Lift Documentary

Lift is a documentary piece, by Marc Isaacs, about the life of the families living in the apartment block and the everyday conversations they have with the filmmaker.


The documentary by Marc Isaacs called "lift" is an intriguing piece about the people living in an apartment block and the lives they lead inside the block. I found some of the conversations interesting mainly with one men who allowed the filmmaker to know his past traumas such as his schizophrenia.
However i couldn't get into the documentary because of its constant cuts and not there weren't many actions that made it stick out.

Some of his shots showed meaning behind them such as the clip of the dog who walks towards and away from the lift and then cutting to the women who had a dream about a dog who drowned, which showed a symbolic connection between her and the dog. There were a small amount of people who showed up again a few times but nothing much happened between them and the only cutaways within the documentary are to the lifts mechanisms or to someone else getting on the lift.

What styles of Documentary do you think this was? Give reasons for your answer.
I think the lift is a observational documentary type because the filmmaker films collects footage of the spontaneous and inhibited flow of life the block and the lift (as the visual main focus of the documentary. However with the interactions towards the people living in the block and the visual choices he goes for it could also be a mix of different documentary types.

Think about he proximity and awkwardness of the filmmaker and location to the filmmaker do you think that this helps the narrative from naturally or do you think it forces a story.
I think the documentary has a forced story through the use of the filmmakers awkwardness because the questions the filmmaker asked was about their day, their dreams and their past which was a trigger for their response for the documentary. This would cause it to be a subjective type of documentary but the majority of shots/shot types would also class it as observational documentary

If it had involved the specific level of planning that you usually associate with the factual genre and used footage of the people outside of the lift do you think it would have been as good? or better?
I think the documentary would have been better because depending on how they shoot and edit the footage they could have included so much more when nothing was happening in the documentary