Month: November 2022

Following on from the plan I created the previous week I wrote my paper over the course of this one. The first draft has now been completed and is currently in need of a heavy set of revising as it is over the word count before I have even implemented a literary review of my sources. Pictured above is a scene that I analyzed for my paper on crowd shots and individualism.

The biggest challenge in this paper for me is proper citation and intext citing using the Harvard system. Since I’m very used to MLA I need to be careful that I haven’t actually cited in MLA format and have to make sure I use the proper Harvard style. For this I will likely go through my final or semi-final draft with my professor to make sure that I haven’t cited anything incorrectly.

This week in class we had group discussion about our topics and helping each other with any issues or difficulties people were facing in research or topic development. For me the thesis I have settled on is: “How Blood Blockade Battlefront uses crowds as symbols of the city’s liberating potential”. This would function through the lens of the ludic nucleus as defined by Manuel Castels alongside with an analysis of the series through the genre lens of the city symphony. I have a plan already written up along with quotes from my secondary sources that I will use to back up my argument. I am quite on track when it comes to my paper.

This week we focused on the formal elements of preparing for our paper, mostly on quoting, paraphrasing and argument construction. For me what was most useful from this class was learning about the Harvard Citation format as I have not used that citation format before and need to learn it. The other aspects are mostly a good refresher as I have come off a BA in Film Studies so I am very used to writing papers of this nature. We were given a task to paraphrase a quote provided.

The original quote: The authenticity of a documentary is ‘deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images are linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality’

Horness Roe. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

My paraphrase: Honess Roe writes (2013, Animated Documentary) that the authenticity of documentary relies on the perceived notion that it’s images are authentic and represent evidence of an event that has occurred. 

I have also begun rewatching Blood Blockade Battlefront and taking specific notes for the show based on my thesis which I have refined a bit more. I mention how BBB uses crowds to convey Manuel Castel’s ludic nucleus but specifically I want to explore and show how BBB uses crowds as a symbol of the city and the city’s liberating (IE transformative) nature that the Ludic Nucleus idea explores. The definition I use for Ludic Nucleus is the one provided by Lawrence Webb in The Cinema of Urban Crisis : Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City “the city as playground, and ultimately, for all its contradictions, a place imbued with liberating potential.”

We went over this week on animated documentaries going over a massive list of them and viewing them. This led ultimately to the question of “Can animation be a documentary”. While some people believe it to be a grey question of half yes half no, I unequivocally state the answer is a Yes. While some people raise an issue that animated documentaries shouldn’t count as documentaries because of the nature of using drawings and not ‘recorded reality’ via a camera this to me is a strange argument to make. Traditional documentaries that make use of ‘reality’ via camera recordings are as prone to creating falsities for the sake of drama or education. Documentaries have been know to reconstruct footage in the editing room to make separate events appear connected cutting between a predator and its prey that in reality were filmed neither at the same time nor in the same location. Documentaries frequently make use of reenactment to convey long since gone events using actors, props and sets and while it is filmed and we see real people one screen it is no more ‘real’ than an animated piece. Even more fundamentally than that is that one cannot ever truly capture reality. When a camera is pointed one way it will miss out on everything else. Things such as distance to subjects, timing, movement of a camera all inform the audience of something and can create relationships that objectively do not exist like a close up of a tiger’s face causing the audience to connect with the creature because of how cute it is.

However Honess Roe points out that Documentary is linked to the notions of realism, not realism itself. That to be a documentary one must merely convince their audiences that was is being seen is ‘real’. Animation can provide that just as well as recorded footage. Using Maitland’s ‘Tower’ as an example it recreates the events of the University of Texas shootings using animation. It recreates the scenarios through the various reports and testimonies of the events. There is your grounding element to ‘realism’ and with that what one sees unfold on screen carries the weight ‘notions of realism’. While of course some audience members could struggle to identify with it was much as they would a traditional documentary that is no reason to deny animated documentaries their status as documentaries. Their imagery is no less real than that of a traditional documentary.