Lecture 10,Eldon Booth

In Eldon Booth’s presentation, he introduced us the idea of documentary film and fictional film. At the beginning, he showed us his ealier work. It was video about an old man and a teenager’s life. He took this video in a documentary style. Docmentary film is a visual expressions to ducument the reality. So in his film, he had the low quality of frame to make it seems like old video. He keep the idea of illusion of reality in this work. He used hand held camera technique, natural lighting, documentary style and nature sound which was captured at that time. He used montage to make this video. He used these footage of this old man and this teenager’s life to create a completely different story which I think is very interesting because thses people were not living like that. He took this film in one take to make the viewers think its the truth. Eldon said he is not ‘only creating the fictional (story)’ but also ‘creating fictional reality and settings’. I think this work is very successful on the idea of the fact of film by the way he made this video.

Gus Van Sant made a film ‘Elephan’ in 1999 which was based on a true story that happened in Columbine High School but presented in a more fictional way. He used high quality cameras to take this film which blurred the truth of this event. The speed of the movie was very slow and it kept repeating the same chapter by different angles and viewings. The camera follows the characters to show their own school life and also make the viewers to pay attention to the environment of the school. It helped us to understand the events at Columbine High School because the people who the cameras followed by were groups of people around the school. They let the viewers understand the reason why that two students started shooting people around the school very clearly. It is very interesting to see most scene of the movie, the camera was behind the character’s back but at the end, when that two students went into the school and started to shoot people. I felt sad and surprised when Alex shooted the people very ruthless. He also killed partner at the end. So I think in this film, the repeatition, pace and the quality of the picture make us feel this is fiction. The truth of the event became blurry and for this reason this movie is very successful.