The film deals with the attack on the Central Park Jogger which occurred in 1989. The film traces what happened to the 5 juveniles who confessed to the crimes, served their time and then were exonerated after another man (a serial rapist) confessed.
What kind of images are from the past? Newspapers, TV programs
Unlike most Burns films the film is without a narrator, in part because the activity involved is recent enough that the participant are still around. The film's major "talking heads" aer 4 of the accused - the fifth's voice is heard, but did not want to be seen on the camera. A number of new reporters, lawyers and one juror are also intervieed on camera. There is substantial footage from the time and some footage of unclear date (shots outside the prison, shots in the park, shots in the streets. Historical footage is unlabeled but in most cases clearly historical.
How does the film juxtapose archival footage with current material? Images of the accused at the time of the trial and some 20+ years later?
What use is made of images to show time passing? (clock movement; cigarettes burned out, empty coffee cups in the empty office)
What about the image of the moon through the trees? Does it set the scene for the time of the attack?
What can you say about the use of music? (The term "Wilding" was apparently a police misunderstanding of one of the suspects (at the time) saying they were doing the "wild thing" although this is not certain. The underlying (subtext) to the film, like many of Burns' films deals with a "racial subtext" that runs through the USA (not the films) .
The film looks at a kind of "ethos" of the time and a kind of "mob" psychology that operated throughout the press and with many politicians.
SUMMATION (A LITTLE ONE)
There is also a difference between looking at Gone With The Wind as a fiction film and also as a documentary (in part) of the performances of those actors in it. It would be very easy to make a film about Vivian Leigh and her style of acting and lift scenes from Gone With The Wind to show a documentation of her acting style. Even more, you could do it with Street Car Named Desire where the Actor's Studio style (Brando etc.) contrasts with Leigh's. So the same piece of film can be viewed as fiction and non fiction. So we then made a distinction between form and content to see if there was something about the form which was crucial. Some films like Nanook are so staged it is hard to take it seriously as non fiction, but what they are doing is real. But the film lacks the typical arc for the main character which a fiction film has (some people said they were more interested in the problems of raising sheep in Brokeback Mountain than of the 2 guys interest in one another. They thought a documentary would be more interesting!) SO is there something about the structure of the film which is "documentary"? They were to consider Woody Allen's Zelig as a mocumentary - an documentary about a person who never lived, but the form is correct even though the main character never existed. They also considered the problems of "bio-pics" and opposed to things on the biography channel.
Later we talked about the role of the narrator and looked at films like Bunuel's Land Without Bread and those without narration like Titicut Follies. We looked at the problem of what can you tell from what you see without a narrator and what impact a narrator has. The loss of a narrator ostensibly rids one of a point of view (which it doesn't since shot selection and editing keep it from doing that). Consider the differences between a tourist going to a foreign culture and an anthropologist going to the same place. They were supposed to consider a 90 minute film of people talking in another language and a book which teaches you how to speak the language - which way would you understand the language faster. We talked about Kino Pravda, Cinema Verite and direct cineme in this respect
This lead to discussions of how much involvement does the film maker have in what happens in the film. So we will be talking about the problems of getting people to remove their buttons because they look crazy (maybe they are). We will talk a bit about people who move from one cause to another since they seem to need involvement. Some police I know talk about seeing the same people at demonstrations all the time no matter what it is for. One showed me pictures of the same woman protesting the Viet Nam War, whaling, nuclear power, and appearing at pro-life rallies, and so on "Is her life so empty?" asks Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd. when he watched the funeral procession for the chimp.
So Tuesday we will talk about Burns and his use of historical material (absent largely from this film) and his interest in a current hot topic - people arrested and jailed who turn out to be innocent (or at least now believed to be innocent). This film parallels, in some respects, The Thin Blue Line and ultimately asks the question about whether we can extrapolate from the film to real life. Burns film may say something about the "characters" in the film, but what does it say about the kids in real life? (The ADA still argues they did it). Here then is a question as to whether the film is really just about the Central Park Five or whether it is about the Criminal Justice system itself in which this is just one example.
Of course we had to get some "non fiction" films in that weren't documentaries like Baraka, Michael Caine on Acting in Film and the Disney Wildlife films Vanishing Prairie and Living Desert
along with some British documentaries like Night Mail and Drifters. A few propaganda films like Triumph of the Will and Why We Fight to lok at how does one decide if a film is educational or propaganda - is it like brainwasing (I don't agree with your position) or Consciousness Raising (I do agree with your position!)