The document discusses how documentaries, while aiming to record reality, inherently construct subjective representations influenced by directors' choices. It notes that excluding the interviewer and questions from shots gives interviews an appearance of naturalness but the questions still guide responses in certain directions, making an objective portrayal of reality impossible.
2. OVERVIEW
• Documentaries are a medium in which to record, and
reconstruct ‘reality’.
• However, as Gauntlett suggests, as soon as you ‘try to
capture reality, you destroy it’.
• This suggests that all documentary footage is in fact a
construction, and is subjective, rather than objective as
the audience might think, in accordance with the
directions of the director.
3. INTERVIEWEES
• We didn’t show take a cinema-vérité approach of showing the
interviewer in any of our shots, nor include the questions
being asked on screen, which gave the suggestion that our
interviewees were talking freely.
• This appears to the audience to be real, as they are drawn
into an everyday reality which they don’t feel the need to
question.
• However, we have used our documentary as a way to
encourage the two points of view about government health
advice, and therefore our questions pushed our interviewee’s
answers in specific directions.
• This injects a sense of inherent subjectivity as a result of our
directions, making it impossible for the documentary to portray
and accurate representation of the everyday.
