Three Short Documentaries: Outsiders, Touched by Murder and When Night Falls (aka Men Who Sleep in Trucks) : Films by Marc Isaacs
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 34867976
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- Second Run DVD
- Month
- October
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The three films forming this output took over three years of multi-layered research, development and production (2014-2016). This included extensive archival research to enable the creation of the story-telling framework underpinning “Touched by Murder”, fieldwork to identify suitable locales for “Outsiders”, and a scoping study to identify the characters in “The Men Who Sleep in Trucks”. Given Isaacs’ artistic emphasis upon spatial constraint, polyvocal narratives and interactive methods of filming, his approach to development and production are both complex and lengthy.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The three short films Outsiders, Touched by Murder and When Night Falls (aka Men Who Sleep in Trucks) jointly form Isaacs’ output. Outsiders was initially released by VICE Munchies TV on 25 December 2014; Touched by Murder, part of the Goethe Institute’s EUROPOLY artistic project, was first released on EUROPOLY’s website on 7 January 2016; When Night Falls premiered on BBC iPlayer on 19 July 2016. They were subsequently included in the box set From Lift to The Road: The Films of Marc Isaacs (Second Run, 2018) (see contextual information for further details on dissemination).
The three films grew out of Isaacs’s decision to return to making shorts in response to the possibilities created by online platforms. All share a focus on social outsiders, whose lives are taken to illuminate both the social tensions existing in contemporary Britain and more general human predicaments.
Taking brevity as an opportunity rather than a constraint, Isaacs’s work adapts the Aristotelian unities of action, place and time as a means of providing conceptual and structural simplicity and achieving a heightened emotional resonance. This process of distillation is further reinforced by a mise-en-scène of extreme spatial confinement. In Outsiders, a food van on the road side functions as a stage of action, while, in When Night Falls, the narrow cabins in which truckers bed down for the night convey a sense of constriction. Touched by Murder constructs a web of witness accounts that are told from within the enclosed spaces of a housing block.
Deliberately departing from a purely observational method of documentary, Isaacs employs a subjective and interactive approach that redefines documentary filmmaking as a creative, polyvocal and open-ended practice that allows the expression of a multiplicity of perspectives.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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