First of all, I recently discovered this professional quality video-sharing website. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it is called VIMEO.
It even lets you watch movies in high-definition. It alots users up to 500 megabytes to upload per week, with no regards to the length of the video. The only problems I’ve had so far are 1) A low amount of random views and 2) I can’t seem to embed my video here on wordpress.com. However, it kept the links that appear after the embedded video:
Rachael’s Cafe [pt. 4 of 5] from Nicholas Peters on Vimeo.
This excerpt is the fourth of a total of five vignettes from my documentary Rachael’s Cafe. Much like Jim Jarmuch’s film Coffee and Cigarettes, each vignette is a different group of people meeting/talking over coffee at a table in the cafe. Each conversation reveals something about who the people are, how they relate to the cafe, and just what the cafe is.
A vignette from Jim Jarmusch‘s film Coffee and Cigarettes:
Besides the last vignette of the documentary, subtitled Grand Opening, I have asked the subjects of the scenes to act on some level. However, these scenes serve as interviews in some way, but I thought I could use slight acting as a tool to create a more real and visual truth as one watches the documentary. This is because standard interviews often have a quality where the subject is removed from the environment, commenting on it as a temporary outsider.
My idea to have Rachael interacting in an interview/conversation with herself as she is now and as she was came from a 2001 film by the British filmmaker Nicholas Barker, which similarly blurred the lines of “documentary.” It is called Unmade Beds. In it, Barker made a low-budget documentary interviewing and observing four different New Yorkers who use personal ads regularly in their dating lives. He showed his subjects the documentary he made, then reshot it all on film, this time having them “act” it out. Presumably, they developed themselves as characters and re-acted the whole thing, this time potentially going a step further into whatever character came across in the first edit of Barker’s.
An interview with Nicholas Barker (director of Unmade Beds)
So once you had these live people that you were dealing, how much of them did you write, how were they accommodated or not?
Barker: We filmed the 4 principle character over 7 months on a camcorder first. I made transcripts of everything they said and collated, edited them down to a film script. I would say 95% of what you see and hear was based on words and behavior that I observed. I certainly don’t claim to be objective, this is highly subjective filmmaking, but it was based on the truths that seemed potent to me. And seemed to be the truths that I felt were dominant in the lives that I was observing. So all I was doing was refining and finessing their language and then turning it into a script, so that I would then teach them to act their own story in my version of their lives.
[He emits a brief, kind of sinister laugh.]
