2. 6 Types of Documentary Film...
Bill Nichols is an American film critic and pioneer in the specific
study of documentary making. In his best selling book
'Introduction to Documentary' he outlines documentaries into six
key categories...
Poetic documentaries
Expository documentaries
Observational documentaries
Participatory documentaries
Reflexive documentaries
Performative documentaries
3. Expository Documentaries
Key points...
Speak directly to the viewer, often
authoritatively.
Attempt to be persuasive.
Narration has 'voice of god' quality.
4. Participatory Documentaries
Key points...
Participatory film makers believe it's impossible
to film and not disrupt the subject of the
documentary.
They employ direct engagement with the
documentary subject.
The relationship between the film maker and
subject is key in the making of the
documentary.
5. Poetic Documentaries
Key points...
Visually fragmented in terms of space and time.
People represented as entities- things that
exist.
Impressionistic and lyrical.
6. Performative documentaries
Key points...
Stress the subjects feelings or emotion.
May enact events to engage the audience into
placing themselves in the subjects position.
Often unconventional or experimental.
7. Reflexive documentaries
Key points...
These documentaries do not attempt to present
a window to another world in which we simply
observe.
They construct a narrative in which facts may
be slightly distorted. Possibly creating a bias
representation of facts.
8. Observational Documentaries
Key points...
Attempt to be spontaneous
Minimum interference with the subject matter.
Ushered in the birth of 'fly on the wall'
documentaries
9. Example... Super Size Me
Super Size Me
Documentary created and featuring Morgan
Spurlock.
Nominated for Best Documentary at the Oscars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2diPZOtty0
10. Example... Frozen Planet
Frozen Planet
BBC Production
Narrated by David Attenborough
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR-xllh_h5A
11. Example- Sans Soleil
Sans Soleil
Made in 1983 by Chris Marker
An anonymous female voice narrates the
thoughts of a traveller as they move from one
destination to the next.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKOJUgTqFtY
12. Example...The Educational Testing
Service
60th Anniversary of ETS
Documentary created to celebrate the
anniversary of the ETS America
Web based documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=1HwCYzHJ1GQ
13. Example... Don't Look Back
Don't Look Back
Made in 1967 by D.A. Pennebaker
Shot in the Summer of '67 in England
Focus was on Bob Dylan's UK tour
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=5GQzkzmRpDU
15. Activity...
Research news stories on the internet and find a
story which you think would make a good
documentary.
Select a documentary mode and justify why you
believe the subject/ story would fit well with the
documentary type you have selected.
Editor's Notes
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. These films are rhetorical, and try to persuade the viewer. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds ‘objective’ and omniscient. Images are often not paramount; they exist to advance the argument. The rhetoric insistently presses upon us to read the images in a certain fashion. Historical documentaries in this mode deliver an unproblematic and ‘objective’ account and interpretation of past events.
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. Not only is the filmmaker part of the film, we also get a sense of how situations in the film are affected or altered by her presence. Nichols: “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. (Almost like any other because the filmmaker retains the camera, and with it, a certain degree of potential power and control over events.)” The encounter between filmmaker and subject becomes a critical element of the film. Rouch and Morin named the approach cinéma vérité, translating Dziga Vertov’s kinopravda into French; the “truth” refers to the truth of the encounter rather than some absolute truth Betrayal of trust through v/o.
Poetic documentaries, which first appeared in the 1920’s, were a sort of reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film. The poetic mode moved away from continuity editing and instead organized images of the material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space. Well-rounded characters—’life-like people’—were absent; instead, people appeared in these films as entities, just like any other, that are found in the material world. The films were fragmentary, impressionistic, lyrical. Their disruption of the coherence of time and space—a coherence favored by the fiction films of the day—can also be seen as an element of the modernist counter-model of cinematic narrative. The ‘real world’—Nichols calls it the “historical world”—was broken up into fragments and aesthetically reconstituted using film form.
Performative documentaries stress subjective experience and emotional response to the world. They are strongly personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical enactments of events designed to make us experience what it might be like for us to possess a certain specific perspective on the world that is not our own, e.g. that of black, gay men in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) or Jenny Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991). This sub-genre might also lend itself to certain groups (e.g. women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, etc) to ‘speak about themselves.’ Often, a battery of techniques, many borrowed from fiction or avant-garde films, are used. Performative docs often link up personal accounts or experiences with larger political or historical realities.
Reflexive documentaries don’t see themselves as a transparent window on the world; instead they draw attention to their own constructedness, and the fact that they are representations. The Reflexive Mode acknowledges the constructed nature of documentary and flaunts it - conveying to people that this is not necessarily "truth" but a reconstruction of it - "a" truth, not "the" truth. Properganda- mild
Observational documentaries attempt to simply and spontaneously observe lived life with a minimum of intervention. Filmmakers who worked in this sub-genre often saw the poetic mode as too abstract and the expository mode as too didactic. The first observational docs date back to the 1960’s; the technological developments which made them possible include mobile lighweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment for synchronized sound. Often, this mode of film eschewed voice-over commentary, post-synchronized dialogue and music, or re-enactments. The films aimed for immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations.
