guidance for July 21 discussion

For this session the lecturer would mainly act as a facilitator, and here is the outline for some basic agendas. The students would be grouped and their discussions would follow three broad clusters (and our discussion would be divided into 3 parts as well. Each for 15-20 minute; followed by an exchange session), you are encouraged to raise questions based on these three clusters:

a.     Lexicon/concepts for documentary cinema (based on our readings, external sources welcomed too; focus is on the characteristics and history of several schools/movements both in the Euro-American context and Asian context): direct cinema; Cinéma vérité; documentary realism & actuality; observational style; documentary ethics; materiality of documentary cinema; Robert Flaherty; John Grierson; spectators of documentary  

NOTE: please try not to only collect lots of information and simply list them out (since we have WIKIPEDIA) but try to explore and think why/in which manner these concepts/film-makers are crucial to understanding documentary cinema. Excerpts of their works are available at YouTube, you could simply click and watch.

b.     Postwar Japanese documentary cinema: Ogawa Shinsuke (Who? When? What? Why?); Sanrizuka series (When? By whom? What? Why?); political documentary (filmmaking); Iwanami Publishing Company (When? Who? What? Why?)

c.     Hara Kazuo and Extreme Private Eros (EPE): Hara Kazuo (Who? When? What?); the tradition of private/privacy in Japanese postwar documentary

NOTE: here I would invite the students to prepare 1-2 questions/arguments during their own group discussions, based on the Nornes article, and present them to all the classmates to consider. Questions could be about the style, realism, auteur’s position, subject (Hara’s relationship with the subject he is shooting); questions of ethics; and social context in/of EPE. Other questions are warmly encouraged too.