Falling Into Form: The Documentary Failures of Fictional Film-Makers

The medium of film presents us with an imitation-reality locked within an invisible narrative structure. The effects of this all-pervasive narrative structure on our daily lives, on how we construct ourselves and those around us, changes both with time and with technology. One way in which such effects make themselves manifest is in films in which a character plays the role of film-maker; in such films the camera becomes the character’s method for negotiating between the real world and the expected and constructed realities of film narrative. I look at three such films: Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Russian film The Man with the Movie Camera, Jim McBride’s 1967 American film David Holzman’s Diary, and Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick’s 1999 American film The Blair Witch Project.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Oregon

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Solmon, Joanna Browne

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Pyle, Forest

• Fictional film-makers
• Imitation-reality
• Film
• Film narrative

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US
• UO theses and dissertations are provided for research and educational purposes and may be under copyright by the author or the author’s heirs. Please contact scholars@uoregon.edu with any questions or comments. In your email, be sure to include the URL and title of the specific items that you are inquiring about.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/32435

OAI record oai:identifier

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Ascholarsbank.uoregon.edu%3A1794%2F32435