Sunday, February 28, 2010

Edgar Berens

On February 12, 2010, our Honors English class was visited by filmmaker Edgar Berens. Edgar let us know that his preferred type of filming was cinema verite, and he liked to work on his own because he felt it was much preferrable to working with people you don't necessarily want to work with. His current project was a film about hospice care at prisons for prisoners that will be in jail for the rest of their life, or likely die before their sentence is up. The opening scene to his newest documentary was an older man sitting and speaking about his jail sentence. He told the camera that he had lost his son when he committed suicide at the age of 14 after using dope. He later shot and killed his son's dope dealer and that is why he was sentenced to life. He also let the audience know that he was sentenced 21 years ago.

Edgar later goes on to film Jack, the man mentioned above's, daily medicine regime. He also got a glimpse of the nurses' views of providing top notch medical care to prisoners that will be in jail for life. Although most of Edgar's film was objective and purely observational, I believe that he very subtly gets his opinion across to the audience. In one scene, he observes an elderly man attempting to get under his covers. This scene provoked a lot of emotion for me, and I think I can say the same for many of my classmates. Here I feel that it is clear that Edgar wants these men to be given hospice, even though they are prisoners.

Edgar also used word narration throughout the documentary, but when asked about it he said he might change it. I think that the word narration worked very well for this film because each phrase gave clue as to what would be seen next, and I often found myself waiting to hear the words that were in the phrase. Overall I really enjoyed this experience and would love to see the finished product.

No comments:

Post a Comment