Media as Documentation

Media is a powerful medium for documentation.  Documenting the world around us is one way of interacting with our world and is also a way of sharing culture, faith, knowledge, imagination, interpretation, and understanding.  One thing I found most interesting from our last Children's Media discussion, was the way that children document things.  We watched a brief documentary about Anne Frank.  The thing that stood out to me in that documentary was the way that she desired to simply tell about her life since there was really nothing more she could do.  And yet, her description and story telling ability shone through her journal and though she didn't know it, she was able to touch the lives of millions and millions of people who would come later.  Hers isn't just a historical account, which is why it is so valuable.  

Many forms of documentation focus on the materialistic side of reality.  We read a brief excerpt from a piece about Abraham Lincoln and it was unique to notice that the first few pages were all about his height, his appearance, his face, etc:  the "materials" that made Lincoln who he was.  This materialistic view of the world comes from a sort of reaction to Romanticism.  Romanticism looks at the beauty of nature and our interaction with our world, whereas materialism focuses more on what we can do with that world.  

The theme of Alienation often shows up in documenatative media, where the confict in the narrative stems from self conflicting with society. There are many films which focus around this kind of story telling.  Avatar, Ratatouille, in fact most of the Pixar films relate a conflict of one character either being unhappy with the world they live in or else forcibly alienated from their natural happy world.  Alienation brings a raw realism to the story that many people can relate to.  We all have felt lonely at one time or another.  We want to be free.

The last thing I want to discuss is Magical realism, or finding magic in the reality that is around us.  The film we watched in class, "Little Fugitive" had this in spades.  One thing I found funny was that I kept expecting the worst to happen to this little kid.  That he would get lost, attacked, arrested, yelled at, or have some other form of conflict.  But instead, the story was more about the magical way in which he saw his world.  Once he was on his own, we saw things through his eyes.  Cares and worries were reduced to his own personal momentary desires, such as "Get money to ride the horse."  Reality was not necessarily ignored but simply seen through a child's eyes.  I think this is one of the unique traits of this kind of story telling.