A reel is something like a video portfolio. I recently published my first one on my YouTube channel.

With the situation at Twitter (what, exactly, is the situation?), it seems a timely move to reassess my “social media strategy.” The quote marks indicate a certain irony 🙂

Twitter wasn’t doing it for me. Or, rather, I was bad at Twitter. So I have decided to make it a consumption platform only. I’m drastically cutting back who I follow to just my most trusted sources for news and information about documentary films. If you follow me there, you may unfollow at any time. I tweeted my last tweet there this morning.

As noted on Facebook last week, I’ll use my wall for personal stuff only — communicating with friends and family. I am trying to build a page there that’s primarily focused on my documentary work, which will continue after I retire in about four weeks.

Instagram is, and will increasingly be, all about my move to Portugal and promoting my documentary and nonfiction video work.

YouTube is go-to right now. Please “like” and “subscribe.” Unironically 🙂

I’m giving Tribel a try as a self-promotion platform similar to how I was using Twitter.

And then there’s Rhetorica — an old-fashioned blog. Blogs are kinda dead, I think. I keep this up for nostalgia. It is one of the oldest, continuously published blogs on the interwebs. Hit the link to Archive.org for all the old stuff (that I lost awhile back in a server snafu).

I’ve recently posted Witness at Tornillo to my YouTube channel (handle: @acline). I was executive producer, assistant editor, and one of three cinematographers. This award-winning film (2020 Kansas City Filmfest International Best Documentary Feature) was directed by Shane Franklin.

So there’s a long-running trope in the writing of tough reviews that starts this way: “I watched ____ so you don’t have to.” This signals that the review will pan whatever the thing is and offer an invitation to bask in confirmation bias instead. This move belongs solidly to the various tropes we might list under the heading “clickbait.”

So yesterday I tweeted this:

While I appreciate the “I watched it so you don’t have to” approach to reviews, I think it’s best to ignore crap that isn’t #documentary #nonfiction or treat it instead as #fantasy. I don’t even like calling it a #film. https://t.co/HRyy5kWh8F

— Andy Cline (@arcline) October 11, 2022

I “appreciate” the trope when it helps me avoid nonsense. But I did read this review because I’m interested in defining what a documentary is.

Proposition: Some documentaries engage in propaganda, but propaganda that employs features of the genre of documentary only as a rhetoric of legitimacy is not a documentary. Opinion and a strong point of view are necessary in the emotional medium of video/film. But there must be a foundation of information and knowledge.  Neil Postman offered an interesting way to think about this foundation. Information is statements about facts in the world. Knowledge is organized information embedded in a context. Many documentary projects live in these two formulations. The best ones, however, include Postman’s third feature: wisdom, the capacity to know what body of knowledge is relevant to solving significant problems.

[S]election Code fails all three. How do I know this? Not from the review. I know if because responsible journalism has already examined the information regarding the 2020 election and published knowledge. In a few cases, perhaps even wisdom. And none of it points to election fraud. All of it points to the Big Lie.

So, [S]election Code is not a documentary.

Yeah, busy. I’m 10 weeks from retirement, 11 weeks from leaving Springfield, and 14 weeks from arrival in Portugal. I had hoped to have Trinity ready for the BEA Festival of Arts. Not gonna happen.

But this does give me a project to work on as soon as I arrive in Europe 🙂