This document discusses postmodern perspectives on documentaries and their construction of reality. It notes that while documentaries aim to represent everyday reality, they are inherently subjective due to choices made during filming, editing, and narration. Reality is staged and reconstructed through these documentary techniques. Postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard have criticized how documentaries create a "simulacrum" or hyperreal version of reality that blurs the lines between real and constructed. Ultimately, the document concludes that documentaries can never fully or objectively capture reality due to the many subjective decisions that shape them.

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Postmodernism
By Megan Vincent

2.  Media forms such as photography and
documentaries are a representational medium:
They sometimes reconstruct the everyday
reality viewers typically cannot experience
themselves. Because photography can signify
truth, audiences understand the documentary,
a moving photograph, to signify truth also.
However, audiences can observe the difference
between the “everyday reality”presented by
documentaries, and the fictive “reality”of
cinematic films.
Reconstruction

3.  The documentary's version of reality is not as
truthful as it seems to be. As the audience believe in
the truth of the documentary, they are drawn into an
everyday reality that seemingly does not need
questioning. There is “a sense of co-presence between
creator and the viewer, experiences a perception of
reality.
 Documentaries are a subjective device, a medium
that “marshals systems of representation to
encourage point of view about something . This
subjectivity, can be drawn from the film but also the
interpretation of the filmmaker, which therefore
makes it impossible for a documentary to ever
accurately represent the everyday.
Version of Reality

4.  Documentary construction can be separated in
two halves: filming and the narrative. It is
composed of interviews or a “voice of God”
narration. Despite the fact documentaries are
informative, there is an ‘art’ to documentary
that obliges the filmmaker to create elements
and tell a story. “…”The “informational value is
mediated through the perspective of the person
making it, and it is presented as a mixture of
emotion and information
Documentary
construction

5.  ‘Any documentary…made in no matter what
style, is arbitrary, biased, prejudiced,
compressed and subjective. Like any of its
sisterly or brotherly fictional forms, it is born in
choice –choice of subject matter, place, people,
camera angles, duration of shooting, sequences
to be shot or omitted, transitional material and
cutaways’. This therefore shows that
everything will always be under the influence
of the film makers, creating subjectivity.
Frederick Wiseman

6.  Many critiques of how reality and the everyday are
represented come from 20th-century postmodernists, such as
Baudrillard. He writes about many issues with
postmodernism such as the problems with
1. The interpretation during documentary construction.
2. Representation is both staged and narrated and does not
capture the real
3. Once one has recorded what was once reality, the resulting
representation is “hyper real
4. The world is saturated by reconstructed media texts, the
audience can no longer identify the real truth/ meaning
 Baudrillard terms this phenomenon a “simulacrum,”a disparate
model or simulation that exists in a hyper real space.
Post-modern issues

7.  Although the documentary has some value and
truth, its presentation of reality will be
inherently be subjective. It shows itself as
objective in its representational techniques, but
this serves only to blur the line the real and
hyper real. This “everyday”shows us that it will
never come close to the actual reality it strives
to represent. Ultimately, documentaries are
shaped by too many determinants such as the
filmmakers to genuinely represent everyday
reality.
Summary

8.  Fundamentally, we need to decide how
establish reality although it is a construct. For
example the use of montage shots which
connote real time and the use of interviews to
suggest information and heighten the realism.
How it has influenced
production decisions

9.  Although our production is a documentary it is
a reconstruction as we have chosen and edited
each element into it. For example, the use of an
interview is reconstructed due to the 3 point
lighting, microphones and briefing to the
interviewee. This does not make it completely
real and supports the idea of ‘post-modernism’.
Construction

10.  There are two ways we could approach our
production with regards to post-modernism:
1. Acknowledge it is a construction
2. Make it seem like we are capturing reality
How are we going to
approach it?

11.  This style means that we would expose it as a
construct and show the elements that have
been tampered with to show the audience that
is not completely capturing reality and for
them to notice is completely a construction. We
could perhaps do this by filming the interviews
with a group member talking to them to
portray the fact it is a construct.
Approach 1

12.  This would mean that although it is a
reconstruction, the audience are under the
impression that it is reality for example by
continuity editing. Here we would explore how
far we would pass it off as real and not draw
attention to the fact it is a construct. This is a
more traditional and conventional way of
documentaries.
Approach 2

13.  I believe that we should take approach 2 because the
topic of our documentary is traditional and
therefore it would suit this conventional way of
representing it as reality. Approach 1 would also
mean that there would be an absence of
conventional shots and include more creative
elements such as unusual camera angles and shots
which also would not suit the traditional style and
topic of our documentary. Thus, we are going to
have to reinforce the fact it is no a construct and
make the audience believe it is a reality. This could
be done by smooth editing and conventional shots
such as bright lighting for the interviewee in a
medium close up to heighten to verisimilitude.
Conclusion?