Gaby's Devotional Cinema Response

There are several ways I might apply the ideas that Dorsky spoke about in the book to inspire my own filmmaking, especially on the current documentary project. He stresses several times the importance of meaning and how to create new meanings in different ways, which I took to mean that one must not sacrifice meaning and emotion for the aesthetics of a film. Film has a way of moving people emotionally and is one of the reasons I found myself drawn to it in the first place. Documentary films allow you to tell stories that engage the audience and can even move them to action. As I would like to start my filmmaking career in social documentaries, I find this advice to be particularly useful. One has to be able to show the realities of your subject without alienating the audience and therefore evoke an emotional response within them. Dorsky mentions how some film has just become “mere wallpaper in support of spoken information” (29.) This can be readily applied to documentary filmmaking as many docs tend to only be informative without engaging the audience emotionally, and in turn tend to look as if they were news clips. Documentary films weren’t meant to be visual newspapers (with the exception of propaganda). Therefore, we should allow the film to take on a more poetic sense and find meaning through themes that would be explored in the film, without being constrained to them. To do that, I would use Dorsky’s idea of intermittence using techniques such as montage or moments where there is not much action or information. Though it is difficult for me to move away from wall-to-wall information, so I would need to be more selective in the information I want presented in my documentary that would be most effective and meaningful to allow for the moments of intermittence. This way, the audience doesn’t become too aware of the fact that they are watching a film with lots of information, causing an information overload for them and perhaps evoke a negative feeling towards the documentary as a result. Dorsky also explained how the use of the self-symbol could bring more meaning to the film without having the film explicitly state the meaning. In my current documentary project, we intend to use the juxtaposition of Dale’s life in prison and the constrictions of life in the junkyard.