Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Generic Types of Interview-Based Features (Examples)

Confessional Interview - here is all-time humdinger (still record audience for factual programme): part one; part two; part three; part four. Imagine you had done this interview (not for TV). Practice by 'writing this up' - in true Sun/Bella style as Diana opens up her heart... Compare with this recent example of a FEATURE INTERVIEW (Gonzo style interview - reporter/interviewer is star, it is all about what Ross is saying, not Cameron - the stories the next day were all about what Ross said.) Of course journalists (and student journalists) love the idea of doing feature interviews - here's another (in print) - Lynn Barber. The ultimate thing would be Lynn Barber interviews Jonathan Ross - imagine that! - or Divinia What'sherface interviews Michael Parkinson - that'll never happen! (Actually I claim IP rights over that - pitch a new TV series - call it Interviewers Interview Interviewers About Interviewing and Stuff - it's a winner. It would be well wiggy for for the viewers to work out who was interviewing who. Maybe they could vote for who they thought was winning. But I digress.

Sometimes students try to reproduce a TV or radio style 'chat show' interview by using a Q and A format for a magazine article. That is just total crap. It just looks very amatuerish (the writer is using TV style in print, which doesn't work). Here's an example - its an intreview with a journalist (confusing I know, but I want to hit two birds with one stone). Its sad because the subject matter is potentially excellent (the interview subject is sometimes called the greatest living journalist). This "Q and A" is very weak and the thing would have been a lot stronger if it had been done as a proper confessional (by 'writing it up' as "my life story...") or if it had been done as a feature interview (complete with gonzo type observations about the interview subject. What this is really is a total cop out - they should have just commissioned Ryzard to write the piece in his own voice. A big shame they didn't.

Both the feature interview and the confessional interview have to be differentiated from the classic PROFILE - or 'living obituary' - which are more the province of the trade press, and the broadsheet. Some profiles: Hugo Chavez, Tim Berners Lee, David Frost, Aki Kaurismaki, Jonathan Ross. The key to features getting a total grip on the formats. Readers/ viewers/ listeners "consume the formats" - not especially the content. Remember: The medium is the massage. Get those formats nice and crisp - don't mix them up, or you'll end up with typical amatuer student journalism sludge.

OK it is trumped for ratings success and commerical value by Panorama Princess of Hearts. But the most effective confessional interview I've ever seen on film is Shoah (It contains answers to single questions which, with gentle prompting, last up to an hour each). The method comes from the clinical practice of psychotherapy.

Interview technique - in confessionals that's mainly a matter of GET THEM TALKING - KEEP THEM TALKING (not like TV style chatshow/ Paxman interviewing. That's a different game). For profiles you don't even interview the subject. You interview people who know them.

OK it is trumped for ratings success and commerical value by Panorama Princess of Hearts. But the most effective confessional interview I've ever seen on film is Shoah (It contains answers to single questions which, with gentle prompting, last up to an hour each). The interview subject is actually given time to think and take his time to remember and answer. Its a kind of exact opposite of the Jonathan Ross approach - and TV/Radio generally - where interviews are mainly a contest of wites between reporter/presenter and subject (eg Paxman) and an entertaining gladitorial contest. All very good. But a different approach. Shoah of course works against the grain of the visual medium in so far as it is not superficial. It take almost ten hours to tell the story. It uses the visual medium to achieve emotional engagement, in the style of a oil painting. It is calm, slow, cold, unsensational, humane, unconstructed, honest, unmanipulated, adult, painful significant... .

Saturday, November 11, 2006

TOM WOLFE ON FN

Below is from Tom Wolfe's essay in 'Hooking Up' - which brought ideas about the internet to a wider audience in 1996. I'm prompted by the fact that I'm discussing feature writing with students, and Tom Wolfe (Boring Old Fart that he is) rules supreme throughout the American speaking world when it comes to that. There's a great peg which its the 10th anniversary of Tom Wolfe's prediction that by 2006 somebody would annouce, pace GOD IS DEAD (that's been the case for 150 years) that THE NEW GOD IS DEAD (that's a really good headline. I claim properitory rights over that). And the new God was the holy duo of EGO and ID. These two dieties have now been killed Wolfe expects by biotechnology (clones, cybernetic brain impants, genetic engineering, 'designer babies') and direct brain/personality manipulation by means of psychoactive drugs, brain implants and neuroscience.

Wolfe writes:

"Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book was Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science ].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."

Nietzsche's view of guilt, incidentally, is also that of neuro-scientists a century later. They regard guilt as one of those tendencies imprinted in the brain at birth. In some people the genetic work is not complete, and they engage in criminal behavior without a twinge of remorse--thereby intriguing criminologists, who then want to create Violence Initiatives and hold conferences on the subject.

Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."

Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?

A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? And what if, ten years from now, brain imaging has proved, beyond any doubt, that not only Edward O. Wilson but also the young generation are, in fact, correct?

The elders, such as Wilson himself and Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life , and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker , insist that there is nothing to fear from the truth, from the ultimate extension of Darwin's dangerous idea. They present elegant arguments as to why neuroscience should in no way diminish the richness of life, the magic of art, or the righteousness of political causes, including, if one need edit, political correctness at Harvard or Tufts, where Dennett is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, or Oxford, where Dawkins is something called Professor of Public Understanding of Science. (Dennett and Dawkins, every bit as much as Wilson, are earnestly, feverishly, politically correct.) Despite their best efforts, however, neuroscience is not rippling out into the public on waves of scholarly reassurance. But rippling out it is, rapidly. The conclusion people out beyond the laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We're all hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!