The short film, directed and edited by Tina-Louise Smith(that’s me!) will show at International Museums Day on 18 May 2012.

I closed my well-researched eyes so I could not see all the money I was handing over and came home with a 1kg baby. The only problem was that MyCamera, where I bought the camera, was out of batteries for the camera as one salesman sold the battery reserved for me without consulting his colleague. This meant I had to buy a battery from another supplier, but to compensate for disappointing me, I was given a gratis A3 print.

Here is the print still bubble wrapped. It’s a photo of Yves and his new wife, Yvonne. I am very happy with the print and hope Yves and Yvonne will be too. I am so happy, I had to blog about it.

Yves and Yvonne bubble wrapped

Here is the actual photo.

Yves and Yvonne

Thanks for my camera, MyCamera!

Train 3505 was a submission to the Documentary Filmmakers’ Association’s My Town Short Film Competition in 2011. The film was shot and edited by Justin Joshua Davy, who worked with me at Accidental Films and TV as an intern from October 2010 – April 2011.

I like the way Justin lets us feel the train and its occupants before he takes us inside. As we travel through the early morning landscape, we hear the sounds of the train on the rails along with the sounds coming from inside the train. Maybe it’s because I find travelling on a train quite lulling, or maybe it’s the moody early morning shots, or maybe it’s the repetitive sounds – whatever the cause, in the first 30 seconds of the film I am already transported into the film and a part of it.

It’s a powerful story of the daily commute of 700 000 South Africans. I hope you enjoy it!

The stories of social, technical and economic developments are integral to how these filmmakers came to and influenced documentary filmmaking. I was especially intrigued to learn how the changes over the years, influenced by the political climate around the world, affected the craft and how we have inherited that history in South Africa.

Working in television and video production for the past eleven years I am aware that documentary has a secondary status to that of fiction, or drama in South Africa. It is often said that documentary is the training ground for filmmakers with an allusion to filmmakers moving on to make films that demand more of the filmmaker, like dramas. There is also the suggestion that filmmakers can make mistakes and more glaring mistakes in their documentary forays than they  would be allowed to when making drama.

Reading Barnouw’s history, however, it becomes clear that documentary filmmakers were at the forefront of the history and development of filmmaking from the beginning. The first filmmakers were documentary filmmakers, who, in a sense, laid the foundations for all kinds of filmmaking. This does not mean that these early filmmakers were less sophisticated than those who came later; instead, it means to me, that these filmmakers had to work harder than those who came later in order to understand the medium and to use it to say what they wanted to say.

The documentary filmmakers who were fortunate and privileged enough to be making films in the early twentieth Century, were making films that still inspire and intrigue us today. Not only in terms of the stories they were telling, but also in how they used the camera and co-ordinated the technical teams they worked with. With bulkier equipment and often larger crews than we work with on documentary films today, the pioneering filmmakers were able to capture magical shots, scenes and sequences that we learn from today. These achievements wrought out of the demands of the times suggest that documentary filmmaking is a craft that requires patience, focus and a technical intuitiveness. More a bootcamp than a  nursery school where you learn your ABCs. The point being that even though you could throw someone in the deep end on a documentary film, this is not because it is easier to make a documentary film than it is to make a drama, but perhaps because our society values documentary films less than fiction. The ability to “never to stop looking, never to stop responding to the world around one,” the trait Richard Leacock admired in Robert Flaherty and thought the most difficult discipline, is one of the hardest for a first time filmmaker to get to grips with. As the story changes, the filmmaker needs to be thinking about how the changes may be worked into the film and needs to ensure that the footage will make sense of all the unscripted real life drama, while the first time fiction filmmaker does not have this challenge.

The second idea popularly held about documentary films in South Africa that the book made me revisit is the one that tells us that documentary films don’t make money. The story of documentary from 1895 through to the Second World War is one of a receptive audience and willing sponsors. People were fascinated by the faces and images from the world around them. Documentaries had cinema releases, which were sold out and during World War II, documentary was more popular than fiction. In fact, throughout these heady first fifty years, documentary was more popular than fiction. First of all documentary led the way in technical developments and secondly, it was able to show people themselves, it was able to take them around the world, and it was able to place them at world events as they happened. Documentary was not for a niche market, it was for the world.

From my reading of the book it seems that a growing concern amongst governments (notably American and Russian) and corporations of how they may be portrayed and then perceived by the audience led to a reluctance to sanction and support documentary films.

In the postwar years, as multi-national corporations – largely under American control – expanded abroad at an unprecendented rate, the drive to control markets, resources, and media went with them.

The beginnings of the cold war were related to this development. Starting shortly after World War II, this confrontation between capitalist and socialist powers involved struggles for markets and resources, but proclaimed itself in ideological terms. On both sides it brought a stiffening of controls over mass media – with drastic impact on documentary content and style. DOCUMENTARY A History of the Non-Fiction Film by Erik Barnouw, p.221

This period of media control in the US we tend to lump under the banner of McCarthyism, even though McCarthy only started his attack on the Office of War Information in early 1950. The earlier suppression of “un-American activities” began in 1947 by the US House of  Representatives included the rooting out of “communism in the film industry.” Tactics included the blacklisting of uncooperative artists we have seen in films of the period. McCarthy’s attack followed this, along with the FBI’s purge of subversive elements within the film industry. Many of these so called subversives were documentary and news filmmakers, who had travelled and reported on the war and on the world. These travels and the reporting meant that these filmmakers had been in contact with the new enemy – the Russians, the communists.

The changes in the way documentary film was viewed sixty years ago has clearly affected our view of documentary film today. As documentary fell out of favour, distribution channels closed down and there was less money and less support in the form of funding for marketing.  This was the result of concerted efforts and official policies. What we need today is concerted effort and official policy to reverse this legacy.

Maybe documentary film does not have to be the training ground for filmmakers. Maybe if more money were pumped into documentary films, they would actually make money for the investors.

Fighting in Stalingrad WWII

“Soviet cinema, in decline during the 1930′s, began a renascence during the war, with documentary leading the way. Its hold over audiences, in a land where virtually all families lost members in combat, was incalculable; documentaries and newsreels often seemed the only link with distant loved ones. For many years after the war, on May 3 of each year, a woman in Tashkent laid flowers at the screen of her local cinema. It was where she had her last glimpse of a son.” DOCUMENTARY – A HISTORY OF THE NON-FICTION FILM, p. 152 by ERIK BARNOUW

What is not clear from this quote is that the woman last saw her son at this cinema in a documentary film.

*Images for this blog post including the thumbnail were found here.

In Masupatsela Series II my top two projects were Realistic in Gugulethu and LEAP Science and Maths School in Pinelands. Both organisations are doing work that inspires and moves me. What this means for me is that if I can be involved in these projects in any way, I will be.

Last week, therefore, I was at Realistic to meet with Ncamile Solomon Madikane, the founder and director of Realistic to discuss a project we could collaborate on. I walked through the doors and found David Goldblatt sitting in the waiting area. He explained to me the project he was working on. As I had been the first time when listening to him explain his motivation for that project back in 2007, I was struck once again by this man. There he was, about forty years older than me and still caring enough about the world and the people in it to follow his inspiration and keep on keeping on. At eighty years old he continues to try to make sense of the world – one man, his lenses and his camper.

I want to be like David Goldblatt when I’m big!

He recognized that history does not always happen where one waits for it, and that effects are easier to find and photograph than causes.

This makes me wonder whether brilliant documentary filmmaking captures the causes and not only the effects. It allows viewers to understand why something happened or why something is the way it is.

So, then, there are many movies of the year for 2010, but if I were forced to choose I would have to go with Housing. In South Africa we face issues of housing on a daily basis that some South Africans have tired of hearing about them. When you’re a middle class South African in South Africa, the issue of people having roofs over their heads can appear to be a particularly South African one inherited from that albatross, apartheid, that hangs tirelessly around South African necks. Our understanding of the politics of housing is a particularly South African understanding. Even though there are white people, few, without roofs to call their own, one has to work hard to see it as a human rights issue and not a black issue, despite it being the direct result of apartheid policies. Not because South Africans do not see black people as human beings, but because we are thoughtlessly plagued by the notion that people are either one or the other. Although, at times this is not so thoughtless because the economic discrepancies that do exist in South Africa, exist along these colour lines and it is the starting point of trying to understand why things are the way they are.

On another level we are aware that there are housing issues all over the world, although we may not know them as intimately as our own. This is the power of documentary films, of brilliant documentary – they take you straight into a world you would not usually visit and show you ways of being you would otherwise not see. They make you exclaim to yourself – if not out loud to your fellow movie watchers – I didn’t know that!

The housing issue in Housing is also about a housing shortage and the failure of government to provide for the poor (the issue that governments allow there to be poor people is a topic for another day). The film’s angle, however, presents the people without houses as the menace. If you have a council house or a council flat in Bari you are fortunate because there are 20 000 families on a waiting list who do not have a house or a flat for themselves. If you have to leave your house or flat for a while, which, depending on your circumstances, may be three hours or a month, you may return to find that your home has been invaded by squatters who now call your home theirs. All the people we meet through the film are scared of losing their homes. As a result their movements are restricted, complicated and often odd.

In Housing the filmmakers had incredible access to their characters allowing us to see things that are almost surreal. We learn about the working class housing shortage in Bari through four main stories. There’s the forty-odd year old overweight man, who seems to be a loser. He is always moaning and he has nothing positive to say about anything. He is always wearing the same shirt and the one time he goes to the laundromat, he leaves while putting this shirt back on.

There’s the disabled woman with the disabled daughter, who threatens municipal and council staff that she will gas herself and her daughter if she is unable to do a house swop that allows her to move out of her current flat.

There’s the pensioner who never leaves her house, has her son-in-law deliver her groceries, has conversations with friends in neighbouring blocks by shouting across narrow concrete yards and has the hairdresser pay her a house visit.

Finally there’s the man in his late fifties or sixties with a girlfriend – who reminded me of a chihuahua – and whose relationship falters because of the housing situation.

What makes Housing brilliant is the decisions the filmmakers made. You could argue that we only get to see what the filmmakers want us to see and there’s a lot we don’t get to see. And your argument would be spot on. The filmmakers chose the scenes that would intrigue, engage and perplex us. It is these choices that hold you spellbound throughout the film. Yes, we never see the people who threaten the characters in the film, but we certainly learn to understand how the threat is perceived by our four heroes.

Anyone who holds up a camera when there are people around will know that when the camera appears people change. Some shy away from the camera, others are drawn to the camera and still others play to the camera. Through Housing you sometimes wonder whether the people in the film are playing to the camera and they may well be, but that doesn’t detract from the impact of the film. You will have this in any documentary film and sometimes it can be clear that people are playing for the camera and that makes you distance yourself from the person, but it doesn’t happen like this in Housing - you wonder and then you follow the story.

The way the story is cut together we are constantly hungry for more, hungry to see and to understand. We cannot know why the filmmakers made the choices they did – in order to know that we would have to have a conversation with them and perhaps know all the footage they shot. When we know all the footage, we may find ourselves making different choices, explaining the housing shortage differently. All we can know is whether we enjoyed the film or not.

It would make me happy if you got to see Housing and the other films in my list. But don’t do it for me, do it for yourself.

[*The thumgnail image for this post was taken from the Melbourne International Film Festival's web site http://miff.com.au/films/]

Unbeknown to him, I chose Grondwerk‘s domain name, thinking that if I wasn’t happy with it, he would never have to see it, and if I was happy with it, he didn’t have to be. I worked away on Saturday afternoon with the help of an After Effects video tutorial that makes it all so clear.

I designed a simple logo with a classic look and found myself hoping that Grondwerk would like it. When I realised that I wanted him to like it, I started to worry that if he didn’t like it, I would be gutted and not continue my experiments. Then I remembered that I am not easily discouraged when I am having fun and believe in what I am doing, and what I was having fun doing and believing in was experimenting.

Turn on your volume to experience the result:

The music sampled is “It’s good to be here” from the Digable Planets’ 1993  debut album “Reachin’ (A new Refutation of Time and Space)”.

So, now I’ve seen the movie and, as with his previous film, ‘The Departed’, I am disappointed. Although this disappointment may be influenced by the fact that I recently read the book, here I try to explain my response.

The movie opens with a white screen as the ferry bringing Ted Daniels and Chuck Aule to Shutter Island passes through the fog that metaphorically represents the unclear world the two will be wading through once they’re on the Island. I thought this was clever and that the bright white of the fog and the bland grey of the sky and the ferry worked well for what I knew lay ahead. Once we make it through the fog onto the deck, we meet our two main characters watching the approaching island. When the captain ominously warns them about the approaching storm we are treated to a sweeping aerial shot that flies towards Shutter Island. I loved this shot and it moved us very quickly to the main location and into the main story, the only story. The Shutter Island that Scorsese had created was very close to the Shutter Island I had created in my imagination – the buildings, the guards, the nurses, the orderlies, the activities.

I know that if Scorsese’s Shutter Island had been very different from my Shutter Island this would have posed its own problems. As it is, though, our Shutter Islands are rather similar. I don’t think that it is the similarity that prevented me from being drawn into the film, I think it is more likely the fact that I know the story too well and was watching the film to make sense of the choices Scorsese had made.

Another thing that troubled me about the film – and that I am only articulating to myself now as I write – is that it is almost too perfectly made. The 1950s, when the story is set, is often presented as a time that was very much about sparkling appearances with dark secrets bubbling underneath the surface. Shutter Island the film is true to this and maybe this is the problem. Even though there is a violent storm at the beginning of the film, the little Shutter Island bubble remains neat: the cracked tree tunks are neat and there is very little evidence of havoc wreaked by the storm. The beds in the bunker where everyone bunks the night of the storm are also very neatly lined up and there is little chaos within this shelter. Teddy Daniels scales the cliffs of Shutter Island with nary a scratch to be found on his person, nevermind that scaling those cliffs are near impossible. Okay so the violent inmates break free, but even this is directed in a way that it does not look like close to all hell has broken loose. Maybe this is the genius of Scorsese? I don’t know if this is what he wanted, but it seems a bit too polished to be real. Of course I don’t mean documentary real, I mean it doesn’t create a real enough sense of the imperfect real world to convince me to suspend my disbelief and step into the film as if I were there.

As Martin Scorsese has been making films longer than I have been alive, it is no surprise that he is able to use the tools of the trade to masterful effect and construct perfect shots and beautiful pictures for us to look at. Throughout the film Scorsese also made use of the slightly high angled shot as he followed our main characters about, giving one the sense that something beyond their knowledge was happening, or that someone knew more than they did. Another shot that surprised and excited me was the ocean’s point of view shot of Ted Daniels in the orderly’s white uniform diving into the sea. The sequence begins with Ted on the rocky shore, he lifts off, we cut into the ocean’s pov as Daniels flies over the camera, and then we cut back to the observer’s perspective from the shore as he slices into the sea. The white outfit flying through the cloudy white sky and then cracking into the white-grey sea made me catch my breath.

Then there are the characters. Ted Daniels as played by Leonardo Cappucino, was all acting and very little character. I snorted during the scene where he discovers the drowned children, drags them one-by-one into his arms, cut to an aerial shot of the water rippling ever wider around the destroyed family and Cappucino opens his mouth to scream that cliched Hollywood, “Noooooo,” as he throws his head back towards the heavens. I expected more.

Cappucino’s accent did not work for me. I was told by my Slacking companion that it was meant to be Bostonian, but the pronunciation of  ‘marshall’ (with the first ‘a’ as the ‘u’ in club) and ‘escaped’ (as exscaped) kept sticking in my ear. It was as if those were the two words he had practised and so they had to make sure they got them in the script frequently enough, so we could hear that he really was from Boston.

Overall, it was hard to believe that Cappucino had made it to the point where he inhabited the character and became the character. He still had a few rehearsals to go.

And Mark Ruffalo? He wore this pained Bruce Willis expression through most of the film. I used to like him – especially after ‘In the Cut’ – but I will have to revisit my opinion of his acting.

But maybe, all this does is expose how far I still have to go as a director. I mean if the film works for most, especially for those who haven’t read the book, then Scorsese has done a great job of distancing himself from the script and the plot and of being able to judge whether the characters and the set are as they’re supposed to be.

And this has nothing to do with it, but as this is a blog, not a formal remunerated article, here is something I always wondered, which would be a question directed at Dennis Lehane, not at Martin Scorsese: why give the protagonist such an odd name, like Andrew Laeddis. Is Laeddis a common name in the States? It seems to me that Laeddis would be more suited as the made-up name and Daniels as the genuine name.

*Images used for this post are taken from imbd.com’s Shutter Island page