Any respect for video journalism? - Shooting by Numbers

Peter at Shootingbynmbers writes:

"There is one significant difference between the luminaries of the new wave and the evangelists of video journalism.

Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol etc. complained that the leading French moviemakers of the fifties had no respect for the art of moviemaking and accused them of “holding cinema in contempt”.

The most strident VJ evangelists espouse the new paradigm only because it is fast and cheap. They have no respect for the talents of the producers or the discernment of the audiences." Read more here...


And I responded
Hi Peter, ultimately therein lies the crux. Video journalism's strength in a more tech-savvy environment might also prescribe a weakness, depending on one's point of view.

It is the low hanging fruit. Pick up a camera, shoot, et voila.

Photographers may still happily embrace the tag, "Amateur Photographer", the same goes for by Super 8mm Bolex users.

But you're unlikely to find this anywhere in video journalism.

There is, and it's not an argument for me, no distinction between the grades of video journalism inter alia.

Perhaps partly because it's relatively new; relative with regard to the newspaper video journalism boom, and also peer review is thin on the ground.

Renoir, Spielberg would not call themselves auters. They were bloody good to anyone who knew their work, but it took that mag that would evolve into an influential read and spark a movment in itself, Cahiers du cinéma, to bestow such a label: auter.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Hence you've a basis to argue that videojournalism is in fact DVCam film making for news and more, which has always been my point here

But that's a mouthful and video journalist, like radio, magazine, newspaper journalist has more bite.

But if we entertain the idea VJ is digital film making then like film it has rules that require being pushed, just as Lars Von Trier's Dogme movement added to the new wave of low budget film makers emerging en masse on the scene from the 80s. [Here's one of my fav snapshot articles about that era].

But we're talking about video journalism, posts like yours and many others that talk about the process, form, style guide us to think further beyond its monetary advantages.

DIY TV, Cheap and Chearful TV, Robocop TV - these were some of the nicer adjectives we attracted when we went Vj solo in the 90s.. Get a load of those cameras!

We might have been partly to blame: yep I can do the job, (er badly someone just shouted LOL) of three some of us gleefully pronounced.

For me years, I'd like to have thought we should have moved on.

d

p.s Now here's a humdinger, Is videojournalism art?
p.p.s just going through Bergman's collection - Seventh Seal. Watched it when I was knee high to a grasshopper, but makes more sense now. What about posting a pool of your cine favs that could lend to auterism.

Devoid of Yesterday

Rob Chiu does things that you wonder how on heaven's earth he does them. When I wan to be inspired, rob's site is where I go put my feet up. Actually I don't that much now as I pretty much have a mental library of the work on his site.

Rob and I go back some years. We met on the covers of a magazine called Computer Arts. He had his reel in one week and then mine the other. Reels are reels, but rob's was beyond belief.

His style is teutonic, a sort of David Finch meets Carson and Tony Scott. What he does with visuals will make you weep with joy and probably send you to amazon to buy a book on After Effects.

Yesterday he sent me the preview of his new piece. Gosh would I just love to sent it out, but er No. Embargoes are not meant to be broken.

There is a new space that video journalists could inhabit, mixing motion graphics with their skill for story telling. It gets wrapped up in something I call MI6: integrated multimedia.

The bar Rob sets is way high. On Black Day to Freedom, about refugees which he produced, curated and everything else, some of the most talented young designers around the globe gave freely their time. Hahaha he had me running around the woods behind my house with a sony tape attached to me, being pelted with rain, so we would get the right voice effects for his piece.

Anyway's what am I doing trying to encroach on his glory. Super.. superb. Go to his site

www.theronin.co.uk and then again next week to catch his new piece.