Cairado Nights
An enthralling glimpse into the social underground of Edrehasivar VIII’s Cairado. Spread across secret dance halls, one-night theaters, and so-called literary dens, director Para Lethora follows a band of veiled carousers through the city’s summer party season. With each new location comes new rules, new hierarchies, and a wealth of new characters. (12 E’has 8)

Bokh!
The proxy battle waged between sixteen-year-old Anmurlin Ruzh and Csthalis Hanothar at the thirty-third Dachenbokhmatema—the annual bokh tournament between the elven nations—caught on kamera by director Beset Athmaza. Known for its rhythmic, at times frenetic editing style, this documentary captures the tension on both sides of the border from the opening ceremony to the announcement of the victor—including the infamous moment Hanothar swapped his bokhrat and cavalier during a tea break in the penultimate match, a gamble which may have gone undiscovered were it not for the kamera. Faced subjects were removed from the film and replaced with static patterns beneath moving figures, a decision which facilitated the film’s release in the Commonwealth then and delights audiences now. (17 E’has 8)

Sholavee
In the seventeenth year of Edrehasivar VIII’s reign, brothers Valara and Vestis Daibrohar set out to the abandoned estate of Sholavee to document the main house’s renovation. This film, directed and edited by Vestis, instead focuses on the week that the brothers and their crew spent trapped within the decaying manor as a ghoul stalked the perimeter. In response to the threat of fines for featuring the uncensored face of a ghoul, Daibrohar removed much of the explicit footage. The result is a documentary which not only depicts the process of being hunted by a ghoul, but leaves the audience feeling just as helpless. (20 E’has 8)

big questions:

• WHAT IS THE LINE BETWEEN DOCUMENTARY AND ART FILM?
• HOW DO COMMONWEALTH DOCUMENTARIES AND ATHAMAREISE FICTION FILMS INFLUENCE ON ANOTHER?

 

1. []-making

• basically everyone has seen dakhenbarizheise documentaries
• faceless, silent except for music or sometimes narration, "exquisitely boring"
• pok: like the kind where your instructor brings out one of those big wheely-cart consoles when she's sick? / mmq: yes exactly (NOTE TO SHESS: you'd think that with how hard pok goes at rec nights he'd realise that those movies only get brought out when the instructor is hungover lol)
• let's define 'documentary:' a genre of nonfiction filmmaking which shapes +/ interprets factual material abt a subject
• reveth means death; to die, to kill, a dead thing*
• ath: to make. a tool, or the means by which something is made. 
• ex. 'athmaza'
•  usually we say 'maza', and it means a witch (or 'mazo', if she is a woman) 
• technically word is athmaza (spell-maker) and maz is just a spell but like... context clues
• (NOTE TO SHESS: wait does that mean athmuranar i zhas literally named himself 'wealth-maker'?? that's SO funny. what a power move.)
• word order matters → athrevetha = executioner, reveth-ath = execution (lit. corpse*-making), reveth-atha = guillotine. athmaza = witch, maz-ath = spell-making?, maz-atha = magical focus/spell components, etc
• *"rightful and righteously created corpse", technically; 6 different words for death in ethuverazhin
• easy way to tell if manufacturing documentary is documentary or advertisement is if the title is just (object)-making or it tries for a more eye catching title. (osmin michean and friends vs tea-making)

2. filming rights in the commonwealth

• banning DISTRIBUTION of faced films rather than banning faced films ALTOGETHER has benefits, but also downfalls
• ex. people are free to make faced films so long as they are not distributed, not true censorship but also yea functionally it's censorship just lighter
• ex. those without religious/ otherwise faith-based objection to faced films are not made to feel they are being oppressed by those who do have those objections (on a broad scale; individual basis is not possible to judge precisely)
• by elf standards(!) ehas7's decision is basically so centrist  it risks failing to appease anyone
• a risk appears: people have the equipment to make faced films, but without a clear direction they might end up trying to replicate the caloperaneisei and just create an underground distribution system where ehas7 cannot see
• He Does Not Want To Have To Try And See It. He Is Famously Not Excited About That Level Of Government Interference
• explicitly criminalised enterprises more dangerous because they're underground; potential victims fear legal blowback if they seek assistance
• re-enter ulkeris zhikarmened welcome back ulkeris zhikarmened!!!

3. welcome back ulkeris zhikarmened

• pardoned for the execution photograph incident but cannot cross the athamareise border due to complications with athmuranar i's crackdown on """criminals""" from the commonwealth immigrating, even tho zhikarmened was born in amalo
• surprisingly, does not leave cetho (city where the imperial palace is). instead gets immediately to documenting the conditions of manufactories 
• if he makes it clear that he is doing this to demonstrate poor working conditions, no one will let him into their manufactory. so instead he documents the process of manufacturing specific goods + promises to thank the manufactories in the end credits
• manufactories which his teams note as specifically dire are investigated, but investigation is not tied to documentary, and not all manufactories end up getting investigated

4. zhikarmened and pel-thenhior

• though living in cetho, z still considers himself an amaleisa. once pardoned, he writes to longtime friend p-t for information about state of amaleise film industry
• these letters continue for the rest of their lives! p-t's films cannot make it into the commonwealth and z's simply don't make it into amalo until right before p-t's death in 9 ehas9 (!), but they can describe the landscape to one another 
• we have (most of) these letters and we do know that they traded information 
• most influential figures in early elven cinema "an oddly incestuous bunch" - zhikarmened apparently ends up on ehas7's payroll and highly trusted, and anti-film advocate thara celehar (ehas7's best friend) independently knew p-t and THEY had a lifelong correspondence. keep your friends close and your enemies closer?
• (NOTE TO SHESS wait i went on your friend from celvaz's blog after you gave it to me and saw a lengthy post about how p-t like wrote his final film about celehar and how they were like. lovers? or something? is that just a rpf thing? i know celehar is your friend's fave haha)
• p-t develops special effects method involving partial mirrors, now known as the 'zhikarmened process' after z popularised it. basically a mirror is used to reflect one image while the subjects are filmed through a glass insert in the mirror, making it look like the subjects are inside the reflected image. 
• zhikarmened introduces p-t to animator's ink that can be painted directly onto the cel. z mostly used it for subtitles/bringing the viewer's attention to small details/last minute edits. p-t takes advantage of this for special effects, esp. mazwork, and builds on the visual language established by the ink's use in documentary (mmq: we'll get into metakino in a few weeks, just you wait)

further reading/viewing:

• collected letters of pel-thenhior (as compiled by the university of amalo)
• the zhikarmened process: false mirrors with real impact (by tanno thiss)
• politics of the imperial dinner party (a paper by a dakhenbarizheise writer but the library has a translated copy) (features some of ehas7's secretary's table layouts, one of which all but confirms zhikarmened's presence in the emperor's home)
• "lacemaking", a documentary led by zhikarmened about sharadansho silk (yikes)

Krenn Onn
Mm. Qentak
Introduction to Dakhenbarizheise Cinema
447 words

As a documentary in its own right, Bokh! (Athmaza, 17 E'has 8) is already a great watch. The patterned figures can be difficult to watch at first, but the quick and almost musical pacing of the cuts lulls the viewer into acceptance. Soon enough the bizarre becomes natural. But what made my viewing particularly special is I got to watch the film at an extracurricular social event with one of UP's five Commonwealth exchange students. I absolutely lucked out there.

The first thing Hasiva made me realise is that the documentary really is a mix of Commonwealth and Athamareise styles. Though the Commonwealth's documentary tradition can be musical sometimes, you can really hear how Thu-Athamar's obsession with opera elevates the situation: at one tense point, the background music apparently came from a battlefield sequence in the opera Siege of Tekarie. The patterns on the Commonwealth players' veils were easily recognisable to someone who's actually from there; according to Hasiva, the players came from all over the place, like the woman wearing a variation on a popular block-printed pattern from Lohaiso, or the man whose diamond patterns were "too wide to be from anywhere but Cairado¹." In the case of the second person mentioned, it was apparently clear to Hasiva that he was wearing the robes of the mazai under his veil, a detail which totally went over my head. It's also worth mentioning the film uses a few low-angle close-up shots to put the viewer at a level with the board. This is a narrative technique and would not have any use in a traditional documentary, another sign of Thu-Athamar's influence despite this being a Commonwealth filmmaker.

It also helped a lot that Hasiva is apparently a ranked bokh player back in the Commonwealth. Though he says he plays on the lower of the two tiers, it's pretty clear competition is fierce and that even those not in the highest tier have to play a strong game. When we got to the Ruzh-Hanothar matches, he spent the entire thing muttering under his breath about how uncharacteristically bad Ruzh's gameplay was that night—from stress, I guess. He was only 16 and was representing not just Dakhenbarizhan but also the Nazhmorhathveras in one of the most publicised "battles" in the ongoing cold war. I could see the kid's hands shaking, but without any idea what Ruzh usually played like, I never would have realised just how different that game was from his others. This made it all the more surprising to see Hanothar cheat—an event which made my Commonwealth friend nearly tear his hair out. "Thou wert winning, thou idiot!"²

[1] [2] Hasiva, 3619.