This document defines documentaries and their key elements. It explains that documentaries focus on real people and events to allow audiences to form opinions. The term was coined in 1926. Documentaries document actual events using footage or reconstruction with narration. There are five central elements - observation, interviews, dramatization, mise-en-scene, and exposition. The document also outlines six common types of documentaries - fully narrated, fly on the wall, mixed, self-reflexive, docudrama, and docusoap.

1. What Is A Documentary?
Essential to a documentary is it focuses on questions actual
people and events, often in a social context, placing the audience
in a position to form an opinion about who or what we are
seeing. The term documentary was coined by John Grierson in
1926. The purpose of a documentary is to document something
that has happened. It can be shown using actual footage or
reconstruction. It can use a narrator’s voice over to anchor the
meaning or rely on the participants themselves, perhaps with
occaisional interjection by the narrator.

2. Features Of Documentaries
According to John Corner (of the University of Liverpool), there are 5 central
elements of a documentary. These are:
Observation (fly on the wall)
-Programme Makers
-Pretend the camera is unseen or ignored by the people taking part
-Unseen observation put the audience in the role of eye witnesses
-Indirect address to the audience
Interview
-Interviews can be used to make a contrast with the observation sequences
-The interviewer is wither seen or unseen
-The interviewee addresses the interviewer not the audience
-Sometimes pictures are dubbed over the speaker, in support of what has been
said
-Interviews can be structured in two ways, either runned fully or there are cuts in
between.

3. Dramatisation
-Although documentaries use a sense of drama, this feature is specifically used to
portray people and events, the filmmaker can not gain access to in real life. These
sequences are based on fact.
Mise-en-scene
-What the directors and producers. Put in the scene e.g. Lights and propps in
interviews.
Exposition
-The line of argument in a documentary

4. Types Of Documentaries
There are 6 different types:
Fully narrated
-Direct address documentaries
-Use an off screen voiceover to convey the exposition
-Voiceover helps to make sense over pictures
-Dominates the meaning
-Narrator often gives sense of authority about the topic
-Critics have called the style “voice of god“
Fly On The Wall
-Rely totally on observation
-No commentation or narration
-Cameras left to record people with viewer making their own conclusion

5. Mixed Documentary
-Uses combination of interview, observation and narration to advance the argument
-Narration is often from within the frame (most commonly seen on the news)
Self reflexive
-The subjects of the documentary acknowledge the presence of a camera and speaks
directly to the filmmaker.
-This style makes a point of drawing attention to the filmmakers role in constructing a
view of reality
Docudrama
-A reinactment of events as they are supposed to have happened
-In this style the elements of argument and exposition are combined with those of
fictional narrative. Basically stories based on fact.
Docusoap
-A phenomenon of recent years which follow the daily lives of particular induviduals
with a designated job (airport)
-Many dispute that they are documentaries in any aspect