documentary styles

1. DOCUMENTA
RY STYLES
AND
INFLUENCES

2. 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.

3. 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)

4. PARTICIPATORY
DOCUMENTARY MODE
This 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.

5. PERFORMATIVE
DOCUMENTARY STYLE
This 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.

6. REFLEXIVE
DOCUMENTARY STYLE
This 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).

7. POETIC DOCUMENTARY
STYLE
These 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.

8. 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.