Love, Racism and Mental States- Cinema as journalism should be, but how and why does it matter?
It’s a film that peers into the chest of what cinema was in its purest form — a slice of life. Empire of Light (2022) by Sam Mendes lives in the 80s, illuminated by its fashion, Ska music, Skins and a cinematography mimicking that polaroid effect long forgotten.
A young black man played by Micheal Ward finds friendship and more with a maturer woman (Olivia Coleman’s character). It’s a highly believable scene that forms part of the film’s main spine, with mental issues, racism and the magic of movies being the tarpaulin that covers the plot. I’ll give no more away, other than to urge you go watch, if you like your cinema as life.
That cinema as life resonates with me. Last year it was Minari (2021) which received critical acclaim and seven Oscar nominations, including one that was taken home by Youn Yuh-jung as best supporting actress.
Written and directed by by Lee Isaac Chung it’s a somewhat auto biographical film setting up shop for the emotions of a South Korean family’s quest to settle in rural America. Here the subtle dynamics of diversity and integration, of pursuing one’s dreams, and sacrifices play out amongst intergenerational family members.
Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu said Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves and to that end Nomadland (2020) written, edited and directed by Chloé Zhao is the mirror that equally reflects and refracts America’s under-the-radar-citizens.
It netted two oscars for the director and one for actress Frances McDormand the driver of the film. The script emerged from a book, which itself arose from a piece of journalism documenting America’s underbelly society grimly moving across the prairies of Amazon, searching from one job to another.
Is there a current shift to capturing everyday life as film? Not really you could point to Lindsay Anderson This Sporting life (1960) starring burgeoning actor Richard Harris. Anderson back in the 50s was spearheading a new thing in British New Wave cinema having bagged an Oscar winner for best documentary short with Thursday’s Children (1954).
Yet something is happening. Diverse stories and diverse personnel could be it. Cinema as journalism and journalism as cinema too, when I interviewed film maker Mark Cousins.
I’m behind a movement called Cinema Journalism. It’s an adjunct to video journalism in which one person is the auteur, like Zhao, filming, editing and directing, but that multi-skilling is not its USP.
Video journalism is officially 29-years-old from when it was first introduced in the UK. Thirty youngsters from 3000 were chosen into its ranks. Many have gone on to amazing careers, such as Bafta winner Dimitri Doganis, and documentarist and writer Marcel Theroux, brother of Louis.
Something happened as video journalists rolled out 500 stories a year doing everything themselves. Many discarded the journalism tropes and looked to cinema for guidance. In turn, audiences and experts would comment that what they were seeing was real life that looked liked cinema. Take the views of this audience from the uber gathering SXSW.
My first real inkling of this journalism a cinema was in Berlin at the global video journalism awards, for a film about the UK’s newspaper industry getting into video making.
I’d trained scores of journalists across the breadth of the UK with the Press Association. 8 Days is how they cracked storytelling to take on the BBC in 8 days by reporting a murder case re-opened for them by Cleveland police.
Cinema journalism is not just solely a question of aesthetics — that is the look. Cinema is a confluence of elements that cohere together, as well as different styles. The trend at the moment for the cinematic look, is but one element and the label “cinematic” itself is not exclusively about ascribing the bokeh effect or shallow depth of field.
Many a critically acclaimed film have not used either. Citizen Kane (1941) was a masterpiece using deep focus. In other words cinematic journalism is not the same as cinema journalism.
There are a number activities that render a journalism film as cinema which can still be assessed as objective and impartial. A PhD study has proven this, and interviews with some of the UK’s cinematic auteurs play to this.
“Aren’t I talking about documentary?”, I’m often asked. Most forms are palimpsests I reply. Cinema’s beginnings were life as seen, before experts like John Grierson considered them too superficial or staged towards fiction and ‘introduced’ the term documentary. USSR filmmakers still then called factual films cinema.
Just as the 1990s saw the revision of documentaries, led by figures such as Michael Moore to become Cinema Documentaries, so in the 2000 names such as Raül Gallego Abellán and Clive Myrie would give credibility to cinema journalism. Myrie’s work during lockdown was shown to groups in the UK and Russia who came to the same conclusion. This is cinema.
Empire of Light could have been captured in its day as journalism. Several films e.g. Kes (1969) fall into that category of social films that would largely be ignored by current news outputs in favour of the news package. This form deploys attenuated sequences to drive its narrative, and its sense-making is akin to watching an episodic narrative and being dropped in on episode 35.
Another masterpiece Pather Panchali (1955) by Satyajit Ray too could have been journalism or a doc. Cinema and video journalism only exist because of the deficit that’s come to exist in news film making. They’re equipment agnostic.
You could film with a broom frankly (if it worked). I once put a lens in a carrot to make my point. It’s the philosophy driving the physical film. There’s a whole treatment justification to arrive at this.
But why does it matter? In an age of presumed fleetingness, you still never forget a good film. Its sense making stays with you. It’s a way of circumventing spin, because it frees itself of normative journalism tropes, and young people as I told an audience of teachers at the BFI are drawn to it.
I’ve had young people I work with express how they wouldn’t watch a film of an event like the rescue of young 12 Thai boys and their coach stuck in a cave, but they’d watch the film The Cave. This view is universal. In Lebanon, India, Russia, and on the border of Syria I would meet and work with young people, who themselves eschewed the news format for cinema journalism. This is my trailer on them.
Back to Empire of Light (2023). I expect to see Micheal Ward in a leading man status film soon. Comparison do no one justice other than act as shorthand notes, and to that end Ward is a young Denzel Washington.
If you’d like to support my programme of cinema journalism or know more please contact me at david() viewmagazine.tv, gyimahd@cardiff.ac.uk or Linkedin.
Read my piece below on how to produce a radical programme in learning to build a start up around creativity. I’ll be hosting a panel on diversity with Create UK in March. More details to follow.
