Will’s poem got me to thinking about the nature of memory, and how when we are trying to recall something, we are in an almost thought-less mode of being as we try to access information buried somewhere in our grey matter.

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OUTTAKE

TRUTH

The academic Cindy Poremba seems to be at the forefront of academic exploration of “documentary games.” In 2005, she wrote a paper with Ian Bogost (subsequently published in 2008) examining the idea of documentary games, and particularly to the idea of documentary in film. Academics seem to differentiate documentary games from “lens-based media” through their relationship to a data set that represents “reality.” In traditional film that data set would consist of light that is hitting film, resulting in the photochemical reaction that captures an image. But games are not constrained by this process, and video games in particular can run through “engines” that allow for a variety of documentations to be presented to the end-consumer. Poremba writes, “Documentaries excel in specific instances, but documentary games deal in real virtualities, possibility spaces in which mutiple instantiations for real world activity can exist.”

However, documentary games need not be bound to video games. The game designer Brenda Brathwaite is currently in the midst of creating a series, named the Mechanic is the Message, of six tabletop games, several of which deal with historical issues. She gained a lot of notice for her game “Train,” in which players are forced to deal with the logistics involved in transporting people to Auschwitz.

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The anecdote was especially relevant given the UDC’s adoption of contemporary mythology as the theme of our year-long project, using Roland Barthes’ 1957 text “Mythologies” as a guide and reference point for our experiment. Kara’s story raised a number of questions in my mind about the definition of myth. Can we assume myth is synonymous with falsity? Does myth obscure the “truth?” Should documentary play a role in attempting to challenge the falsity of myth, or is it enough to document the myth itself? How are myths created, and from where do they derive their power?

Prior to our class discussion, I would have defined mythology as a narrative technique used by a culture to explain something that is not understood, much in the way that ancient Greek and Roman mythology did. But myths can also serve as fables–morality tales intended to teach recipients about the social codes of a society. And deciding what the difference between mythology and folklore was proved especially difficult. In thinking about mythology and discussing the topic with some friends, I also came to realize that mythology is not seen as such by the society that has adopted and promulgated it; it requires the view of an outsider to assign the label of mythology. There is also a collective process by which myths are codified. It is true that one person can create a myth, but it takes a critical mass of people within a society to believe in and propogate the myth to ascribe it with any power. It makes sense to me that oral storytelling traditions are a key element of myth-making. The retelling of stories over a period of time and generations must have led to exagerrations, selective editing and the reimagining of narratives before they were ever written down and frozen in content. Kara’s experience seems especially relevant considered in this context, when no authority has recorded the story, and its ideas remain malleable. I don’t really have a clear idea how, if at all, these ideas and concepts gibe with Barthes’ definition of Myth.

So far the UDC members have been assigned two readings, the first being Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in The Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” That was followed by an excerpt from Barthes’ “Mythologies.” I have never formally studied cultural or literary theory, and found both readings difficult, if not outright inscrutable. In approaching the material, my attitude vacillated between a genuine intent to understand the material, and hostility toward what I perceive as the intentional obfuscation of ideas. Coming from a background in print journalism, my attitude about conveying information is rooted in the idea that it should be conveyed as clearly as possible in order to be accessible to the widest range of people possible. Creating a barrier to the expression of ideas only serves to heighten class divisions. I’m also a little wary of the fact that I am forced to read English translations of the works, and am wondering how much of the nuance of the ideas is lost through that process. But I want to be careful that my attitude is not rooted in feelings of inferiority or defensiveness because I don’t really comprehend the texts. In that spirit, I went out and picked up Terry Eagleton’s “Literary Theory: An Introduction” on the advice of Christopher Allen. I also stumbled across another supplemental text, “Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory” by Peter Barry, which I am slowly working my way through. I was, however, gratified to learn that I was not alone in my trepidation regarding the pronunciation of the names of members of the pantheon of cultural/literary theorists.

Over the course of several hours, I managed to interview nine sellers, some of whom were individuals, and others who were in pairs or larger groups. I again limited myself to two questions: why are you having a stoop sale, and what are you selling? One thing I noticed immediately was that people’s motivations for having a sale had changed dramatically in the space of a week. The first day I shot my initial Vidster footage used in my pitch, Saturday Sept. 26, many people had cited an impending move as the impetus for their sale. A week later, with no shift in the calendar month approaching, most sellers seemed motivated by a simple intent on making the most of the good weather, with many assuming it was the last warm Sunday of the year. Again, I found that the best stuff happened after I turned the camera off and engaged my subjects in conversation.

At the intersection of Sterling and Butler, I met Alfredo Ceibal, a self-described “painter of the painterly tradition” who had come to New York decades ago as a struggling artist, only to find success and return to Guatemala, his birth country, in an effort to give something back to the motherland. I had a great conversation on the death of the American newspaper and shared a fascination with Maori culture with one-half of a couple who had lived on Park Place, near the intersection of Washington Avenue, for close to 30 years. There was something so satisfying about witnessing stoop salers interactions with their neighbors and friends; it was almost like watching the social fabric being woven firsthand. Conversations were not limited to the simple mathematics of buying or sellling–people were having conversations about history, politics, art, and culture, among many other things. The experience immediately brought to mind descriptions I have read of the Agora, the common public markets of ancient Greek city-states that also functioned as a space for public political and philosophical discourse. Though, of course, stoops sales are decentralized in a way that the Agora was not.

During the editing of my rough draft, I was sometimes torn between including small gems that I had captured, and trying to remain somewhat true to the City Symphony genre. In the end, I decide to sacrifice my sentimental attachment to some of the footage in favor of a stricter presentation of information I had gathered in response to my questions. I ended up cutting out four of the interviews–sometimes because of poor production values, but in other cases because of an arbitrary gut feeling. Here is the result:

I got a wealth of helpful criticism from my co-collaborators during last Sunday’s critique session. Aside from suggestions on cleaning up some portions of distracting audio, the overwhelming consensus seemed to be that I should attempt to focus more on the relationship of seller to good. What are the stories behind some of the more unusual items for sale? What sort of attachments might stoop salers still have to some of their wares? How did the items come to be in their possession? These are all useful interview questions to pose. I was also interested to learn that my peers were largely uninterested in footage of the sellers interacting with buyers and browsers. I also got some good ideas on incorporating better transitions between the stoop sale sites, some of which would attempt to incorporate motion to give the viewer a sense of traveling within the neighborhood. (I agree with the critique that the transitions between sale spaces are jarring, but was left at a loss for how to connect the interviews.)

The next step, of course, is going back to get more interviews. It remains to be seen if I will have repeated success in being blessed with weather conducive to stoop sales.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City 1927. A classic silent film dedicated to Berlin shot in 1927 by Walter Ruttmann.

Man With a Movie Camera 1929. Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera is considered one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era. Startlingly modern, this film utilizes a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and incorporates innumerable other cinematic effects to create a work of amazing power and energy. Vertov uses all the cinematic techniques available at the time – dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze frames.

Manhatta 1921. A portrait of New York by painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand. The title cards show quotes from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” The film spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River. It has been described as the first avant-garde film made in America. Its many brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize New York’s photographic nature.

Regen (Rain) 1929. Short documentary film by legendary Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. A poetic meditation on the transformation of a city by rain.

For the assignment, we were given a neighborhood and a time of day; our means of documenting the city was left for us to figure out. I was given Prospect Heights during the hours of 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. I was really struggling with the assignment, and spent a lot of time tossing around varied ideas, but all of them felt rather forced, and not natural to the sort of work that I would eventually like to do. It’s possible that my thought process had become a little more confused than usual after having seen the widely varied work that my co-collaborators have produced. My first idea was to somehow document the area of northern Prospect Heights bordering the Atlantic Yards that Ratner was trying to seize through eminent domain in order to build the Nets stadium/office space/housing. I spent a few hours riding around the neighborhood on Wednesday, but my thoughts remained a fallow field.

On Saturday I woke up (relatively) early for a second tour. The thing I noticed almost immediately was how many stoop sales were going on. I’ve always been fascinated by stoop sales. They’re an unusual conflation of public, private and commercial space, and a rare opportunity for normally standoffish residents to interact with one another in the public arena. I decided to try to interview as many people having stoop sales as I could, limiting my questions to two: 1) Why are you having a stoop sale? 2) What are you selling?

The idea was an experiment in that I wasn’t sure what sort of raw information I would collect. What, if anything, would the responses say about the character of the neighborhood? Of its residents? Of the sort of people who have stoop sales? I also decided to record the specific addresses of all the stoop sales to see if any sort of geographic pattern would emerge. The one thing that I immediately realized was that, for some reason, my approach gave me almost immediate access to my subjects. In my experience, getting people to open up to a complete stranger is an enterprise that requires a significant amount of time, over which a mutual trust between documentarian and subject is forged. I’m not sure if the sort of people who would have a sale are just also the sort of people with less inhibition regarding being recorded. But inevitably, the most interesting material was conveyed after I had asked the two questions and turned my camera off. Here’a an excerpt of the first interview I conducted, of a Coney Island native and aspiring screenwriter who woke up after a bender penniless and thought to hold a sale to put together some scratch.

Because of battery problems, I was forced to shoot on the Vidster, which has a pretty terrible on-camera mic. I want to go back and redo the experiment with the Panasonic DVX-100, but my greatest concern now is that the weather will turn before I can get back out this weekend. I have no idea what seasonal restrictions the unwritten rules of the city impose on stoop sales, but I think I can safely assume neither seller nor buyer is interested in braving sub-freezing weather to sell/buy goods generally worth $20 or less. Keeping my fingers crossed.