Big honking lavs, and other raw tales

“Welcome to Macintosh” is screening on CNBC this week, and if there’s one thing more than others that stands out, it’s the beach-ball-sized lavalier mikes with exposed wires that seem clothespinned to every t-shirt in the bunch. This, in turn, reminds of the Spike Jonze short doc on children’s author Maurice Sendak, “Tell Them Anythng You Want,” a film filled with jump cuts, bad lighting and Sendak sporting a lav hanging off his shirt like a Taser lead.

What’s the deal? Meanwhile, watching the FOX coverage of the National Football League playoffs, I noticed two things – first, that studio hosts had their lavs placed inside the knots of their $300 silk neckties, peeking from under the cross knot in a way that spoke of deep preparation, and second, the presence on football fields these days of boompoles and blimps, as if on-cam mikes are just no good anymore. Every game looks like a movie set, with crane shots and the overhead tracking.

Look at the knot of the tie - there's the lav....

What’s the deal with the seeming reversal?

The visible-lav movement seems to be something that is too obvious to be accidental. It seems instead a sort of postmodern DIYish self-ironic statement, one that says the following: This is an interview. We’re keeping it real. There’s a roughness to the approach, which can also include wild pans, zooming in and out abruptly, and and the vertiginous handheld shots that sway up and down. In the Mac doc, they also intercut shots with what appears to be purposely downconverted clips that are in black-and-white and generally exposed; there’s also what looks like a Skype or iChat video interview with one person the filmmakers presumably could not afford to actually interview in person, or hire a local videographer to grab for them.

All this is just as obvious as in the Sendak film, in which two highly compensated film operatives, Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs, include footage of themselves shooting handheld stuff. It’s not a glitch; more like two guys trying to work below their pay grade. You know they could afford better, but they are sure to walk into their own crossfire. Look how raw we are! God forbid we think these guys don’t have a warehouse full of gear (wireless lavs, say), or that they can’t run a wire up Sendak’s shirt. (Once, visiting a friend on the set of “Three Kings,” we watched Jonze try to figure out how to load film in his brand-new, $6,000 Leica still camera, with middling success. We knew a thousand serious photographers who would have killed for a Leica).

In the Mac doc, we’d give them more flex. It’s a truer product, made cheap and dear; nonetheless, every affiliate TV station on the planet knows to conceal the wire and loop it around the clip.

So is the bare lav the new freak flag of indy docmaking?

In the spirit of LATFH.com, we’ll say, “Look At This F—ing Lav,” viewing it as a hipster-retro thing. But in another way, we’ll view it as simplicity, not worrying about making it look as if it’s obvious. Think of Ira Glass’s glasses: Making a statement. Evoking a tradtion (Maysles, Woody Allen). Raging against a world in which technicians slip lavs into the dimples of ex-football players’ Hermes neckties.

Docs are becoming the indy world of filmmaking, more indy than indy dramatic films. So it seems a statement of this minimalistic, low-budget sentiment to not do the most obvious (and cost-free) task of slipping the lav up a shirt.

Will the trend catch? Hard to say. But it does seem a statement.

Are you a hide-the-lav or an expose-the-lav filmmaker? An Inny or an Outy, so to speak? Here are some points of view:

Hide the lav…

http://www.televisionsound.com/parabolic.html

http://www.videomaker.com/article/1193/

http://www.videomaker.com/article/14112/

And the show-the-lav constuency:

Thin as it is, few spoke directly of naked lavs, although many do it. The best we found was Nonfiction Media, which had a 2008 post that said this:

Up till now, we have generally figured that we don’t mind too much if viewers can see that there’s a microphone. Apart from being the easiest way to mount with the best chance of getting decent sound, a visible mic also lends a kind of we’re-not-trying-to-fool-anyone transparency to a documentary.