Good morning/ afternoon everyone as you are all aware today’s lecture will be on documentaries. We are going to look at the statement “The medium is the message.” Said by Marshal McLuhan in understanding media: the extensions of man. So what does this statement mean? The medium is the single for of media in this case meaning the documentary there for the documentary is the message. To full understand this statement we need to fully understand the nature of a documentary. Documentaries by nature suggest a truthful account of some real life issue, and we as the audience naturally want to learn more about the issue, so consequently we believe what is said, unfortunately though what we learn from documentaries is exadurated, manipulated and warped versions of the truth. Documentary makers take events that have happened and things people have said and they edit and manipulate these things to get their point across.
We are now going to take the two documentaries, Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore and Michael Moore hates America by Michael I don’t know his last name and look at the techniques they used to manipulate reality to persuade people into believing what they believe.
The first thing we are going to look at is music, documentary makers add music to parts of their documentaries to set a mood and make us feel a certain way about things. We first see this right at the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11 when Moore is talking about George Bush he plays hill billy music he does this in an attempt to make us thick that George bush is a hill billy. He also does it when he is telling everybody that Bush spends too much time on vocation he plays a light jumpy music and makes it sound like a big joke and we therefore think that bush as a president is a big joke. Another time through the documentaries that this is done quite well is during the scene when he explains how Bush flew all the Bin Laden’s out of America after 9/11 he plays the song we gotta get outta this place by the animals which has the same effect as the song played during the vocation section once again it makes us think that George Bush is a big joke.
Another technique that documentaries makers use is editing. This is where the makers either cut thing out of a piece of footage or swap between two pieces of footage and take things out of context. In the documentary Michaela Moore hates America points out that in one of Michael Moore's documentaries he took two speeches made by Charlton Heston and cut and pasted bit together to make it look like one speech he did this by cutting to the audience every time he inserted a new clip, this worked quite well and many people don’t know that that was two speeches made into one. We also see this when shows Moore saying ‘the last thing you want to do is become more like Americans’ although Michael Moore says this it does not show the context in which he says it. When things are taken out of context they can be made mean very different things.
One thing that we see quite often in these two films is the film makers bombarding us with the same stamen being said by multiple people. We see this in Moore's documentary when he shows us that no one could get their objection signed by the senate, we see about ten different people saying the same thing. This makes us think that everybody has the same opinion on it and therefore we too should have that same opinion. A similar technique to this is playing the same clip constantly though the film this is very obvious in Michael Moore hates America the clip that says “Guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people.” Is play very regularly in an attempt to drum into that Moore says careless things like this.
Another common technique used is the attempt at comedy. In documentary we see this when he has a pretend game show to show us how stupid Michael Moore’s opinion is, he does this by extreme sarcasm to the point where it just becomes stupid.
What we have learnt from this is that although documentaries have aspects of truth in them the aspects are manipulated to convince the audience on the maker’s opinion of the matter. So now we can see that the meaning of the statement ‘the medium is the message” is the message we are getting is a twisted warped and manipulated version of the truth made to persuade us to believe the film makers beliefs.
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