OUTLINE

INTRO:

In Brett Kashmere’s documentary, Valery’s Ankle, he talks about “nationality and sport”, discussing how violence in hockey has defined Canada. Hockey, being a very large part of Canadian culture, is notorious for its brutality. Kashmere uses many clips involving acts of violence in hockey to make his point about cultural identity in Canada. In this documentary, Kashmere fails to respect the other qualities these hockey clips show. These clips show passion, a willingness to succeed, as well as loyalty. Kashmere ignores these positive traits, and manipulates the clips in order to make his point. Roland Barthes, in his essay ‘The Blue Guide’, talks about how “The guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness” (Barthes 76). Similarly to this ‘guide’, Kashmere’s accusation that hockey fights provoke a negative view of Canada, acts as ‘an agent of blindess’ to the passion also displayed by these actions.

1st Supporting Paragraph:
Kashmere is manipulating these images so that we only see the brutality, and not everything surrounding it. We do not see how this act by Clarke was him showing passion for winning and representing his country.

2nd
Manipulation in theater is very easy to do, because as Michael Fried says:

“Theatrical art communicates to viewers through formal cues that make them conscious of the fact that their ostensibly transcendent encounter is in fact highly conditional—that aesthetic meaning is not immanent in the physical object but is created through and by their very situatedness in space and time before it” (Kester 47).

3rd
When we see a hockey fight, and hear Kashmere’s voice, talking about how this violence defines Canadians, we are easily manipulated. This method used by Kashmere is an example of a documentary motive discussed by Robert Sklar in his essay about artifice in documentaries.

Rethesis
As this shows, Kashmere has used common methods of manipulation to mold our minds into believing that these hockey players are simply being violent. He also leads us to believe that this defines Canadians, because they celebrate these acts of violence.


QUOTES

“all evidence is subject to interpretation and argument. Once archival footage is placed into the larger context of a documentary film to support or refute an argument about a particular historical event, it becomes artistic proof” (Grue).
“the documentary motive in mass communications media, and they suggest paradoxically that in nonfiction communication—as in fiction—the operative word may not be artifact but artifice” (Sklar 299).

“Theatrical art communicates to viewers through formal cues that make them conscious of the fact that their ostensibly transcendent encounter is in fact highly conditional—that aesthetic meaning is not immanent in the physical object but is created through and by their very situatedness in space and time before it” (Kester 47).

“To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless” (Barthes 76).