Digital Media Studies

(Prof. Federico Siniscalco)

There is different way to represent a culture: photo, film, clothes ecc.

Travel writing is different from Documentary because the first one is non-fictional.
Italy is the centre of the Western world and also became the centre of art and history. Italy is also
the center of the Roman Catholic Church.

There were many interesting aspects about Italy:

 Via Francigena= a reference to the way going north to south
 Grand Tour= 1600, Italy is a center of interest
 Macchiavelli= gained a lot of interests with the Prince
So, there were a lot of reasons to come and visit Italy
People from the Middle-class would travel to Italy, even teachers would follow the family and the
children to teach them about Italy. Unfortunately we don’t have many testimonials, especially
from the servants (since they couldn’t write)

Goethe: he went to the ruins in the upper part of Assisi, which was his major interest. It’s an
interesting quote because of the romantic importance he gives to nature, combined with the
“sublime”. He’s looking for what is significant for him

William Bryant: He has an interesting approach. He’s in Italy, in Florence and he’s writing to his
mother. He’s paying attention to the people and he’s looking outside the window of his hotel,
there is no interaction between travelers and the local people

Nathaniel Hawtorne: He travels to Italy and he writes journals. He also came to Arezzo but he
doesn’t mention his name

Renoir: an high fictional director, he wanted the population to be equipped with a video camera.
He didn’t like the standard video camera used in studio shooting

Bella e brutta figura= is an interesting concept for Americans. Italian people care about making a
good impression

The Direct Cinema Group:

Robert Drew
Richard Leacock
Pennebaker
Albert and David Masleys= Albert Maysles is one of the major filmmakers. He remained in contact
with numerous personalities, like: John F. Kennedy; the Beatles, the Rolling Stones.
For him what really counts is having a camera in his hands; he’s described as “the best american
cameraman”. David is his brother, with whom he work.
His career started in the 1950s as a lover of photography and human psychology; he also made a
film: “Psychyatry in Russia”, where he investigated about the curiosities of the Russian people; he
was provided with a video camera by CBS in order to create a critical, then the head of a
pharmaceutical company bought the film.

DIRECT CINEMA CINEMA VERITEE

waits for situations to happen on their own , Term coined by Jean Rouche= has
assuming a more strictly observational attitude more desire to provoke and reveal,
it pushes for actions to happen
Films of the Maysles Brothers:
- Showman: it is the first film of the two brothers. David made the sound and editing.
- Primary: where we have an important scene= Kennedy was filmed by the cameras above
his head to see the reaction of people who saw him walking around
- Yanki no!: 1960
- Salesman: it is based on the story of 4 salesmen, but it is concentrated in 1 of the person,
“Paul Brennan” (irish from Boston)
- Jimmee Shelter: they were on the stage with the Rolling Stones, then David go out with the
photographer Bryant and then they know that he was killed
- Grey Gardens
- Cristo: also brought to the embassy by Mondale, because he thought he was
Important for democracy

- Running Fence: it all began in the waters of the Pacific, near California. The white curtain
was supposed to interrupt communications but it did the exact opposite, it brought people
closer so that they talked about art

Albert Maysles thinks that there is no better job because people can learn from it, thanks to the
stories of others. His project began on trains and buses, from the desire to tell people’s stories. To
bridge the gap beween being objective/subjective, you need to have a loving spirit for what you
do.

The documentary Idea: At the end of the 1950s there was a development of technology to
facilitate filming, We have two instruments:
- KENOTOGRAPH= a big instrument mechanically equipped
- CINEMATOGRAPH= smaller tool with crank
When documentary spread, the instruments were still the ancient ones: tripods, small machines
with black and white photos, no sound until 1927, except concerts and orchestras

TALKIES DOCUMENTARIES= they had special effects and a comment, to add more info
LES RAQUETTEURS= the film records the activities focusing on people and their reactions. The
director becomes part of a social level
Lumière Brothers, “Arrival of a Train” (1895): It’s a silent film and, technically speaking,
the first. They were not totally silenced, since once they were played in cinemas there were
sounds or effect reproduced by cinemas.There were other ways to create this, but none as
efficient as photographs moving

Lumière Brothers “Exiting the Factory” (1895): Group of workers exiting the factory.
Noone looking at the camera, although the cinématographe could be easily seen but not so heavy.
This make us understand that documenting reality could affect reality

Lumiére Brothers “Fishing for Goldfish” (1895): That kind of equipment today led us to
film family moments

George Méliès, “Voyage to the Moon” (1902): more fictional. this is a long movie
Lumière Brothers vs George Méliès
The Lumière Brothers come from the tradition of photography, unlike George Méliès who comes
from the tradition of entertainment

“Uncontrolled” means that the filmmaker doesn’t function as a director nor as a screenwriter. A
prepared script is not permissible, nor gesture or any king of direct communication between the
filmmaker and his subject. The filmmaker acts as an observer.
Direct cinema masks the filmmaking apparatus, encouraging identification with characters and
producing dramatic tensions.

OBJECTIVE SHOT= a shot where we are not seeing the scene from any character’s point of view,
nobody will ever look into the lens because the camera is not really there

SUBJECTIVE SHOT= the camera is seeing what is happening through the eyes of one of the
characters. If an objective shot of something is preceded by a shot of a character looking off
screen we will interpret this shot as a subjective shot of what the character sees (this kind of shot
is POV)

Evolution of documenary > 3 films:

 In Transit= the title is linkes to the idea of moving along by train so it is a sort of allegory of
life. This is a very short film settled in a train. During the film we can observe how a woman
tried to not look in front of the camera. This is another example of “direct cinema”
(=without stage, special effect, and this is not a formal interview), is a sort of of monologue
without interruption between the mother and the little son. The director’s purpose is not
to break off the “poetic moment” (=mother with his son). Film can capture life, emotions
and events; in Italy we have never had this kind of film, instead we had filmmakers who
have performed something very close to this kind of film
 High School= his feature is capturing life into institutional locations and he always does it
with descriptions. There’s no narration, no music, no fiction but only going through the film
understanding how this kind of reality works. he did ths documentary about the
functioning of the high school, putting together all the elements which the school is
 composed of. The filmmaker doesn’t have a critical attitude according to direct cinema but
only observation and letting people make their own conclusions even if it provides a lot of
critics.
 Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee)= at the beginning it appears as a documentary which
shows the distruptions of USA South during the civil war (reproduction of the old style
documentaries). in the beginning we can listen the voice of Leacok, professor of
Massachussets where teached documentary cinematography. For the first time appear
“The voice of me” (authoritarian voice as “god voice” which express a state of mind= this
introduce the autobiographical documentary style)

Italian Neorealism: is a film movement characterized by stories set amongst the poor and the
working class. They are filmed on location, especially by non professional actors and the primary
goal is to show the economically difficult post World War II in Italy representing changes in the
italian psyche and conditions of everyday life.
Neorealism became famous in 1946 with Rossellini’s film “Rome open city”. Neorealist films were
filmed with non professional actors, although in a number of cases, well known actors were cast in
leading roles playing strongly against their normal character type. They were shot exclusively on
location, or cities or rural areas.Neorealist films often features children in major roles.

“FLY ON THE WALL” = the word fly regard the degree of visuals in which we can see everything,
the filmmaker captures:
 the reality
 the emphaty
In contemporary society the “Fly on the wall” are the security cameras which record everything
with no interruption, no interpretation

Naples of “Paisan” by Rossellini: a series which follow the liberation of Italy during the
World War II= this shot in Naples is more fictional but shoot in the streets with real people, only
American soldiers are actors.The sound was done in post production. The main theme is: african-
american racism > especially the fact when African American soldiers returned home after World
War II, their battle honor was not recognized ny American Society, because the color of their skin

Salesman: 1960, direct cinema documentary directed by Albert and David Maysles and Zwerin.
Albert says that Salesman repesent the life of all us. Both Maysles brothers suffered a great deal of
anti-semitism in Boston by Irish people, so through this movie they want to apologize for what
went when they were young
PLOT= the documentary follow four salesman as they travel across England and south Florida,
trying to sell bibles door-to-door in low income neighborhoods and attend a sales metting in
Chicago. Especially the film follow the story of one of them, Paul Brennan an irish american from
Boston. Characteristics:
 irony
 fantasizing being rich
 the microphone is an important innovation (= having a good sound is crucial)
 comentaring society= we don’t have actors but real people, a reality in a fictional style
Types of Documentary:
 Expository= the goal is convincing. Omniscent narration, stronng poin of view, image
supports the words
 Observational= filmmaker is just an observer
 Participatory= attempt to persuade
 Dramatic= often have reactions, uses actors and narration.

Approach and storytelling techniques: we can also being inspired by other documentaries.
What’s your approach?
1. FINDING A SUBJECT, DEVELOPING A CONCEPT: are the first things you have to do.
2. VISUALIZE: this is a crucial passage; imagine a black space and start to put on your idea to
create the story and visualize your setting, characters
3. FIGURE OUT THE STORY WHICH WE WANT LET ALIVE

Leacock and Drew on filmmaking: It is possible to use non professional actors, it is a

complicated technique, you have to develop to get people to be natural.

Pennebacker and Hagedus on filmmaking: Hegedeus said that filmmaking comes naturally
to him. He doesn’t think about what to do because he has a very natural approach to filmmaking.
He knows where to aim the camera, you have to practice.

“Dolce far niente” by Rossellini: this is a clip from Rossellini, Viaggio in Italia, 1953, it refers
to this concept that is a generalization of Italian people. The dialogue between the couple and the
Napolitans is about the “dolce far niente”. If you want to create a documentary on this, you have
to show things rather than tell things, so you have to be able to capture in real life situations
where people are enjoying the dolce far niente

Making a documentary - Preproduction:

 Subject= we have to think a subject, the general idea
 Topic=
 1. people living in Italy, not necessarily citizens;
 2. biographies and autobiographies; specific situations
 3. culture and tradition: art and crafts, culinary traditions
 4. the arts: visual arts, performance, cinema
 Story= which draw the attention of the viewers

Approach: understand what kind of documentary you would like to create:

 Observational micro documentaries
 Possible use of “voice of me”
 Possible use of interviews

Tripod or handheld: we can use a smartphone, from the point of view of taking images. One of
the first choices is how to hold your phone, having a stable image is important. You can hold it by
hand when you have to move. In the case of tripods there are some that are more expensive
because they have an element called video-heads. There is a liquid inside this head that makes the
movement smooth. Those tripods are good if you want to frame or put the phone in a certain
position and you don’t touch it, and they cannot be used for movement

How to shoot handheld:

1. Brace your camera elbow against your body. Use a free hand to steady your camera hand
or to steady the camera by gripping the lens. When you move the camera, you have to
move your torso, but don’t move the camera
2. Keep your lens zoomed out to its widest setting or use a wide prime lens. When you shoot
video, it’s better to keep it on wide angle, because this minimizes the feeling od shaking pf
the movement, 3 types of lens:
 telephoto or zoom lens= with these you can control the speed of zoom in comparison to
the new digital zoom. it makes object far closer, Maysles use it in Gimmee Shelter, he
zooms to the singers to reveal and give details
 Normal lens= which are the closest to our vision, it reflexes the way which our eyes look
 Wide angle= gives a wider view
3. Assume comfortable footing and lower your center of gravity slightly as you twist left or
right to follow the action
4. Avoid zooming. Move in closer or farther away to adjust your frame

Rule of thirds: ancient camera from the 1930-40. You need films. once you put in the camera
you have 4 minutes for filming. there’s no audio
The film language is based on the concept that we have many shots. Film is about compressin
time, going from natural time to film time, you compress time by cutting and editing

You have grid which most cameras in smartphones have. The center of our composition shoud
correspond to a point where the line cross. if you have two people on the shots,you have to make
sure that the intersection of the lines correspons with the most important part of a person, the
eyes.

Head Room: We have to make sure that there is enough space over a person’s head, but not
too much space

Look room or nose room: We have this person looking towards his left. we have to give space
where the guy is looking in order to see a little bit of what he’s looking at

Lens focal lenght - normal: Characteristics:

1. the normal lens reflex the way our eyes see
2. This lens is at the middle of the focus range
3. Both foreground and background remain in focus

Lens focal lenght: telephoto: If I change the normal lens with a telephoto and I stay in the
same place where I took the photo with the normsl lens, the image will be very close and zoomed,
so the only way to have a good photo is move back. The background will be closer than the normal
lens. Characteristics:
 Background soft-focused
 Much less of the background is visible
 Distant objects appear closer and more compressed

Lens focal lenght - wide angle: Contrary to telephoto I have to move closer to the person, in
order to keep the size of the head in the frame. There is a lot more background because the frame
is bigger, i’m framing more things. Characteristics:
 objects close to the lens are distorted, and a wide angle lens tends to create a barrel effect
 distance exaggerated
 much more background is visible

Shallow depth of field: a creative use of focus, we have a sense of depth and we have a way of
making an object stick out from the background. This approach became popular and also our
smartphones have a system where digitally they can create a shallow focus. Obviously in film it’s
done optically, because the digital way doesn’t give a good image

Long depth of field: It is the opposite of the shallow focus, object are all the way focused from
very close to a very long distance. The ability is to try to geta s many objects as you could in focus

Depth of field: in a camera, in addition to the gear for the focus, there is another gear which is
the diaphgram, a system that opens and closes the aperture of lens. It regulates how much light is
coming in, it’s expressed in number. The more the diaphgram is closed down, the deeper the focus
is, the more the diaphgram is open up, the smaller the depth field is

Racking focus: we can change in a moving image, the points that are in focus. What we have to
do is open and close the diaphgram to change the focus

Lightning: another important aspect. There is a point where the sensor will be exposed properly
if you are usinga digital sensor or when the film will be exposed properly if you are using analog
film, and then we get a clear image that has a good balance between dark and white. The image is
underexposed when there’s not enough light, overexposed when there is too much light. It’s
better to capture images early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is just rising
and when the sun is setting.

Sound recording: sound is crucial, in fact many people say that the big difference between an
amateur film and a professional film is sound.We have:
 sound locations
 monitor sound level
 ambient sound
 avoid wind
Storyboard: is a graphic organizer that consists of illustrations or images displayed in sequence
for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic. it has 4 columns:
shot number, picture, title shot, and duration of shot, sound, dialogue

Film “Montery Pop”: was made by Donald Adam Pennebacker. One of the faboulous 4
filmmakers who created direct cinema. With this film, he created the genre
“ronkumentary”= the documentary about rock concerts or rock groups
You hear this music in the background “extradiegetic”= representation of space given only by
descriptive sequences; so it’s not being played in the concert but it’s being used as a background
music for the shots.

Between “Monterey Pop” and Gimmee Shelter there’s a huge contrast:

 In Monterey Pop people are happy, kind
 In Gimmee Shelter people are aggressive, drugged

Clip of “Monterey Pop” + Song “Are you Going to San Francisco”: everything looks
bautiful, happy. the movie becomes a rockumentary, in the sense that there are different rock
groups that we see.
The song becomes a sort of emblem for the protests and for a dreaming of a new world, a new
society. It’s one aspect of the counterculture of the flower children that existed and that at least
left them be what they are

Last minute of Gimmee Shelter: the credits will be quite long. There were many people
involved in the filming. This rockumentary was not done to make money on it but to put the focus
on some problems of the society of the time.
Sony Berger, one of the leaders of the “san Francisco Hells Angels” wrote an autobiography that
he dedicated to Albert Maysles bevause he felt that he was a fair rapresentation of the “Hells
Angels” of San Francisco (they’re not evil people, terrorists, they were keeping some sort of order
that was not carried out by the police forces, were oppositional against any kind of rebellion.
“The rolling Stones” kept the relationship with Albert and David Maysles because they didn’t feel
that they were improperly represented and so the film manages to keep both aspects of the story
and it doesn’t point a finger against one or the other

Maysles on objectivity: They’re interested in the human connection that filming can bring, in
fact dispersed film was about psychiatry in Russia back in the 50s when he went and filled into a
mental institution because he was doing psychological work on that topic

Establishing shots: are a type of shots that help us to understand where we are. Normally they
are longshots and they are done with the wide-angle lens (ex: they show the the skyline of the
city)

Wide shots: are similar to establishing shots because they use the wide angle lens and give us a
lot of infomation. They are a little different to establishing shots because they could be already
telling the story and they would be followed by medium shots and close ups
Medium shots: In medium shots you start to see the white part of the eyes, they can be done
by the normal lens. So, you start to see some detail of a character

Close ups: are interesting because they put you in the story. They can be done with a normal
lens and also with the wide angle lens and if you have a tripod also with the telephoto lens
(because with this lens the image tends to shake). Those shots are used to emphasize every little
movement and detail

Other types of shots:

 1-shots= just one person in the frame; typical of interviews
 2-shots= a medium shot, frames 2 people at the same time
 Over the shoulder shots (OTS)= typical of TV interviews, good for shooting a conversation
or interaction between people, and for showing a character’s point of view (in an objective
rather than a subjective manner)
 Reaction shots= used to show an opposite viewpoint of the shot before. They are also used
to alternate between subjective and objective shots
 Tilt up and Tilt Down= uses a cinematographic tecnique in which the camera stays fixed but
rotates up and down on a vertical plane (ex: if we are close to a tower and we want to take
a shot of it but we don’t see the whole tower, we slowly move up the camera to show the
rest of it)
 Pans (panoramic shots)= from left to right and viceversa

Cutaways: help to avoid jump-cuts (when you take one single frame, you cut it and you put it
back together). They are shots of anything relevant to your interview or location. They can be shot
before or after an interview. They should add signficant information to the story. For example in
an interview if we cut a frame, we can see that the image changes, and it’s not good to see, to
cover this jump-cuts we put on this frame another image (for example the interviewee’s hand
shaking his pen)

180^ rule:the 180 degree rule is a guideline that states that two characters in a scene should
mantain the same left/right relationship to one another. When the camera passes over the
invisible axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line and the shot becomes what
is called a reverse angle. Reversing the angle is commonly thought to be disorienting and can
distract the audience from the intent of the scene

The 30 rule: if we shoot a scene from an angle, then decide to shoot a little bit further along,
these two shots will not cut together very well because they are too similar. It causes the cut to
jump out on screen. To avoid this, you can make sure you always move the camera 30 degrees,
orbiting arounf the subjects.This will help to reduce the severity of transition jearring or what
filmmakers and editors refer to as jump cuts
B-roll or visuals: b-roll complements the narration (during an interview or an off-screen voice).
It can be relevant to the topic being spoken about or to the speaker. It is a good way to avoid
having just some “talking heads” on screen

Duration of shots: The following times are indicative. Remember, you can always cut shots
during editing, so even if you shoot a little longer, it’s ok but it’s good to keep these durations in
mind, so as not to get carried away.
 Wide shots: max 7
 Mediumshots: max 5’’
 Close ups: max 3’’
 Longer shots can be used to follow an action (someone walking, cookineìg etc). These types
of shots are knoen as “long takes” but they are quite difficult to pull off

Coverage: is something that we need in order to be able to edit the footage. When you are
recording a situation, an important event (marriage, graduation) you always have to go beyond
the shooting of the event, you have to fill in the rest, you have to take location shots, show details,
show another action that they are going on.

Following Sean: this film is an essay film (=video saggio), it’s not considered an observational
movie, but more as an autobiographical documentary. There are some parts that are
observational, but what is characteristic is that the filmmaker talks about his experience, his life
(voice of me) the voice of filmmaker is a sort of memoire, a sort of essay that we are listening to.
In addition to telling his life, the filmmaker tells us the story of a little child (Sean) and we see in a
large range of time his growth. This film is an integration of images with words in the first person
narration. An autobiographical documentary works if we find the right register, tone of voice
which is not the BBC documentary speaker, you have to interpret your story and your voice