BETHANY MOSS

Documentaries

What is a documentary?

A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality.

"Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving.

Types of Documentary…

• Expository documentaries - speak directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view

• Observational documentaries - attempt to simply and spontaneously observe lived life with a minimum of intervention

• Participatory documentaries - believe that it is impossible for the act of filmmaking to not influence or alter the events being filmed. What these films do is emulate the approach of the anthropologist: participant-observation

• Reflexive documentaries – the filmmaker acknowledges their presence. Based more on suggestions and opinions rather than facts

• Performative documentaries - stress subjective experience and emotional response to the world. They are strongly personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental

• Poetic documentaries - a sort of reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film

Genre

“A genre is a category of media text that comes to be recognizable through its

conventions.”

• Preserve• Persuade• Analyse• Express

• Discuss• Explore• Intervene• Enlighten

Purpose of documentaries?

Conventions of Documentaries

1. Hand held camera – encoding realism and ‘truth’2. Narration / voice overs – lead the audience into

preferred reading 3. Vox pops / Interviews with ‘experts’ / participants /

subjects4. Intercutting / Parallel Editing – linking usually to key

scenes5. Archive footage – supports filmed scenes & narration6. Surveillance (information) decoded by the audience7. Mediated culture – documentaries select & construct

(encodes opinions)8. Selective editing – crucial to constructing meaning 9. Often ‘single stranded’ / linear – one subject is often the

topic

History of Documentaries

• The history of documentaries goes back to the invention of film by the Lumiere brothers.

• They created short unedited clips (the cameras that they created could only hold 50 feet of film

stock) which captured the life around them. These were known as ‘Actualities’.

• ‘Un Train Arrivee’ is their most well-known film showing a train pulling up to a station. Audiences were both fascinated by the detail of movement captured by a film camera for the first time, but also shocked and slightly scared as many people

thought it was a real train coming towards them…

History of Documentaries

• A major development in the documentary film genre happened in the 1950s and 1960s due to ‘Direct Cinema’. This was a movement which began in the USA, aiming to present social and political issues in an unmediated way with the impression that events are recorded exactly as

they happened (without the involvement of the film-maker).

• Smaller/lighter film cameras were also developed around this time period allowing feature films to be made

(documentary films).

• Similar movement happened in France – ‘Cinema Verite’ (‘Cinema Truth’) – minimalist style of film making – favours hand-held camera, natural lighting, location

filming and diegetic/direct sound.