Documentaries has always been something that interests me. I feel like there are lots of ways to conduct documentaries and so many topics to explore, that it can be a fun and every educational experience. Often times though, I feel like documentaries can be very difficult to nail. In the case of the Asian Americans Documentary for class, the biggest problem here is the time allowed for the series.
The five hours of this series just does not seem like enough for a documentary covering Asian American history. The titles strongly implies that this is a series discussing the vast history of the culture, but it just doesn't seem to have hit the target. I can't speak beyond the two episodes we were assigned for class, but it seem to only focus on a few things, specifically only Japanese and Chinese Americans, which leaves out so much history and stories.
I want to attempt draw comparison from this documentary to a different documentary. I recently finished a documentary called The Last Dance, which chronicles the Chicago Bulls and their historical run in Basketball with the GOAT of basketball Michael Jordan. The goal of the series was to show the behind the scenes of practices, competitions, and team atmosphere and to show some of the drama that occurred between players and coaches and other teams. In my opinion, I felt the documentary was extremely biased towards Michael Jordan. It always seemed like he had the last say in any situation, and the documentary almost always focused on him even when he wasn't on the bulls. I understand Michael Jordan pretty much was that team, but I feel like the documentary didn't set out to achieve its goal. I remember the trailers explaining the hundreds of hours of behind the scenes footage that seemed to be left out. I am not an expert in basketball or documentaries in general but this is just my take on it. The documentary although entertaining, didn't do what it wanted to do. This is a similar feeling I have towards the Asian American documentary. It is an entertaining watch and can be very informative, but it just doesn't have the time to explore everything it wants to do. Any topic it covered just felt like a recap instead of a full dive into it.
Basically what I am trying to say here, is that documentaries, I feel, are often times hard to nail. TO me, this documentary just seems like it doesn't really know what it wants to achieve, and is a little all over the place. The information presented is goo and informative, I just feel like the title of Asian Americans paired with 5 hours just leaves out so much history.
 |
| Poster Image for the Program |
I definitely agree that it seems the documentary doesn't have enough time and resources to cover all of the history of Asian Americans. I kind of disagree with the idea that the documentary doesn't know what it wants to do. I think it does know what it is choosing to present and does so intentionally , it feels too coincidental at times. So I think the problems are the time constraints and the information they chose to present seems cherry picked in a way.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do agree that the time constraint of the documentary really hurt it, I don't agree that it was its main problem. I think its main problems were focusing almost exclusively on the families of Chinese and Japanese Americans. It could have focused on shorter vignettes on different groups in the same time allotted.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ethan's point. While it is true that it is hard to cover everything is such a short amount of time; the time in this documentary did not divided the time equally among different communities. I was wondering if making a documentary with less detail but that explores more communities, would that make it a better?
ReplyDeleteLike Trent said it does seem intentional the erasure that happens. They could have made more episode to this series.
Valeria
The comparison to the Michael Jordan documentary is an interesting and timely one. And I actually disagree with the documentaries proposition that "Michael Jordan pretty much was that team." Michael Jordan would not have been Michael Jordan without the world class skills of Scottie Pippen and other Bulls players that he was always happy to overshadow. For me, this demonstrates the power of documentary to appear as a neutral disseminator of facts while it always has an agenda.
ReplyDelete