Moving Images, Understanding Media

228 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Media

Prom Night In Mississippi (2008), which was initiated as a result of Morgan

Freeman’s challenge to a small-town high school in Mississippi to integrate

its segregated prom, includes animated sequences to portray scenes described

in interviews. Th ere have also been some documentaries that are primarily

or entirely animated fi lms. In 2008, Israeli director Ari Folman drew on

his personal experiences from the Lebanon War to create the animated

documentary Waltz With Bashir, which won many international awards.

As you have seen through our discussions in the last chapter and here,

documentaries can follow narrative and non-narrative overall structures.

If the documentary revolves around telling a story through linked events

of cause and eff ect, then it is narrative in nature. If the documentary does

not contain a series of events that are linked by cause and eff ect—as with

storytelling—it is non-narrative. A recent motion picture that returns us to

our concept of motion picture language and that echoes non-verbal traditions

from throughout fi lm history—such as in the work of Dziga Vertov and his

collaborators—is the non-narrative fi lm Baraka (1992).

In his fi lm Baraka, Ron Fricke arranges footage from across the globe into

a mosaic of observations of human behavior and scenes of the natural world.

At the other end of the spectrum from lightweight 16mm cameras and Nagra

sound recorders, Fricke used cameras of his own design in 70mm format to

create images that can play on extremely large screens (such as IMAX) and

employ many sequences of time-lapse photography to capture sharp detail

and wide views. Th e images of Baraka are designed to paint a portrait of the

interconnected nature of life on Earth, and the fi lmmakers juxtapose shots

to develop associations that form ideas purely through visuals.

Figure 6-18 Viewers can see

a variety of digital effects in

contemporary documentary

fi lms, such as this use of

a split-screen along with

superimposition in Mojave

Mirage. (Courtesy Kaarina

Cleverley Roberto)

Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).