Lift Documentary Review And Interpretation

Lift Synopsis

Lift is a short documentary about a dilapidated apartment block in rural London. It is filmed by Marc Isaacs who sits himself in one of the buildings lifts with his camera and films the people who use the lift. As the documentary continues the people who use the lift start to become more accustomed to Marc being there and begin talking when he asks them questions about their life.

Lift Review

Lift is a very interesting documentary in that it does follow many conventions of a regular documentary production. It doesn’t cut away to re-enactments that show the subject being described by the residents, it just shows them in the lift describing it instead. It doesn’t end with a message about history or people, only a shot of the apartment block in the winter to round out the show. I think it does a fantastic job of showing the real world in real time, rather than some documentaries that will use pre-recorded pre-rehearsed footage to make a point. When a resident enters the lift and says hi to Marc you know that what they talk about on the journey is real, there aren’t any sneaky cuts to get rid of bad lines or bad jokes, all of it is real. I think it does a better job of documenting the real world over some million dollar budgeted documentaries. The point of the show is sort of hidden behind a low budget look, it never really explicitly says what the point of it is, but you can gather that it has to do with simply documenting the real people in the real world, right at the heart of their lives, their homes. This allow the documentary to reach deep into the mind of the viewer and shows them what it’s like to be in that situation. This is especially exemplified by the fact that the whole time the camera is in the position of Marc’s eyes, making the entire documentary a POV film. This allows the viewer to feel like it is them asking the questions and being conversed with, which isn’t something that often happens in documentaries. I feel like this could potentially be an amazing direction for documentaries to take, placing the viewer at the heart of the facts rather than leaving them in their own homes watching from afar.

Documentary Style

I believe that this documentary was an observational/participatory documentary. It shows the world around the film maker, but it also features the film maker in it, even if it is only his voice occasionally being heard. This shows that the film maker is actually a living aspect of the world there are documenting, rather than just being there to get the facts across. It is also, in some ways, a poetic documentary. It shows the sort of poetic experience of living in that very tower block in London, and what each person in the block thinks and feels every day. Its ultimate goal I to create an idea or feeling in the viewer rather than trying to simply show the facts.

Documentary Assignment

Documentary Assignment

For the first assignment in the second year of this course I have been tasked with creating a documentary. I have decided that I will focus on the story of the monkey hanging in the town I am from, Hartlepool. I will construct a sort of tongue-in-cheek documentary about this subject, showing the facts behind a veil of humour and jokes. I will still show the facts and make it a factual documentary, but due to the humour behind the story it only makes sense to show the facts with a hint of humour. I will use re-enactments of certain scenes from the real world to show what happened in a brighter light, while still showcasing how silly the whole subject is. I will also cover certain other aspects of Hartlepool, such as its rich ship building industry from way back when. I will do this because everyone who lives in Hartlepool, myself included, say there isn’t anything going on here and that it’s a very boring place to be, when in actual fact there are a great many things to do, such as the maritime museum and the many different marine areas to explore.  I will also be looking at the things that arent there, or that have been removed from Hartlepool, and will be looking at how this has had an impact on the way hartlepool looks to the rest of the country. I will be interviewing people to add to the evidence and testimonies about the way hartlepool was or how it has changed.

Was a Monkey Really Hung in Hartlepool?

‘’I dunno, probably, we were pretty weird back then. I mean, we’ve elected the football club’s mascot as town mayor 3 times so….’’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-40801937

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/4122756.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/england/tees/7827332.stm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_hanger

http://www.thisishartlepool.co.uk/history/thehartlepoolmonkey.asp

http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Hanging-of-the-Hartlepool-Monkey/


http://www.gyreandgimble.com/productions/the-hartlepool-monkey/

Start: The start of this documentary will first go over the mythology surrounding the story of the monkey hanging in Hartlepool. It will go over when, where and why it supposedly happened, and the details of what apparently went down. It will go over the facts that we know about the story and will use interviews with older people to back this up, although nobody is alive today who will have seen the hanging, getting stories of old Hartlepool from old people seems the smartest idea.

Middle: The middle section of my documentary will focus on the facts surrounding the story of the monkey. This will be things like a song that was written by a traveling entertainer. A song written about a monkey washing ashore in Hartlepool and subsequently being hung after being accused of being a spy. I will go over both the facts for the hanging and those that go against it. I intend to go at this story in a purely unbiased way, as I am actually from Hartlepool so discovering the truth about this is quite exciting to me.

End: The end of my documentary will recap the first 2 parts and will collate all the facts and stories together in a concise way and will give a final verdict on what they all show. The whole of my documentary will have a comedy feel, because it’s a hilariously daft story, but will be based entirely in fact. It will play out sort of how the Horrible Histories shows play out.

Back during the Napoleonic wars, around early 1800’s, there was a lot of tension between England and France. It was around this time that Hartlepool got its ‘monkey hanger’ name from, well, hanging a monkey apparently. The story goes that during the wars, a French ship washed ashore on the old Hartlepool beach, and was surrounded by locals in seconds. They saw that the only survivor was a monkey and, having never actually seen a Frenchman before, assumed he was a French spy, confusing its chittering as French speaking. As you do. They promptly decided they should hang the spy so as not to let the secrets of the old Hartlepool beach fall into French hands, not that there was much going on there.

My documentary will look at whether Hartlepudlians are actually proud of Hartlepool and its heritage about hanging monkeys and whether there is anything else going on in Hartlepool that could be seen as another claim to fame. Shipbuilding industry? Tongue in cheek documentary. Where is the story from? Re-enactments?

Post-Release

After I began filming and editing my documentary I quickly realized that it had changed a fair amount from what the original idea was. This isn't a bad thing by any means, it simply means that in have to explain how and why it changed from the original idea.

One of the main reasons it changed is because I started to realise that there are things that I simply wouldn’t be able to talk about and discuss in my film, such as the dock area and the shipbuilding industry, due to time constraints or a lack of communication with the people I wanted to talk to and about. An example of this happening would be when I was trying to include Gyre & Gimble in my film, discussing the play they were making about the monkey hanging story. I was liaising with the directors and after a few weeks of back and forth they stopped emailing out of the blue, so unfortunately I was unable to include them in my film. The same happened with trying to get an interview with Stuart Drummond, the legendary mascot of Hartlepool’s football team. For some reason, nobody seems to know where he is or what he’s doing, so again, I was unable to get this interview. These are both quite a shame that I couldn’t get them to talk but it opened the door to allow me to talk about other things.

Another way my documentary changed is that it went from being about the monkey hanging and everything to do with that, and turned into a documentary that was about the town as a whole, showing off so much more from the town than just the Headland and the monkey hanging. I was originally planning to talk only about the monkey hanging and discuss the people and places involved in that, both then and now, and discuss the idea and story with people from the town nowadays and see what they had to say about it. This obviously changed, partly because I realized it would end up being a very linear and straightforward film, and partly because of the reasons stated above, among others.

In the end, it seems that my original idea would have made a great documentary, but the film I made was greater.