Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Last night we finished watching “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” the great documentary directed by Martin Scorsese that aired on PBS in 2005. Watching this film has been a multi-year project. I started watching it with my wife before she was my wife. Finishing it last night closed the circle because we were married this past weekend. The film looks back at Bob Dylan’s life but it got me thinking about looking forward.
There’s an expression often heard in edit rooms: “See apple, say apple.” It refers to the practice of having the narrator talk about something and then showing that very thing. If the narrator is talking about apples, then we have to show some apples. When you extend that “see apple” concept to the whole film, your work loses depth. Example: You do a show about Donald Trump firing people and all you get is a treatise about a gigantic, throbbing ego.
Entertaining for some, superficial for all.
Then you have Bob Dylan and Scorsese. Scorsese begins his documentary with two wonderful and borderline cryptic sound bites from Dylan:
“I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey, going home somewhere, set out, I set out to find this home I had a while back and couldn’t exactly remember where it was, but I was on my way there and encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I really didn’t have any ambition at all … I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be so I’m on my way home.”
That makes me want to keep watching, just to hear Dylan’s tangled poetry. The more he weaves words, the bigger the tapestry surrounding him, the less he reveals about himself. The mystery only grows.
“No Direction Home” is traditional, but also strange, and it takes risks. Risk is important, because in documentaries, the world we once knew is over. Distribution channels have changed. Who can draw a line anymore between reality TV and documentaries? As Dylan says, we’re all on an odyssey now.
While there’s no doubt that reality TV has created greater acceptance for true stories, there’s also a flip side. The influence of reality TV has made doc filmmaking too cautious and literal.
I say we need films that are moving, unexpected and bold. I miss seeing heroic films like Errol Morris’s “The Fog of War.” I’m glad “Food, Inc.” opens on Friday. I argue for going deep. Content matters.
Some might counter-argue that going deep doesn’t monetize well. “Truth is so depressing and people want entertainment.” Well, two words: Stephen Colbert. When you enter the meta-reality of Colbert you aren’t sure if he’s a liberal playing a conservative or a conservative pretending to be liberal. This ambiguity has helped make him enormously popular. Colbert is a hybrid – and I think hybrid is where the documentaries of the future are going.
Richard Propper was a distributor on my documentary about Route 66. Now, along with filmmaker Chuck Braverman, he’s looking to the future by bringing together documentary and reality TV producers and broadcasters. The event is called the WESTDOC conference. It happens this September in Santa Monica. Want to see what the future might be like? Richard is offering a limited time discount to readers of “500 Words on Thursday.” Go to http:// www.THEWESTDOC.com and use promo code MTGWEST2009.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
I’m taking a break from deep topics to write about something shallow: Social networking. But hey, I mean shallow in a good way. Social networking has a huge reach. Yes, there’s something vaguely totalitarian and Hitler-esque about having “followers” on Twitter. But Twitter has been used to get the word out about the fixed elections in Iran and to track emergency weather. Two million people are following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. I know that Jane Fonda had a knee operation because she tweeted.
I don’t know about the usefulness of all that information, but I do know that information feeds SEO – that stands for search engine optimization. It’s the magic stuff you do to get people to find your wisdom on the web – the keywords, text and phrases you embed in your content. I’m going to share what I’ve learned recently about all this from some experts. Let’s start with
SEO guru Scott Edwards.
Scott sets up social networking sites to help people group themselves by their interests and get content they want. There are more than 200 million users on Facebook. That makes Facebook something like the fifth largest country in the world, a country without borders but formed by people who are obsessed about high school. The high school connection aside, Scott encouraged me to start Facebook pages related to projects we’re working on. Good idea. Over coffee at Peet’s he also told me about a site called fmylife.com, one of the most active on the web. People contribute a few lines about something terrible that happened to them and end with the telling initials FML.” It’s sick, but people like to contribute and it will make you laugh.
Buzzwords and buzzphrases have become important. There’s a company called Hubspot that will sell you some software that makes your content more search-friendly. They’ve done something smart – popularized a buzzphrase called “inbound marketing.” They practically own it – Google it and you’ll see Hubspot’s fingerprints all over it. That’s called having authority over a search phrase. Hubspot told me that DocuCinema has good authority, and 500 Words also has good authority as a search phrase, so I must be doing something right.
Scott and I also talked about Digg.com. This site gives people a chance to vote on sites they like – and if you make it to the front page of Digg by virtue of these recommendations, you are gold. There’s stumbleupon.com, a useful site with a funny name. When you sign up, stumbleupon asks you about your interests and tries to throw interesting websites your way. It’s a bit like wandering in the library and plucking books from the shelves. It may lead you to cuteoverload.com, a waste of time but very good if you like photos of sleeping kittens.
You can join LinkedIn, sometimes called Facebook for people with jobs, and post your resume. If you really want to geek out, you can write a blog and optimize the title of it by putting the most search-friendly word first and then go in descending order of searchability. That would make the best title for this post “Web Weave We Tangled Oh.” Hmm. Guess you can’t optimize everything.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Healing is hard to quantify. Does it mean, “My back has stopped hurting by a factor of 45 percent?” Does it mean, “I don’t wake up at night because of those nightmares of being chased by thousands of cats. I only wake up now because I dream of 50 cats?” Does it simply mean, “I feel better?”
Not all healing involves ripping off the band aid and seeing the healing with your own eyes. It can be invisible.
Some have experienced the invisible kind of healing using a technique called Reiki. Reiki involves moving the hands over the patient or lightly touching them. Afterward people have reported feeling balanced energetically or feeling more centered. But how does it work?
“Medicine doesn’t understand how Reiki works.” said Pamela Miles, founding director of the Institute for the Advancement of Complementary Therapies, when I recently interviewed her about Reiki. I’m working on a project about integrative and complementary therapies. As a science-oriented guy I’ve been curious about these therapies because often science can’t explain how they work but they seem to help people a lot. I’ve seen yoga reduce my stress levels. My mother stopped smoking after acupuncture treatments. There’s a mystery here and I want to know more about it.
“When I place hands on someone it’s like feeling an orchestra in my palms – I feel many different notes and qualities of vibration and it keeps changing,” says Miles.
What is science supposed to do with that? What is she transmitting through her hands? Life force energy? Mind energy? It might involve electromagnetic forces. Using a magnetometer to measure electromagnetism, some researchers claim to have seen the energy of Reiki moving from practitioner to patient. (Others say they have no idea what they’re measuring.) But even more interesting is the belief system involved for Reiki to work: you don’t need one. It works anyway, regardless of your belief system or even lack of one.
Scientists, being the take-measure types they are, have taken a shot at trying to understand the success of Reiki. One study suggested that Reiki can speed the healing of skin wounds. Another at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center in New York City looked at how Reiki and meditation might reduce anxiety, fatigue and pain in cancer patients. During the study, the intensity of those symptoms dropped by half. Results like that have encouraged mainstream health care providers to offer Reiki treatments as part of a hospital program. New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, Boston’s Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Institute and Yale-New Haven Hospital are all in.
Nobody knows why, but Reiki seems to help the body engage in self healing. “With Reiki,” Miles says, “patients get a chance to participate actively in their health care and regain a sense of control.” They become partners in their own care, and that, most doctors would say, is a key reason why this form of invisible healing seems to be so effective. I wonder how science will develop the tools to measure something like that. For me, it’s a mystery worth investigating.
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
