#6

Notes for a documentary film, to be shot according to the traditions of direct cinema.

An American suburb, of modest population and income, will be chosen as the destination for a documentary film crew. This crew will be assigned the task of, simply put, documenting the day to day life of the town as well as possible. They will work towards this goal with one important complication --that every choice made towards documenting the life of the town be made with one over-riding ideological supposition.

The specific nature of this supposition is in and of itself arbitrary, other than that it may not be a commonly held belief by any identifiable group or belief system.

Such as the belief that the colors "blue" and "red" are engaged in a violent metaphysical struggle. Although we may assume -- though no more than assume -- that the degree of antagonism between these colors will vary in direct proportion to the level of chromatic intensity - a fire engine, for example, would be considered as "highly aggressive," as would a house fire. Something like, wouldn't you say, the blue of a body of standing water, would be far more ambiguous in its intentions. The color of a cloudless sky, on a sunny day, would hang over everything, would be nearly inescapable. As the film crew will only be observers to the actions of vast, foreign bodies, there will be no way of knowing what these 'actions' mean; there will be no resorting to the voices of experts, to re-enactments and analysis. Needless to say, it would be very important to shoot this on a color stock which does not give any particular advantage in registering either color.

The variation of this procedure most worth noting is this -- that the camera crew not be given the information as to the ideological aims of the film makers; these aims will be applied after the filming, by the editorial staff. In fact, multiple editorial staffs could work on the same footage, in different offices, each attempting to express an entirely different set of assumptions.