The Neistat Brothers – on HBO – have done some incredible videos that have had real impact. Their one about the iPod battery was all over the place and may have gotten Apple to change it’s policy. The video about waiting for the first iPhone that they edited for Jobs’ death is also moving, especially the last shot of his own personal Post-it note.
[Youtube=http://youtu.be/n1HYdsbgYMA]
I’ve followed them because they do love Apple, credit their careers in film to the iMac and do wickedly satirical films. Here is another one comparing Siri to a real life assistant.
Casey just put together this one about the clearing of Zuccotti Park. It all seems so mundane. No real violence. Lots of closeup of protestors and police – making them appear very human. It seems to be just a naturalistic documentation of the whole event with the ironic music behind it. But, like some of his other ones, it is the last 30 seconds or so that raise the emotional impact of the whole film.
Those last 30 seconds really pissed me off. I’ve been upset with other videos showing different responses and violence. But I went into them knowing what I was going to see. We now expect pepper spray. We expect riot gear. We expect batons. We expect barriers. We expect arrests.
We do not expect the police to assault people for raising the American flag. That just comes out of the blue.
It also demonstrates what can be done in the hands of a professional. The Occupy movement – more than any other on in the US – is really defined by all the cameras everyone has. Almost everything done is being documented in this fashion.
With jerky, hand-held cameras. It is real and it is potent. But also from the hands of amateurs.
The cinema verite techniques used by Neistat – the editing, the use of long, medium and close views, and the cutting of the film to the music – all conspire to make the ending much more potent than if it was just there by itself.
I do not know just what will happen with the Occupy movement but I do know one thing – when documentarians begin to create works based on these months, they will produce some awesome work.
