Cinema as journalism as we might know it.
Minari (2020) is a film you must watch. It is cinema as life. A plot that makes itself invisible. It is also mimics journalism as reality. More on that in a minute.
That it is somewhat autobiographical offers something to the latter. But it’s a story about the subtle dynamics of integration, of pursuing one’s dreams and about sacrifices, and intergenerational problems to overcome. It is life as known.
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu said cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves. Alongside Nomadland (2020) directed by Chloé Zhao — who won two oscars — Minari nominated for seven Oscars won one for supporting actress Youn Yuh-jung exhibiting the cinema of life.
Is there a shift to how we might make sense of the world where journalism can sometimes stumble? Ask any teenager how their world is shaped by moving image artefacts and the likelihood is they’ll cite a piece of cinema, NOT journalism.
I asked the question in doctorate studies several years ago. What could journalism learn from cinema? I would interview some of the UK and world’s leading news people. To some it was heresy. But what if a director from cinema looked to make stories in journalism?
What if Spielberg did journalism? It was his second option after all if the silver screen did not yield. Or what if the two overlapped? It would be like documentary and cinema — a thriving field.
Google “documentary cinema” or “cinema documentary”, and for the record remember how Director Michael Moore lit up Cannes with Bowling for Columbine (2002) which received a 13-minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2002. Remember too when Moore said stop making documentaries make films. I would not draw parallels with his reasons for that, in creating entertainment, more so how cinema and its methods engage audiences.
I’m a former scientist who stood behind a wet lab synthesising compounds. You have to break eggs to find the yoke of an idea. As a journalist who worked for the BBC as a reporter (see here) on a nascent cine-journalism format, and then being named an artist in residence at the UK’s leading arts centre the South bank Centre, finding that yoke reveals a possibility of new worlds. Literature and Art have gone through their metamorphosis in striking fashion.
Journalism and its alignment with democracy faces many challenges. Audiences are dwindling in news. The consequences for our democracies and livelihoods leaves people under assault. It’s not also that journalism is dying, but audiences are far more media literate than they were in the 1950s. They crave drama too, true drama.
And the drama need not be physical conflicts, but the nuances and confrontations of everyday life out laid as character driven or immersive narrative events. That’s what great cinema explores, the explicit and implicit. That’s what great journalism should explore.
Broadcast Journalism’s remit in the 1950s under the phlegmatic Grace Wyndham Goldie adopted a form that would neuter expression or metaphor for the obviously explicit. What you saw was what you got.
In Lock down a parent may look fine on the surface, but look for the subtle signs that demonstrate suffering. That’s not how the originators of television news codified it. Subtelty is for novels.
Cinema journalism is an emerging real discipline, built on the sturdy pillars of American rebels e.g. Robert Drew, and Russian pioneers e.g. Vertov.
Yet it is by no means an easy medium to grasp. Hence the limitless deconstructions. It has constraints, but it’s also a langue that draws in audiences. It requires new ways of teaching, of understanding the theory and practicals to deal with the complexities and ideologies within society.
What if journalists could make great cinema journalism? And there is no one cinema. Yet this is not a hypothesis because an emerging cadre are, and they’re being lauded for what they do. Their attempts at storytelling reach for new criteria. How do I make my story memorable? How do I cut past the dead cats and squirrels?
“How do I make the audience feel how I feel?”, asked the BBC’s Clive Myrie. It’s not about being dispassionate ( which journalists once advocated), it’s about emotional intelligence and empathy asking the question: “how would you feel?”
Journalism has invariably been described as a cultural form. Yes, but there’s an adoption of a framework which obviate much needed cultural nuances. It strafes events as some kind of canonical narrative. It uses a Western langue that has proved ill-suited to cultural differences between citizens of the Global South and Asia. That’s what cinema journalism offers, an alternative for our modern days.
This is the 2-min promo below from my Doctorate, illustrating cinema journalism.
