Etre Et Avoir - a Documentary Essay - 2593 Words

Etre et Avoir. Etre et Avoir tells the story of six months in the life of a small primary school in the Auvergne, a predominantly rural part of France. It is a documentary film, primarily operating through a fly-on-the-wall mode, that is to say without any discernable interference from the film maker. The camera appears quite simply to sit alongside the children and observe them as they go about their daily business in the classroom. What I want to do in the lecture today is discuss the ways in which the film both conforms to this idea of simply offering a window on the world, and the ways in which it is clearly constructed, using the same kind of ordering of material we would find in a fiction film. I will be concentrating firstly on†¦show more content†¦Once again, this practical choice affects our overall view of the finished film: this is a modern classroom, with large windows that open out onto the world. The messages of the classroom that the film sends to us Ââ€" the classroom as a luminous space, the classroom as a space that both interacts with and protects from the wider world, are determined by practical, technical considerations that ultimately effect our entire reading of the meaning of the film. Philibert visited more than 25 schools in the Auvergne region, spending over five months scouting for locations, before settling on the small school in the film. He says that he fell under the charm of the teacher and the particular atmosphere he created in that classroom. Philiberts own sympathy for and identification with the teacher is echoed in the way that the film breaks out of its fly on the wall mode in order to have an interview with him: he is the character who the director wants us to get closest too, who is seen as the central articulating point of the film as well as the classroom. Perhaps it is not so surprising that M Lopez is suing for a percentage of the profits: I shall discuss his important symbolic and structuring role in the film in more detail later. Further considerations did however influence the directors choice of class. He was also attracted to the mix of gender, race and age in the class. It was, he claims, a heterogeneous classroom, and furthermore, it al lowedShow MoreRelatedThe Creative Decision Making in a Documentary Production2067 Words   |  9 PagesThis journal inspects the importance of creative decision making in various aspects of documentary production, examines whether those decisions help to make the film an engaging cinematic piece, and explores the influences it might have on the society, the cinema and the subject, in relation to my own experience in producing a 15min documentary film Hackney Pirates, and my understandings of relevant practice from the contemporary cinema. Introduction Films about education for children in critical