I haven't seen the documentary yet, but as a filmmaker myself, wow, they have a fucking documentary ready the next day?! It must have been a stressful final 24 hours for those guys
What do you mean with a genre that is very confidential? Anyway, I'm guessing part of the reason for no voice over is the short time they had to make it, same applies to the colour grading, it's probably straight from camera.
Well not really 95% of the documentary has been shot (and edited, color corrected, mixed) before the election day. What he shot on Sunday is easily edited in a few hours.
The same happened for an Hollande documentary that aired the day after he was elected in 2012.
I was talking about the
cinéma direct genre. Most of the documentaries politics (or most topics to be fair) you see on TV have voice overs and guests, lots of graphic and motion design etc.
Here he keeps the mise en scène to the minimum in order to portray what he believed he captured. It reinforces the backstages and "truth" of the moments he shot so it allows a great storytelling (he breaks the standard TV documentary codes for a Macron documentary knowing Macron wants to break the codes of politics/politicians). Very smart use of that old genre that was before used for ethnography and sociology, and isn't popular on TV : France TV likes documentaries with a lot of voice over, the director in the frame, guests*...except for "Un temps de président" in 2015 about François Hollande. Other are kept to cinémas and DVD : Depardon, Claire Simon, Wiseman... (but they inform you and share their analysis through the means of cinematography whereas the director here is portraying kind of a hero's campaign)
*see what they did with Macron (La stratégie du météore), Mélenchon (the film with Gérard Miller), Juppé (with FO Giesbert) etc, it's really the worst propaganda
I didn't see what he did with Teddy Riner but that must have been kind of the same.
I saw on the director's Twitter that he did color correction with a professionnal. Bizarre artistic choice.
Holy shit he just posted a video straight up telling American climate change researchers to come to France because Trump is a climate change skeptic and we will abide by the COP21.
I'm sensing a Trump Twitter meltdown very soon.
Sorry for not posting the vid, I saw this on FB and I don't think there's a way to share that on here, is there?
[EDIT] A brain drain from the US to France would feel like bizarro world, honestly.
No that's from back in February
Just did. Very interesting, though obviously carefully directed. My biggest worry watching this and hearing him during his Mediapart interview is his seeming obsession with work. His philosophy reminds me of Sarkozy's "Le Travail rend libre". See the part where he brainstorms with Cohn Bendit et al and says something like "when you're young, 35 hours is nothing". He's obviously not as crazy as Fillon, but let's hope he doesn't think we all should be workaholics. I both loathe and like his "winner" attitude.
I need to sharpen my critical eye. What are your biggest takeaways from the video (both positive and negative)?
Well I pretty much did everything I think about it in my previous posts. I would need to watch it a second time because I was focused on the hot things that were in there (the Bayrou moment especially is really mind blowing) and the details (because the lack of commentary means some things need to be explained : for instance when Griveaux (his spokesman) shakes Montebourg's hand with a big smile that's because they used to work together in the same maority at a Conseil général)
On the positive side :
In terms of pure cinematography, it's well edited since there's a good mix of moments (comedy, strategy, another angle at a public event to give contex, real backstage, reaction shots etc) and that gives a good pace, which is important. Sound design is pretty good too, minimalist in the music especially.
There are some really good moments on what is really interesting to me : how the campaign works around his closest staff. With good editing there too, for instance when the press secretary identifies a bad buzz and tries to do as much damage control as possible and we see how it goes to Macron.
Or the Whirlpool moment : kind of the same, you see the damage control and their struggle to have the momentum against Le Pen in the media and how the staff's work (on security measures for instance) can lead to bad buzz.
On the negative it's mostly that something different could have been done to really understand, analyze how a campaign is ran between Macron and his staff, basically doing sociology (hidden mechanism within a group) - but that doesn't fit the director's of the broadcaster's aims who basically want to tell
an entertaining and humanizing story about a big character ("What is the real face of your new President? How is he backstage with the people he works with 20h a day?"
That's closer to a Paris Match paper than one for Le Monde or Mediapart.
It's great to have this on prime time on TF1 (great number of viewers) because few people know about how it works backstage. But it has many bias that you have to acknowledge and that the average viewer won't see because the storytelling is effective and entertaining (even if people know that images can be manipulated etc).
IIncluding his wife, that was reassuring to see she's more a moral/health coach (un peu mère poule...) than a political/strategical one.
Well she clearly says she doesn't give her opinion to her husband publicly but only when they are alone. She's not part of the political team but she must give her opinion in private including on strategy.
That's clearly something that can't be seen (or read in a paper)
Btw about his wife I'm sick of hearing calling her "Brigitte" as if they knew her. Misogyny at its finest once again and that's only the beginning.
Btw2 where were the women in her staff? It's only white males*. Mostly young but still.
*deputy press secretary aside
