Who's father was he?

The New York Times has been running a fascinating series written by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris about the search to uncover the story of a soldier killed during the Battle of Gettysburg. But, like the rest of Morris' work, it is really an exploration of humanity, the nature of seeing and the power of photography.

Memory, accuracy and literature

When can the author of an autobiography be considered an unreliable narrator?

That thought kept going through my mind as I read Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father.

Ung uses the voice of a child narrator -- alternately petulant, unsophisticated and angry -- to tell her story. I had difficulty believing she could remember with such vividness situations and conversations that occured when she was just a child. It's not just the details of her memories as a five-year-old, but her mature observations ("I know we are middle-class because of our apartment and the possessions we have") that make them suspect.

Also, there is very little context or background to Ung's story. Rather, she uses dialogue as an explanatory device which sounds awkward and forced. It also puts the history of Cambodia and the conflict in the mouths of her parents -- hardly unobjective commentators.

There's also a strain of ethnic stereotyping that runs through her book, particularly the way she describes the differences between the Chinese and Khmer. The way she goes on and on about her mother's white skin you start to wonder just where Ung's biases lie.

I think what's most compelling about this book is how it brings up the problem of how to criticize the literature of survivorship. Can you say, this isn't very good writing without diminishing the importance of the story? Can you find fault with its details but still appreciate its overarching truths?

Lillian Helman's Pentimento has been shown to be primarily a figment of her imagination (I hope she doesn't come back from the grave to sue me for saying that!) but it so wonderfully written that you can overlook the veracity for the craft.

Ung's young life was is harrowing and so very tragic. I really wanted this book to be much better than it is. I think her story deserves better.

Gay Talese Leaves Me Cold

Is it OK to not go gaga over a writer recognized as part of the journalism canon?

Let me first say that I think Gay Talese is a very good writer, an excellent writer, in fact.

But it’s the depth of his reporting and not the virtuosity of his prose that made him a star of New Journalism. What’s notable is that the best work in “The Gay Talese Reader” are the earliest, before he became an entrenched inhabitant of the Upper East Side.

You can “hang around the fringes” delving in the lives of your subjects only so long before it starts to looking like slumming. I think he’s a much better observer of those in his own milieu – like “Looking for Hemingway” – than athletes or doormen.

Talese is the Meryl Streep of journalism: a consummate professional whose craft is so well practiced you can actually see where they oiled the wheels to make them glide.

Unlike Streep, however, Talese’s creative output has increasingly diminished. After a prolific youth, he’s turned out, what, three books in 35 years?

I do love “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” because the reader gets to know Sinatra in way that is perhaps more telling and accurate than if Talese had interviewed him. But all things considered, when it comes to New Journalism I’d prefer to read Norman Mailer or Hunter S. Thompson.

When does documentary film document reality and when does it create a reality that doesn’t exist?

That question comes to mind when considering “Grey Gardens,” the 1975 film by Albert and David Maysles.

The film seems straightforward enough: the everyday lives of a mother and daughter – Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier -- who have chosen to live as outsiders in a decaying 28-room mansion in a wealthy Long Island enclave. Two former members of the American elite living among squalor in a matrix of co-dependence and eccentricity.

The Maysles were (David Maysles died in 1987) firm believers that the filmmaker should not in any way intrude upon or effect what they are documenting. This is in contrast to the work of Frederick Wiseman whose work is purposefully not objective.

Robert Coles writes in “Doing Documentary Work”:

“The word documentary [emphasis the author’s] certainly suggests an interest in what is actual, what exists, rather than what one brings personally, if not irrationally, to the table of present-day actuality.”

Here is what Albert Maysles said in an interview:

“… two very good filmmakers in exactly the same place at exactly the same time will come up with a somewhat different film, or a very different film. And that would seem to suggest that there’s no essential truth. But each one of those films can be an essential part of the truth. I don’t think anyone can claim that they’re telling the whole truth. That’s too big a job. What you do put forth in the context that you provide for it can be truthful.”

In this paper I would like to try to apply the standards of the literature of journalism to Grey Gardens by looking at how the authors (the Maysles) used such things as the language of film and structure. I’d also like to look at how elements of such journalistic principles as objectivity, balance and fairness might apply to the film.

A question that came up when discussing this with my group is why the Maysles chose the Bouviers as subjects and, if they profess to not having a point of view when they film, what is the point of making a film in the first place?