DOCUMENTARY STYLES AND INFLUENCES

OBSERVATIONAL DOCUMENTARY MODE

The observational documentary will aim to observe lived life with little control over the artificiality of the events that take place – minimum intervention will occur. The first observational documentaries date back to the 1960’s, where mobile lightweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment was used for synchronized sound. This mode of film will icnlude voice-over commentary to support and narrate the clips, so the audience is aware of exactly what is going on. It also can include re-enactments, music and post-synchronized dialogue.

Often this mode is used for immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations.

Examples: Frederick Wiseman’s films, e.g. High School (1968); Gilles Groulx and Michel Brault’s Les Racquetteurs (1958); Albert & David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s Gimme Shelter (1970) An ironic example of this mode is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will (1934), which ostensibly records the pageantry and ritual at the Nazi party’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, although it is well-known that these events were often staged for the purpose of the camera and would not have occurred without it. This would be anathema to most of the filmmakers associated with this mode, like Wiseman, Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Robert Drew, who believed that the filmmaker should be a “fly-on-the-wall” who observes but tries to not influence or alter the events being filmed.

EXPOSITORY DOCUMENTARY MODE• Expository documentaries are often in the form of an

authoritative commentary which employs voiceover or titles, speaking directly to the audience, proposing a strong argument and point of view. This means these types of documentaries are persuasive, the commentary often sounding objective. The images and clips presented in the documentary will be present to support the argument.

• Historical documentaries in this mode deliver an unproblematic and ‘objective’ account and interpretation of past events.

Examples: TV shows and films like America’s Most Wanted; many science and nature documentaries; Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990); Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New (1980)

PARTICIPATORY DOCUMENTARY MODEThis type of documentary offers a style which includes the filmmaker as a part of the film, and through this we also develop a sense of how situations in the documentary are affected by the filmmakers presence. Participatory documentaries hold the belief that it is impossible for filmmaking not to affect the events being filmed. To support this, Bill Nichols, American documentary theorist, comments “The filmmaker steps out from behind the cloak of voice-over commentary, steps away from poetic meditation, steps down from a fly-on-the wall perch, and becomes a social actor (almost) like any other”. The combination of both the filmmaker and the subject of filming becomes the critical element of the film. This approach was named “cinema verite” by Rouch and Morin, translating Dziga Vertov’s kinopravda into French.

Examples inclide: Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera

(1929); Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1985);

Nick Broomfield’s films. Michael Moore’s films would also belong here, although they have a strong ‘expository’ bent as well.

PERFORMATIVE DOCUMENTARY STYLEThis particular style of documentary stresses subjective experience, and emotional responses to the world. They are strongly unconventional, personal, and even experimental and poetic, and may include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it may be lke for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is unlike our own. Examples include that of black, homosexual men in Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied (1989). This sub-genre might also lend itself to certain groups e.g. ethnic minorities to speak about themselves and their lifestyle. These documentaries often link personal experiences with larger political and/or historical realities.

Examples: Alain Resnais’ Night And Fog (1955), with a commentary by Holocaust survivior Jean Cayrol, is not a historical account of the Holocaust but instead a subjective account of it; it’s a film about memory.

REFLEXIVE DOCUMENTARY STYLEThis type of documentary doesn’t see itself as a transparent window on the world, but instead they draw attention to their own artificiality and constructedness, making it obvious that they are representations. This draws attention to how the world gets represented by documentary films, and this question is central to this sub-genre of films. They cause the audience to question the authenticity and reliability of the documentary in general, and is the most self-aware of all modes. It is highly skeptical of ‘realism’. Brechtian’s alienation strategies are used to jar us, in order to ‘defamiliarize’ what we are seeing and how we are seeing it.

Examples: (Again) Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929); Buñuel’s Land Without Bread; Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989); Jim McBride & L.M. Kit Carson’s David Holzman’s Diary (1968); David & Judith MacDougall’s Wedding Camels (1980).

POETIC DOCUMENTARY STYLEThese style of documentary style first appeared in the 1920’s. This style was a sort of reaction against both the content and the grammar of the early fiction film. This moved away from continuity editing and instead organized images of material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space. ‘Life-like people’ we’re unapparent, and instead the people were filmed as entities, found in the material world. These films were very impressionistic. The ‘real world’ Nichols calls it the “historical world” was broken up into fragments and aesthetically reconstitutes using film form.

Examples: Joris Ivens’ Rain (1928), whose subject is a passing summer shower over Amsterdam; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Play of Light: Black, White, Grey (1930), in which he films one of his own kinetic sculptures, emphasizing not the sculpture itself but the play of light around it.

EVALUATION…

Through our research of documentary genres, we can use these different forms of documentary to analyse our own documentary technique. What we found interesting is how the different forms show facts and truth in very different ways.