Documentry


 * What is a Documentary?**

1. To document a subject in order to preserve knowledge To reveal something about the subject To allow the viewer to experience what it's like to be the subject (whether it's someone diving out of an airplane or a homeless person) To advocate on behalf of the subject

2. One appeal of the documentary is that it lets the viewer participate in another world.

3. Expository documentaries

Expository documentaries are what most of us think of when we think of documentaries. They address the audience directly to present reality's surface. They often use narrators to guide us and to interpret what we are watching. The expository documentary is like an essay: it presents information, and can prove a case or persuade us of an interpretation of events or conditions. The case might be stated outright or implied. In Nanook, Flaherty made a case for the Inuit hunter's humanity and courage in the face of hostile nature.

Observational documentaries

Some filmmakers in the 1960s became disenchanted with the form of expository documentaries. In particular, they disliked the narrator, generally a male, whose booming commentary they derided as "the Voice of God." These directors were looking for a style of documentary that did not place a narrator between the film's content and the audience. They wanted the documentaries to be more self-explanatory, and they wanted the subjects to speak in their own words, with less interpretation.

Reflexive documentaries

Documentary filmmaking is an art form so, as real as it may appear, it is artificial. Expository documentary may try to hide the camera's presence to focus outward on the illusion of realism. Observational documentaries sometimes reveal the fact that there is an interviewer and a camera crew - in the case of cinema vérité, the filmmaker actually intrudes on the subject. Reflexive documentary acts on the premise that the audience knows that all filmmaking arranges and manipulates the illusion of reality, so it exposes the filmmaker, his character and opinions, and even the process of filming itself. The film "reflects" the process of filming. Often, these documentaries are constructed around the making of the documentary itself, as they chronicle the filmmaker's process of searching for the truth and pursuing evidence.

First-person documentaries

The first-person documentary is largely a video format, and most examples have appeared on television. The filmmaker uses the documentary form to examine his or her own situation, as an instrument of self-revelation or self-discovery. One dramatic example documented a filmmaker's search for her birth mother. She chronicled her struggles by speaking to the camera and interviewed others as well. The other interviews often presented alternative views to her own interpretations of events, so the video treated tensions about what was true that the filmmaker tried to resolve in the course of the taping. Ultimately, the film shows the actual search for the mother, and the filmmaker's new understanding of herself.

Poetic documentaries

In the poetic documentary, the aim is less to present an argument or idea as to reveal something extraordinary about the world. For the poetic documentarist, the camera and editing suite are primarily artistic tools. They emphasize the "creative," or artistic, aspect of Grierson's definition of "the creative treatment of actuality." Like other visual artists, the filmmaker allows the audience to see the world with new eyes, sometimes by rearranging or enhancing what we can normally see, sometimes magnifying our view or editing images in extraordinary rhythms.

TV Hybrids

Documentary techniques have had an impact on feature films and on television. When fictional film or TV directors want to create an illusion of gritty realism, they will often use the hand-held camera and unsteady motion of observational cinema, even though they are filming professional actors in highly scripted scenes. If you watch television critically, you will see documentary-like cuts incorporated into titling sequences and other parts of fictional stories.


 * The ABC's of Documentary Cinema**

1.