Voice in Nichols

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Those presentations last Wednesday were superb. I particularly appreciated how Dan and Steve worked up to a thesis or argument about their filmmakers. Don't forget to put up your presentation summaries on the blog, and as we discussed, cite your sources carefully there. If you missed the presentations, make sure to look over the summaries carefully, and comment on them on the blog.

The two chapters from Nichols on ethics and voice are clear and, I think, helpful for considering the documentaries you will be analyzing for your final papers. Nichols provides another helpful chart (even though I'm not enamored with structuralism or formalism, I do like a helpful chart) on Voice on pg. 76. Here's a summary from my notes (it doesn't make too much sense without the tab working well--so look at Nichols:)

Direct Address

Embodied Disembodied

Voice of Authority Voice of God

Interview Titles/Intertitles

Indirect address

Embodied (by social actors) Disembodied (conveyed by film technique)

Observation Film form

I was thinking about how most of the directors chose indirect dddress, letting the social actor (Balog, or Ice-T, for example) speak for them. I also thought about how astute The Law in These Parts was at using film form and observation to make its case. We hear the voice of the filmmaker in that film, and perhaps even see him setting up the studio, but did we see him speaking directly to the camera?

Use Nichols to make your arguments about your film more clearly.