common in all his films: the invisible bond that must be invented day by day for a set of
circumstances to hold and last
- Frederick Wiseman: All his films are connected to an institution (e.g. a hospital, a military psychiatric
penitentiary, etc.) films that present themselves as an in-depth analysis of the country (USA: country devoted to an
immense expenditure of energy to survive): analysis that is the result of a very patient work the films are devoid of
comments: the director always performs the sound taking and directs the shooting by moving the sound rod

THE FLIGHT OF TIME

- forces of the documentary: being able to approach the seasons + compare the epochs + measure the passing of time
+ see what is transformed
- Jean Eustache: La rosiere de Pessac (1968 and 1979): the director, at a party in his native country, resumes the
coronation by the municipality of the most deserving girl of the year are harsh films on the exercise of power and on
the conditions of a society what is weighed from one to the other are the silent transformations that take place in the
space of a decade: looking at the pride of the first girl starting from the second, one discovers the terrible vanity of
the staging of power
- Jean-Louis Comolli in 1989 resumes the elections that agitate the city of Marseille: he produces seven films that allow
you to follow the evolution of the political life of a city struggling with a legacy that dates back to the war the city of
Marseille thus becomes a point of observation of the great tensions that agitate a nation

CHAPTER 3

RETURN OF THE REMOVED

HISTORY IN FRONT OF MEMORY

- documentary: real NO evidence
- documentary: a medium that wants to reflect on history through its representations + find the thread through its gaps
the stakes are always to regain ground in the present and to regain possession of our conscience

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 THE FORM OF MEMORY
A BLIND SPOT
- Le sang des betes (The Blood of the Beasts) by Georges Franju (1948): the director resumes the slaughterhouses of
Vaugirard: the film places the viewer in front of the black sun of industrial death the film exhibits the demon of war: it
is believed to have come out unscathed, but you can no longer look at things as before

EYES OPEN
- Alain Resnais: Hiroshima mon amour (1959): with this film the director tries to keep alive the great inner
restlessness caused by the historical event
- Claude Lanzmann: Shoah (1985): the director will take more than 10 years to complete this film the 9 hours
and 30 minutes of the film are exempt from any archive image Lanzmann makes the survivors repeat the gestures they
have made, to which they owe their lives: they are not witnesses, but the actors of a transference, in the
psychoanalytic sense of the term

THE VOICE FOUND

- 80s: a cinema emerges that finds a form to reconnect the double thread of wandering and hope
- Pierre Beuchot: Le temps detruit (The destroyed time, 1985): makes you listen to the letters of 3 dead between
archives and living places - Marguerite Duras: Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert (1976): here the director
outlines the form of our relationship with the present and in doing so unites us to an anonymous people of which we
are orphans, and at the same time teaches us not to be dismayed by the forces of death

CRITICISM OF IMAGES
HOW TO TELL THE STORY TO CHILDREN
- our gaze on history is structured by images that are neither transparent nor indisputable
- Chris Marker: first to undertake a radical critique of the representations The tomb of Alexander (1993) is a
reinterpretation of our vision of the Soviet revolution, articulated around the career of Aleksandr Medvedkin,
filmmaker famous for the film Happiness (1934) Marker's film aims to illustrate relationships through the
juxtaposition of shots, to detect deceptions, to reveal falsifications and to explain how it was constituted the
revolutionary imagination of the twentieth century. uses the comment: written in epistolary form, it circulates among
the images to the rhythm of the mediation of the walker the voice allows the viewer to regain possession of their
dreams
- every filmmaker who looks at the images of the past can make his own the motto of Chris Marker in Sans soleil: "we
do not remember, we rewrite the memory as we rewrite History"

THE IMAGE, INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE

- Marcel Ophuls explains the system of image creation Vegli d'armi (1994) is a great investigation on the
manufacture of information: here the story is reread in the light of fiction
- the fall of the legend created by the images is the same subject of two other films on the Shoah: The Reich
Highways (1985) by Hartmut Bitomsky and The War Inscribed in the Images of the World (1987) by Harun Farocki the
first undertakes to question the preconceived idea according to which Hitler would have equipped Germany with a
modern road network (interrogates the images of the time); the second highlights how in 1944 the aerial photos of the
army American allowed to distinguish the Nazi camps (although analysts could not identify them because they did not
know of their existence)

THE SECRET KEPT

- Artavazd Pelesjan: the filmmaker composes the song of the century with accents that mix the tragic with the island
enthusiasm of the movements, repeats them, reverses them: this new interpretation of the shots allows him to
reread the history of modern times e.g. Our century (1982): the director takes up the dream of the conquest of space
as a phenomenon in itself cosmic
- So there are two main orientations:
1) in one the images are subjected to the test of doubt
2) in the other the images are exalted, but this does not mean that History is less

CHAPTER 4

UNCULTIVATED LAND

UNKNOWN HORIZONS

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- 1985: Tokyo-Ga by Wim Wenders: the director here records a series of gaps: the distance that separates the German
filmmaker from a lost secret, the protected area of the memoirist of our dreams and our monsters, the block of a
fictional filmmaker who explored occult continents Wenders participates in the evolution of the documentary as a
place of an experience of the world inseparable from the search for himself "Tokyo-Ga": mix with environmental
disorder to find a way

THE STATE OF THE SOIL

- documentary consists in making the world in which the filmmaker lives coincide with his cinematographic
territory: this depends on a process: it is up to the filmmaker to travel the world to reconnect with it the mode of this
movement give shape to the film and redefine the very form of the subject as the seat of an experience open to all
changes
- Mediterraneo (1963) and God what he knows (1994) by Jean-Daniel Pollet: the only director who has managed
to have expressed with a simple overview of a landscape all the becoming of the world: the filmmaker makes the earth
resonate, makes the words vibrate, looks at everything with new eyes and listens with new ears all his films transmit an
image of the world reduced to its simplest expression: Pollet opened an unpublished documentary space that he
would later call CINEMA DELL'IRREALE: there is nothing to explain or prove, but we must try to actively find the
neglected layers at the base of our existence

SPATIAL PLANNING
- Amsterdam Global Village (1996) by Johan van der Keuken: here the director condenses what is the basis of
his approach. Walking through his hometown, he meets its inhabitants, men and women of all horizons, an aspect that
sometimes catapults him into their country of origin: this means that the world is held by a thread, that of the path of
the filmmaker who does not know more than what he discovers step by step
- Route one – USA (1990) by Robert Kramer: here the director adopts a line similar to that of Keuken: Kramer
travels for six months and with a small team the Route One from north to south of the East Coast: he films the route
with the help of a character played by a friend, who concretizes the meetings the genuine portrait of America changes
little by little into an X-ray of a country in full disintegration, but the population, despite this, strives to remain standing
with this the film Kramer does not want to give moral lessons, but wants to highlight the connection between the
individual and the collective as a place where the present is structured, the becoming

GONE WITH THE WIND

- Joris Ivens: after making some atmospheric films (Rain, 1929) in the spirit of the avant-garde of the time, he orders his
life according to the epicenters of revolutionary struggles (17th parallel, 1968)
Ivens' Me and the Wind (1988): one of the rare poetic and political self-portraits that a filmmaker has ever made the
film is the search for a breath of air in a China suffocated by its own state apparatus some filmmakers try to find the
primary energy of an origin: they want to find a balance

THROUGH THE FIELDS

- documentary: it wants to be the field of exercise of a restlessness in motion: restlessness related to the state of the
world this movement towards the world is always embodied in new representations
- luis bunuel's only documentary: Land without bread (1932) (made in the wake of surrealist experimentation):
denounces the harmfulness of a village lost in the mountains of western Spain: the film reveals the dark side of
civilization this film reveals the organic center of gravity that animates men, and that will be the basis of future fiction
films
- Bicycle thieves by Vittorio De Sica: screenplay is the pretext that allows you to film the realities of a country on the
ground
- 1957: Roberto Rossellini films for several months in India: the accumulated material allows him to edit a documentary
series for Italian TV: L'India vista da Rossellini (1959), while at the same time making a film organized as a series of
stories in which animals have a role of equal importance compared to that of men, India (1959) Rossellini tries to give
new impetus to the possibility of tracing a narrative, of finding a primary energy that can anchor man in the world
- filmmakers found unprecedented loopholes that prevent the narrative from turning in circles, from closing itself
- Pier Paolo Pasolini: late '60s realizes notes that have the value of both inspections and essays of reflection: Appunti
per un film sull'India; Notes for an African Orestiade
- Ken Loach: realizes Kes (1969): connection between fact and fiction

VALEDICTION
- documentary: the reality it transmits is the one it has selected and staged so that the participants obey a single way of
being: a documentary program brings out an image of the world, an image whose form restores our relationship with
the world by exploring its contradictions

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- documentary: it allowed to experiment and develop the possibility of uniting the plans without subjecting them to a
character, to his gaze, in fact its strength lies in the deconstruction of the "subject" the documentary fights against
traditional cinema where the viewer is forced to identify with the character
- documentary gesture: experiencing the connections and absences that belong to us, that animate us and that are the
basis of our dreams relationship with History and with the present is upset: the documentary relentlessly renews the
fiction: the doc. it takes flight where fiction finds its limit by closing itself within chimeric codes: it is the future of
fiction

SECOND PART
DOCUMENTS, TESTIMONIES, TEXTS, ANALYSIS OF SHOTS

DOCUMENT
- Le tombeau d'Alexandre by Chris Marker: the film traces the history of the Soviet communist utopia through the
career of filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin and with the help of numerous archives Marker establishes a dialogue with
images, from which it is highlighted how archival images show an event

INTERVIEW
- "programming the case" by Nicolas Philibert: he focuses on the way in which acting can enter the daily work of each
The least that could be done (1996): here the filmmaker follows the creation of a theatrical performance in a
psychiatric clinic
Philibert in an interview: states that the doc. it is always reduced to "a film about..." and in doing so he excludes any
narrative dimension, but what he tries to do is to make "a film with...": you are not so far from fiction. The director
does not try to educate the viewer, on the contrary, before making a film, the less he knows about the issue, the better:
this attitude has an advantage: getting closer and closer to reality (leaves room for subjectivity, encounter etc.)

SCRIPT
- what's before the movie? Not necessarily a script, just the indication of a direction, of an inclination, or rather, of an
encounter: the adventure of the encounter becomes the script that is shot day by day

SYNOPSIS
- The first of the congnome (2000) by Sabine Franel: plot: one day in 1987 80 cousins meet around the tomb of their
common ancestor, Moise Blin, a Jewish salesman who died in 1820 the filmmaker then discovers a group of brothers
ignored and undertakes to ask them questions about their identity and the sense of family
this documentary/fiction (the film presents a 140-page screenplay: a necessary step to express the energy of the film in
all respects), will be developed in a non-linear way: a succession of testimonies that oppose each other, but that in
reality overlap and complement each other
ANALYSIS OF SHOTS
- Delitti flagranti (1993) by Raymond Depardon: fixed shots in very long fields, edited without any comment: inside the
painting there are all the protagonists of a situation: it is thus a matter of filming a relationship such as the one that is
created between an accused just arrested and the deputy prosecutor in charge of deciding on the continuation of the
procedure
- filming does not mean watching, but being present at what is filmed, being sensitive to the presence of the person
filmed

DOCUMENT
- Chronique d'un été (1961) by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin: the film offers itself as an effort of reflection, on the part
of each one, on his own place within the society French as well as within the film the directors highlight the tension
that agitates people
this film is a quest. The environment of such research is Paris. It is not a fictional film because the research concerns
real life attention, however, it is not a documentary: this research does not aim to describe: it is an ethnological film: it
seeks man: it is an experience of cinematographic interrogation CINEMA-TRUTH: ELIMINATING FICTION AND
APPROACHING LIFE (with this film the directors approach the line dominated by Flaherty and Vertov)

DOCUMENT
- Men of Sunday (1929) by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer: for the first time a film starts directly from the lives of
ordinary people, without trying to apply a narrative of adaptation for the cinema: so the film brings to the climax the
documentary logic: it privileges the sensation of the moments, rather than the sense of action
Men of Sunday is a film without actors: they are non-professionals who become actors of their own lives: the film
becomes the means to make the chronicle of their present

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the film requires six months of shooting, made only on weekends, the only moments of freedom for the protagonists
who worked during the week
everything is worth taking back: life can be as beautiful as it is difficult
there is no plot: this lies solely in the organization of the moments that the protagonists spend together, on the edge
of improvisation

NARRATIVES

THE INVESTIGATION (AND I) SEEN BY LUC MOULLET AND MICHAEL MOORE

- investigative film: the two filmmakers put themselves on stage personally: they expose their body to the mdp: it is a
moral matter: the filmmakers are not external to what they shoot
- Genesis of a Meal (1979) by L. Moullet: here the director retraces the entire chain of the food industry, starting from
the store where you shop. It recomposes the path of food and its cost through intermediaries: then it breaks down an
entire economy up to the working conditions of the collectors, the film strives to make tangible the cannibal
relationship between the Western table and the subsoil of the third world
- Bowling at Columbine – A nation under fire (2002) by M. Moore: here the director fights against the free sale of
weapons in the USA and does so starting from the massacre committed by two teenagers in their high school
(Columbine) in a small town in Colorado with this he shows how a society has been built in which fear and
consumption go hand in hand

DOCUMENT
- Ten (2002) by Abbas Kiarostami: the director concentrates a shooting device inside a closed place, a car, and to focus
the film on a divorced woman, always at the wheel, without a space of her own the film is the result of a long
preparation
the driver of the film had a headset in her ear: the director dictated the dialogues, the questions (the woman was in
the company of the car: intimate conversation between two people sitting next to each other)
result of the film: documentary and fiction are confused: it becomes difficult to know if you have to talk about person
or character

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