This document provides an overview of documentaries, including: - Defining documentaries as non-fiction movies that document or capture reality, as opposed to news reports. While striving for truth, documentaries involve subjective storytelling. - Explaining that for every documentary, there are three intertwining stories - the filmmaker's, the film's, and the audience's perspective. - Suggesting some techniques for identifying documentaries, like expected topic, who tells the story, shot types used, and whether images are contemporary or reenactments.

1. Week 9
What Are Documentaries About?

2. • Understand the difference between a
documentary and a news report
• Understand that "truth" is a complex concept
that is different from "accuracy”
• Engage in close reading of a media "text"
MAIN OBJECTIVES

3. VOCABULARY
• documentary, documentarian, genre, fiction,
non-fiction, accuracy, objective, subjective,
propaganda

4. What is A Documentary?
A documentary is a broad term to describe
a non-fiction movie that in some way
"documents" or captures reality.

5. What Makes a Documentary
a Documentary?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34-zYlEI5_4

6. Defining Documentary
• "Documentaries bring viewers into new worlds and
experiences through the presentation of factual information
about real people, places, and events, generally -- but not
always -- portrayed through the use of actual images and
artifacts. But factuality alone does not define documentary
films; it's what the filmmaker does with those factual
elements, weaving them into an overall narrative that strives
to be as compelling as it is truthful and is often greater than
the sum of its parts."
•
--Sheila Curran Bernard, Author of Documentary Storytelling

7. Watch Documentary Trailers
https://vimeo.com/15464226
Rising From Ashes

8. After Happily Ever After trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhiDXIbZcNU

9. THE TRIANGLE OF COMMUNICATION
• “For every documentary there are at least three
stories that intertwine: the filmmaker’s, the
film’s, and the audience’s. These stories are all,
in different ways, part of what we attend to when
we ask what a given film is about.”
--Bill Nichols

10. What Makes a Great Story?
https://vimeo.com/40972394
Ken Burns: On Story

11. FILMMAKER INTERVIEWS
Freida Lee Mock
•
http://www.pbs.org/pov/behindthelensvideo_freidaleemock.php#.VkOset-rRsM
Stop at 2:50 minutes
1. What are the purposes of documentary films?
2. Do documentary films tell the truth?

12. Up Heartbreak Hill (Trailer)
http://www.pbs.org/pov/upheartbreakhill/trailer.php#.VkNGu9-rRsN

13. IDENTIFYING DOCUMENTARY
TECHNIQUES
• What is the topic? Is it something you would expect
to see in a newscast or a newspaper?
• Who tells the story?
• What types of shots are used?
• Who or what is on screen most of the time?
• Are the images contemporaneous (vérité)?
A re-enactment? Representational? Something
else?

14. Sound of Vision (SHORT FILM) 8 min (
http://www.pbs.org/pov/soundofvision/full.php#.VkNJvt-rRsM

15. Group Discussions
• https://docs.google.com/document/d/128obEBzZ-
SVA4QK9RSk7Kvje0nrTRzMtG4tJ-LikKWk/edit