Biographical documentaries, especially female biographical documentaries, have always been the focus of attention in the documentary world. Different from the many female biographical documentaries currently on the market, some women who are more willing to selectively display and shape the almost flat symbolic image from the perspective of the documentary filmmaker, have won the Oscar for "A Day in September" The narration of the documentary honorary director Kevin MacDonald, the famous black superstar Whitney Houston, who enjoys the reputation of "American Sweetheart," The annual new work "Whitney" does the opposite, and collects a lot of Objective image material content for the transition and editing between content and content. As Whitney Houston grew up and lived in an era that coincided with the era of television video, video virality, and the popularity of private portable video records, it was an era of full video explosion, which gave this to a certain extent. Documentary producers have more possibilities to integrate the material with space and imagination, and the latter is vital to the production of documentaries in any sense.
Similarly, in the era of such an explosion of images, the process of most people's cognitive understanding of a woman like Whitney Houston is also based on the process of spreading images through various channels in most cases. But in essence, the various images of Whitney Houston that people have learned through his cognition and the subjective and objective changes brought about by changes in the years and the environment are also subjective and one-sided through video production and communicators. Locally choose or even distorted it before spreading or even spreading it twice. Especially for such a humble black female artist who was born in the American racial contradictions and troubled autumn of the 1960s, how she could break through the shackles of skin color and environment and almost overnight became a symbol of the "American Dream" of that era. She also It can be overwhelmed and even lost by the glitz lifted by the public and images, and fall into the altar.
But to be precise, whether as a producer of such a documentary or even just an ordinary outsider, looking at the ups and downs of Whitney himself in the tide of this era, the focus and information of focus and discussion remain the same. It can only come from that one image after another across time. This is a problem that biographical documentaries and even all video art have been facing, that is, how to display and shape human images as much as possible through images, especially true and three-dimensional female images.
If the aforementioned materials such as the director’s selective display and connection of video materials only reflect the director’s or the editor’s own consciousness, then Whitney Houston’s face-to-face interview, which is rarely seen in the entire film, should be included. Play a more critical role in this documentary. Regrettably, however, unlike Whitney’s lively and unrestrained manner in the private video footage of his family, Whitney Houston under the public lens can only choose to suppress his own nature more in the interview. . This is indeed one of the various constraints that Whitney as a woman, especially a black woman, can foresee in the mainstream world of white culture, but in the final analysis, the environment in which Whitney grew up and the ideological education he received are different from those of Whitney. In the 1980s and 1990s, the environment that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s, and was regarded as an icon of the "American Dream" by a generation, especially black Americans, was completely different from the public ideology and even out of touch. Whitney's career and economic success cannot conceal all kinds of unnecessary internal friction in his real life, especially in his family life. This is a huge internal destructive power for a black woman who came from a traditional Catholic education. She can talk about the will and love for God all the time, but often she doesn't know how to truly practice it in reality.
In the "Dialectics of Enlightenment" co-authored by Horkheimer and Adorno, the current video output was "criticized, thinking that it paralyzed the audience's imagination"; "paralyzed the audience's judgment, so that the audience can no longer Distinguish between "perception" and "imagination", reality and fiction", and further pointed out that the cultural industry "the more successfully the cultural industry can use technology to create replicas that resemble real objects, the more easily it can make people believe that the outside world is just a movie. Show a simple extension of the world" (Stigler "Technology and Time 3-Consciousness is Like Movie 1"). Undoubtedly, these distinctive views of contemporary philosophers also show the inevitability and objective laws of the rise and fall of Whitney Houston as the first superstars born in the era of the image explosion, and more importantly, they reveal Whitney. The potential negative impacts and harms to their sound cognition and ideological development that are shared by the general public due to the explosive input of external images; on the contrary, they can especially inspire video works of special genres such as documentaries and biographies Let’s explore how to truly represent people, events, and time.
Due to the batch, streamlined production, output and influence of the imaging industry, it is easy to fall into the siege of material homogeneity and stacking when processing the image materials required for documentary films. Especially for content such as the life of a character, the time flow of the character's growth will inevitably overlap with the growth time flow of other people (including contemporaries), which can easily form potential repetitions.
As the first black woman to be labeled as the emotional sustenance of the universal "American Dream", the image technology that has made it a household name with the help of sound moving images, live TV, movies, etc., is rooted in its purpose. Serving for the graphical output of the so-called "cultural industry" and ideology. At this time, Whitney’s own so-called female consciousness or independent consciousness, whether or not Whitney is the representative or representative of the female image of his time, appears to be alone under the mighty law of the jungle of Hollywood’s entertainment industry, even Often isolated and helpless. This is also a true portrayal of Whitney Houston's life. The sad thing is that even so-called "objective" documentaries, like general narrative films, are often only a temporal object that emphasizes the "coincidence" of the consciousness of the filmmaker and the audience. The man has passed away. We may never and cannot understand Whitney's true mental journey and full image from the movie.
Self-determination
2019.1.8
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