Codes and Conventions of Factual Programming
- 1. CODES AND CONVENTIONS OF DOCUMENTARIES Ashley Winter - Sim
- 2. EXPOSITORY These documentaries are present in a way that it speaks directly to the viewer, often in an authoritative way which uses voiceovers or titles, showing a strong argument and point of view. These films try to persuade the viewer. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) Images are often not paramount; they exist to advance the argument. The use of images presses upon us to read the images in a certain style. Historical documentaries in this mode deliver an unproblematic account and interpretation of the past. Examples of this documentary are things such as: ‘America’s Most Wanted’ or ‘A&E Biography’; Scientific/Nature documentaries such as ‘John Berger’s Way of Seeing (1974)’ Michael Moore is a prime example of an expository documentarian.
- 3. OBSERVATIONAL Observational documentaries try to simply observe life minimum intervention. Filmmakers who worked in this sub-genre often saw the expository mode as too didactic. The first of this kind of docs dates back to the 1960’s when technological developments made them possible include mobile lightweight cameras and portable sound equipment for sound. Often, this mode of film was developed in to voice-over commentary, post-synchronized dialogue and music, or re-enactments of certain events. This implies the ‘Fly-on-the-wall’ technique which basically means to observe but to not intervene. This is applied to documentaries such ‘Planet Earth’ and ‘High School’ by Frederick Wiseman.
- 4. INTERACTIVE Interactive documentaries are where the act of filmmaking is to not influence or alter the events being filmed. What these films do is show the approach of the 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 his/her presence. The meeting between filmmaker and the given subject becomes a primary section to the film. Michael Moore’s documentaries could come under this sub –section although he is more of an expository documentarian.
- 5. REFLEXIVE Reflexive documentaries draw attention to their own construction, and the fact that they are representations. How does the world get represented by documentary films? This question is a key factor to this sub-genre of documentaries. They push us to question the reality of a documentary in general. It is the most self-conscious of all the sub-genres, and is highly sceptical of realism. It may de-familiarize what we are seeing and how we are seeing it.
- 6. PERFORMATIVE Performative documentaries express experience and emotion to the world. They tend to be personal, unconventional, perhaps poetic and/or experimental, and might include hypothetical re-enactments of events created to make us fell what it might be like for us to have a certain perspective on a world that is not our own. Performative docs usually link up personal accounts or experiences to larger political or historical realities.
- 7. REALISM Realism means interest in actual or real world, which is different from the abstract side. Realism documentaries are based on real life people and their lives, and show what their lives or the people themselves are like. Some documentaries go into detail of the said persons experiences using re-enactments of events to show this.
- 8. DRAMATISATION These documentaries are also know as ‘Docudramas’ which is a genre of radio and television programming, feature film, and staged theatre, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. On stage, it is sometimes known as documentary theatre.
- 9. NARRATIVISATION These documentaries try to communication events/experiences in a narrative form to gain a greater understanding, e.g. documentaries that try to narrativize the holocaust.