Saturday, December 17, 2005

Keep Feeling Fascination!

Having put nose to grindstone, I have written a reasonable first draft of chapters 2 and 3. I still want to put some more work into the ending of chapter 3, and both will need some serious editing before I post them here. I had a lot of fun trying to get Baudrillard, Heidegger and McLuhan to 'agree' with each other. Not 'agree' in the strictest of senses, but rather to come to a similar point or two about epistemology through media - surprisingly they kind of do. More on that later.
In chapter three I'm tracing the development of the documentary as a means toward 'mediated truth' over the last hundred and twenty some years. I have changed the working outline to reflect some of the expansion in this area - also I wanted to find some way to work in the word "Phantasmagoria" more often. This chapter focusses on what types of truths media producers and their audiences expected to see in their 'documentary'. The tension between closer-to-actuality documentary and the more fantastic and contrived documentary has ocurred time and again, from the Magic Lantern shows of the Vicortian era, to the tension between cinéma vérité and propaganda docs, to today's 'serious' cable channel documentaries and reality-based TV. But even more interesting is the borrowing of production techniques into narrative film and the emergence of the pseudo-documentary and the mockumentary.

Hopefully I'll get the actual chapter online soon. In the meantime, I am looking for good quotes for chapter headers. Among them is this quote from "The Human League"

"Well the truth may need some rearranging,
if the story's to be told.
It's plain to see the facts are changing,
no meaning left to hold"

Any other suggestions?

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