Identifying documentaries
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Documentaries aim to provide accurate information to educate viewers on various topics. They can cover any subject matter. Good documentaries, according to Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, find important people involved in the story, achieve balance through editing, aim for objectivity, recognize the limitations of documentaries, and leverage what only cameras can do. There are several types of documentaries such as poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative documentaries which differ in their approaches and styles of presentation.
Identifying documentaries
- 2. DOCUMENTARY Documentaries are usually feature length presentations of accurate and logical information to help widen the understanding of a certain topic. They can cover pretty much any subject from wildlife to conspiracies. Many of them often cause controversy
- 3. WHAT MAKES A GOOD DOCUMENTARY Alex Gibney, an Oscar winning director of documentary says that there are five key factors in making a good documentary and they are: • Find the movers and shakers in the story • Use editing to achieve balance • Aim for objectivity • Recognise what a documentary can and cannot do • Let the camera do what only it can do After giving it some thought these do seem to be very logical guidelines to making a good documentary and should be considered when making one.
- 4. TYPES OF DOCUMENTARIESPoetic documentaries Example: Joris Ivens’ Rain (1928) Definition: 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. Expository documentaries Example: Frank Capra’s wartime Why We Fight series Definition: They 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. Observational documentaries Example: Gilles Groulx and Michel Brault’s Les Racquetteurs (1958) Definition: They 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. Participatory documentaries Example: Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1985) Definition: They 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. Reflexive documentaries Example: Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Definition: They 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. Performative documentaries Example: Alain Resnais’ Night And Fog (1955) Definition: They 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.