With respect to the video clip "If By Chance We Meet Again" (from This American Life), I wish to raise a couple of questions. What would this documentary be like if there were no narration from Ira Glass? More importantly, what would this documentary look like if all the narration had been provided by the owners of Chance? What if these cattle ranchers knew how to use and edit video and decided to make a documentary of their own about their experiences with Chance? If this were the case, how would the content, style, and presentation of the video change?
Perhaps...
1. There would be no scenes showing or talking about how Second Chance almost killed his owner.
2. The video would lack any scenes which negatively portrayed Chance. It would probably be just the opposite.
3. The majority of the footage would be simply of the cow. The majority of the audio would be of the owners talking about their cow's greatness.
In fact, I wonder how the owners felt about the actual video and how their story was presented (including the narration by Ira Glass).
Perspective is powerful.
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You raise an issue that's also very interesting to me. A lot of documentaries I've seen recently have an invisible narrator, or the narrator has been absent and the editing of the documentary is supposed to tell the tale. I'm struck in particular by the way in which Ira actually appears on screen in a disheveled state at the emergency entrance of the hospital. Would the ranchers have made the editorial decision to include the goring? I suspect not: it wouldn't quite fit for the way they wanted to represent this miracle of Second Chance. Then again, there's never the possibility of full control of any narrative and the meanings that it generates, even if you create it yourself.
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