Samuel Garnett Week 5 Blog Post

Samuel Garnett - Week 5 Blog Response

I was particularly captivated by the use of the subjects of the documentary’s own footage, and the sense of personal experience I was able to gain from this. To be able to see the ways in which a person chooses to focus their camera is extremely telling; from the start where a woman points the lens to herself, perhaps taking her moment in brief spotlight, to when another of the factory workers focuses her camera on her son and lets him be the star of her vignette to the camera being turned on the United States through a crack in the rusted fence along the border we as the viewer get an organic sense of gaze. This is something I find all too underused in documentary filmmaking as it eliminates the director’s own intentions and puts the film in the hands of the very people it studies. At no point while watching the piece did I feel a curatorial presence from the director and always felt I was being given a full, honest picture of these events from the peoples living them. This for me is peak engagement for a film of this style.