LET’S HAVE A MEDIA CLUB
Ratheesh Kaliyadan
We are living in a media driven society. Nobody can stand apart from the magical skin of media today. Everything related to our socio-cultural life is decided by the media. Thus it influences our economic state also. Our taste, interest, needs, belief, demands, even thoughts are drastically influenced by media. What do you think and How do you act are molded in the kitchen of media gigantic.
Here is an example from our families. Three year old child in our homes now days never ask for a chocolate. But they ask for a particular brand. From where does this child get the name of the chocolate? Majority of us appreciate the child for its keen observation. Is this due to its serious observation? My answer is NO. The brand ambassadors become a great success in ‘catching them young.’ Negative values like consumerism haunt them. Socio-cultural behavior is seriously threatened. Traditional values and customs are torned away. These are some of the criticisms by the older generation against the new ones.
At this juncture what is the remedy to liberate our children from the black hands of mediations? This is the challenge we have to face in our surroundings. Parents and the general public believe we, the teachers, can do something. Can we? What we have to do is make aware our children that what we see, hear and read in media are not the real ones. Equip them to read media critically. Build up their efficiency in analysis and interpret. Nourish their ability in critical thinking.
Media clubs can help in these regards a lot. There are lists of activities we have to done. These activities will help them to make media criticism through fun. They can do serious things joyfully. One of the activities listed and practiced by most teachers in their class room is making newspaper. You can decide the form of publication. I may share one of my experiences. The last academic year, we divided the whole class in to ten groups. Each group gathered news from their surroundings. Brought it in classroom. Processed them there. Pasted on the walls in the form of a wall new paper. Remember it was the first form of news transaction. Acta Diurna is example. We simply followed those ancestors. It is not a novel idea or a great work.
After ten groups presented the newspapers, we conducted an exhibition. Invited local media persons. They made news on the exhibition. Also they got several news pegs from the news appeared in our wall newspaper. Out of the stories, one got special attention. It was about the life of a poor Muslim old lady who lived alone in a hut. The news had different impacts. Several organizations expressed their interest to rehabilitate the old lady. But she was not ready to leave her place on the ground of her sheep. At last the RDO visited her and issued a special ration card. The card supported her to buy rice from the ration shop without paying a penny. A mediavist is generated through this innovative experience.Citizen journalism became a tool for it.What we call this style of study is critical pedagogy.
My learners are much motivated by the work. We moved to another area. Our school is a government Girls higher secondary school. It is in Thalassery, Kerala. The place is famous for Circus, Cake and Cricket. We approached the circus artist. Collected a lot of information. Prepared features and profiles. Through the activities we learned how to gather news, how to write in different formats and how to edit them. The articles published as a book- CIRCUS, edited by me and published by Media Analysis & Research Center. By documenting the experiences of the artists, we made another step in journalism. This is a unique book in this subject in Malayalam.
Everybody have a deep instinct for self-expression. You can cater your club member’s interest in this regard through a blog. Creating and maintaining a blog is very easy. Almost all providers use a highly user friendly mode in creating new blogs. It makes you a media owner without investing singly rupee. A penny less effort to make you a media owner is really an interesting experience. You have all freedom to accept, edit or reject an article. Nobody has a control over you. You become the agenda setter of your blog! Try it. Provide your children an online global opportunity to express themselves. Moreover we can read you by sitting in Kerala. It is one of the easiest methods to share your activities also. The media club can do a lot through this medium.
If you have some money to invest, why can’t you try for an E-newspaper? The softwares are either cheap or free now. The URL registration cost is minimum. If you are interested you have it.these are possibilities. I shared what we practiced in our class room. If it is happened in our actual life situation, it is possible to you. If you have a will, you have a win. Remember production is not important in media club activities. It helps them to make their work funnier. Our concentration should be the other half that is the awareness part.
(Speech delivered at the planning meeting of media clubs on April 21, 2011 at Central Institute of Educational Technology-CIET, NCERT, New Delhi)
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Documentaries
DEFINING DOCUMENTARIES
Ratheesh Kaliyadan
History of films begins with non-fiction films. Grand Café in Paris marked the embryonic screening of the first film by the Lumiere brothers. The initiatives of the Lumiere brothers paved a strong corner stone to the milestones of movie movements. The ever first films exposed actual life situations in factories, railway stations etc. these films never considered to be as documentaries. Because these kinds of non-fiction films does not satisfy criteria of a documentary.
It was in 1920s crystalized documentary as a form of expression with the theorization of John Grierson. He was a Scots social scientist specialized in the psychology of propaganda. Reviewing Robert Flaherty’s Moana in 1926, John Grierson said it was “documentary” in intention. Actually Flaherty’s earlier work Nanook of the North (1922) is now acknowledged as the seminal work in this category. Robert Flaherty, an American engineer began shooting an ethnographic record of an Eskimo family in 1915. After several years tiresome works, the film Nanook of the North became a reality.
Grierson defined documentaries as the “creative treatment of actualities.” Actual life situations’ different patterns of treatments are the major characteristic of a documentary. Here common people get a space to share their expressions. Issues among the general public or alienated sections are treated in detail. Finds the roots of cause and effects equation in an issue could be seen in this kind of films. Intentionally insisting a criticism is one of the face values of documentaries. Thematic focus and purposeful social criticism are the hearts and minds of a documentary film.
Different ideologues used documentaries and non- fiction films to propagate their own ideological versions. During the First World War from 1914 to 1918, film became an important medium of government propaganda.
Documentaries developed in different ways during the 1917 Russian Revolution. First evidence of documentary spirit in Russia lies with Kino-Eye of Daziga Vertov and his group. Kino Pravda(film-truth) movement by Vertov exemplified the revolutionary version of film movement. He used camera powerfully to disseminate the reality against the bourgeois perspectives. Real life captured by the camera was the motto of film-truth movement. Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera 1929 is a powerful record of the camera’s capability to move and capture hidden agendas through exposing life in the street. He used montage shots lavishly to prove the capacity of camera as the all-seeing tool.
Like communists, the Nazis also utilized the capacity of camera in propaganda. The potentialities of camera meaningfully utilized by AdolfHitler in Germany. Hitler reinforced the Aryan supremacy by carefully treating the medium and selection of actors and characters. Triumph of the Will, the advertisement film made for making advertisement of the Nazi Congress in Nuremberg in 1934. Hitler is treated as a mythological character and pictured him as the god of Germans in this film. The Nazi films are best examples of manipulation of cameras.
Ratheesh Kaliyadan
History of films begins with non-fiction films. Grand Café in Paris marked the embryonic screening of the first film by the Lumiere brothers. The initiatives of the Lumiere brothers paved a strong corner stone to the milestones of movie movements. The ever first films exposed actual life situations in factories, railway stations etc. these films never considered to be as documentaries. Because these kinds of non-fiction films does not satisfy criteria of a documentary.
It was in 1920s crystalized documentary as a form of expression with the theorization of John Grierson. He was a Scots social scientist specialized in the psychology of propaganda. Reviewing Robert Flaherty’s Moana in 1926, John Grierson said it was “documentary” in intention. Actually Flaherty’s earlier work Nanook of the North (1922) is now acknowledged as the seminal work in this category. Robert Flaherty, an American engineer began shooting an ethnographic record of an Eskimo family in 1915. After several years tiresome works, the film Nanook of the North became a reality.
Grierson defined documentaries as the “creative treatment of actualities.” Actual life situations’ different patterns of treatments are the major characteristic of a documentary. Here common people get a space to share their expressions. Issues among the general public or alienated sections are treated in detail. Finds the roots of cause and effects equation in an issue could be seen in this kind of films. Intentionally insisting a criticism is one of the face values of documentaries. Thematic focus and purposeful social criticism are the hearts and minds of a documentary film.
 |
| Grierson |
Different ideologues used documentaries and non- fiction films to propagate their own ideological versions. During the First World War from 1914 to 1918, film became an important medium of government propaganda.
Documentaries developed in different ways during the 1917 Russian Revolution. First evidence of documentary spirit in Russia lies with Kino-Eye of Daziga Vertov and his group. Kino Pravda(film-truth) movement by Vertov exemplified the revolutionary version of film movement. He used camera powerfully to disseminate the reality against the bourgeois perspectives. Real life captured by the camera was the motto of film-truth movement. Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera 1929 is a powerful record of the camera’s capability to move and capture hidden agendas through exposing life in the street. He used montage shots lavishly to prove the capacity of camera as the all-seeing tool.
Like communists, the Nazis also utilized the capacity of camera in propaganda. The potentialities of camera meaningfully utilized by AdolfHitler in Germany. Hitler reinforced the Aryan supremacy by carefully treating the medium and selection of actors and characters. Triumph of the Will, the advertisement film made for making advertisement of the Nazi Congress in Nuremberg in 1934. Hitler is treated as a mythological character and pictured him as the god of Germans in this film. The Nazi films are best examples of manipulation of cameras.
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