"Verbatim"

https://vimeo.com/93181621

Although not in a documentary style, this film has given me an interesting look at how verbatim might be presented on screen. The piece is different to my film in many ways; most crucially it does not aim to educate its audience on any particular topic, and shows us a situation that was not originally contrived to be made into a film. The latter is part of the reason I believe it works so well. Everything the people are saying is entirely in the moment, as opposed to my interviewees, who although will be speaking with no prior knowledge of the questions etc, will be doing so in the knowledge that their words will later be said by actors for the sake of an audience. However, as I am aiming to create a conversation with, rather than interview my testifiers, I am hoping that the flow of speech will be as fluid as seen in this film. I really like the performance style, it is clear that these are actors and not real people, which is something I am very conscious about communicating to the viewer. I think that in a film that is shot in a documentary style it would be incredibly easy to confuse the actors with the real people who’s words are being spoken. This is problematic as I don’t want to misrepresent the real people, or to mislead the audience into thinking they are watching them. However, the comedic intent is very strong in the actors’ performances, and using such an approach could undermine the importance of the original words. I want my interviewees to be taken seriously, as theirs is a view often speculated about but rarely glimpsed in its real form. Speaking about The Girlfriend Experience, Liz Tomlin examines how comedy can take away from the reality of a piece.

“(…) there is an audience laughter which is distinctly middleclass, a joke that the women themselves would not have recognised or intended. This is the laughter of a cultural tourist who finds humour in the naivety or taste of the “other” who does not share their levels of sophistication; a laughter that serves, as Peggy Phelan cautions, to turn the “other” into a “fetish” for the dominant subject of the audience (1993: 6). At such moments, the reality is effaced by the comic performances that make the laughter feel easy, but if the reality is recalled, the piece becomes uncomfortably voyeuristic.”