Apr 18 2008
No respect
Following on from a comment to my post yesterday [New media - old wave]
There is one significant difference between the luminaries of the new wave and the evangelists of videojournalism.
Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol etc. complained that the leading French moviemakers of the fifties had no respect for the art of moviemaking and accused them of “holding cinema in contempt”.
The most strident VJ evangelists espouse the new paradigm only because it is fast and cheap. They have no respect for the talents of the producers or the discernment of the audiences.
If they are not shouting:
“any idiot can do it”
then they are congratulating themselves on their Limbaughesque perspicacity:
“no-one ever went bust underestimating the taste of the American public”.
….not yet anway, but we live in hope.
[…] video 2 zero added an interesting post today on No respect for video producers or consumersHere’s a small reading […]
Hi Peter, ultimately therein lies the crux. Video journalism’s strength in a more tech-savvy environment might also prescribe a weakness, depending on one’s point of view.
It is the low hanging fruit. Pick up a camera, shoot, et voila.
Photographers may still happily embrace the tag, “Amateur Photographer”, the same goes for by Super 8mm Bolex users.
But you’re unlikely to find this anywhere in video journalism.
There is, and it’s not an argument for me, no distinction between the grades of video journalism inter alia.
Perhaps partly because it’s relatively new; relative with regard to the newspaper video journalism boom, and also peer review is thin on the ground.
Though Michael Rosenblum and Ken Krushel at CTZN.TV are moving to redress this.
Renoir, Spielberg would not call themselves auters. They were bloody good to anyone who knew their work, but it took that mag that would evolve into an influential read and spark a movment in itself, Cahiers du cinéma, to bestow such a label: auter.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Hence you’ve a basis to argue that video journalism is in fact DVCam film making for news and more, which has always been my point here
But that’s a mouthful and video journalist, like radio, magazine, newspaper journalist has more bite.
But if we entertain the idea VJ is digital film making then like film it has rules that require being pushed, just as Lars Von Trier’s Dogme movement added to the new wave of low budget film makers emerging en masse on the scene from the 80s. [Here’s one of my fav snapshot articles about that era].
But we’re talking about video journalism and posts like yours and many others that talk about the process, form and style guide us to think further beyond its monetary advantages.
DIY TV, Cheap and Chearful TV, Robocop TV - these were some of the nicer adjectives we attracted when we went Vj solo in the 90s. Get a load of those cameras!
We might have been partly to blame: yep I can do the job, (er badly someone just shouted LOL) of three some of us gleefully pronounced.
Years on, I’d like to have thought we should have moved on.
d
p.s Now here’s a humdinger, Is videojournalism art?
p.p.s just going through Bergman’s collection - Seventh Seal. Watched it when I was knee high to a grasshopper, but makes more sense now. What about posting a pool of your cine favs that could lend to auterism?
for art in videojournalism: Geoffery Reggio - Anima Mundi, Koyaanisqatsi
for auteur in vidoejournalism: Errol Morris - Fast Cheap & Out of Control, Thin Blue line, Fog of War etc.
- so for vj that aspires to art get Philip Glass to do the music.
for auteur in mainstream Hollywood narrative: David Lynch
for web video- I though Hillman Curtis first film on Stefan Sagmeister was brilliant - very arty:
http://www.hillmancurtis.com/hc_web/film_video/source/sag.php
not very impressed by any of the others though.
Its not so much lack of respect as lack of understanding of what is going on in the world of online video.
Some news exec sees a YouTube clip get 2 million hits with shaky footage from a cheap handicam and they think they can replace all the photogs with high school kids. Sure if the high school kids get really compelling footage that no-one else has got then quality doesnt figure in the equation.
But even in big news rooms, how often does that happen? With less compelling stories, competition and image-quality comparisons rear their ugly heads.
How can you describe Erol Morris and Geoffery Reggio as VJs? They both make really big budget films using Hollywood size crews. About as far from VJ as you can get.
I don’t think any viewers are interested in how many people or how much money is spent making a video. Many of the most popular YouTube videos are made by $$$$$$$$ enterprises.
Lowering production costs lowers the risk threshold - you can afford to fail more often without going bust - but as producers successfully refine their production decisions I don’t think costs are going to be the deciding factor in the long term.