What is a documentary

What is a documentary?

A documentary film is a movie that attempts to document reality. Even though the scenes are wisely chosen and arranged, usually through editing after filming, they are not scripted and the people in the movie are not typically actors. A documentary can be made about near enough anything and created by anyone.

 Sometimes, a documentary film may rely on voice-over narration to describe what is happening in the footage; in other films, the images speak for themselves without commentary. A documentary often includes interviews with people in the film for additional context or information.

Documentary’s should mainly include facts and even some figures to do with what is being spoke or seen too in the documentary, a documentary can either been written in first or second person however sometimes can be written in third

In general, documentary films focus on real life and include footage of events as they happened. A movie about World War II might feature actors portraying soldiers, real or fictional, in the war, recreating certain battles or events. In contrast to this, a documentary film about World War II might primarily feature news real footage of actual fighting, with commentary from experts and veterans who were in the war. It is this focus on documenting reality above drama or a fictional narrative that typically separates these movies from summer blockbusters and other popular films.

One recent documentary that has been show on tv a lot is 9/11, I feel that this was a really touching yet interesting documentary, it told us information from the American terrorist attacks in such detail as was all given by a narrator/voice over. Throughout the documentary they show a number of interviews with people from the 9/11 attacks such as some of the people who survived the attack, fireman, police officers and family members to those who were involved. Using interviews in documentary’s I feel really makes the show, aslong you have someone with good questions to ask and be answered an interview will really make a documentary worth while.

Documentaries dont always use the official footage of an event as there may have been no footage filmed at this particular time. In some cases documentaries can often use recreational footage to show the audience Documentaries can be ranged from extremely random subjects to something we all think about every day. Most of the documentaries which seem to have rather random subjects are called ‘Experimental documentaries’ these range from all sorts of subjects but one in particular I have seen is ‘Once upon a Tram Ride’ which tells a story on the life of a protestor in The Hague.

The six types of documentary’s

1. Poetic documentaries, which first appeared in the 1920’s, were a sort of reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film. 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. Well-rounded characters—’life-like people’—were absent; instead, people appeared in these films as entities, just like any other, that are found in the material world. The films were fragmentary, impressionistic, lyrical. Their disruption of the coherence of time and space—a coherence favored by the fiction films of the day—can also be seen as an element of the modernist counter-model of cinematic narrative. The ‘real world’—Nichols calls it the “historical world”—was broken up into fragments and aesthetically reconstituted using film form.

2. Expository documentaries 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. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds ‘objective’ and omniscient. Images are often not paramount; they exist to advance the argument. The rhetoric insistently presses upon us to read the images in a certain fashion. Historical documentaries in this mode deliver an unproblematic and ‘objective’ account and interpretation of past events.

3. Observational documentaries 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. The first observational docs date back to the 1960’s; the technological developments which made them possible include mobile lighweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment for synchronized sound. Often, this mode of film eschewed voice-over commentary, post-synchronized dialogue and music, or re-enactments. The films aimed for immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations.

4. Participatory documentaries 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. 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 her presence. Nichols: “The filmmaker steps out from behind the cloak of voice-over commentary, steps away from poetic meditation, steps down from a fly-on-the-wall perch, and becomes a social actor (almost) like any other. (Almost like any other because the filmmaker retains the camera, and with it, a certain degree of potential power and control over events.)” The encounter between filmmaker and subject becomes a critical element of the film. Rouch and Morin named the approach cinéma vérité, translating Dziga Vertov’s kinopravda into French; the “truth” refers to the truth of the encounter rather than some absolute truth.

5. Reflexive documentaries 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. How does the world get represented by documentary films? This question is central to this sub-genre of films. They prompt us to “question the authenticity of documentary in general.” It is the most self-conscious of all the modes, and is highly skeptical of ‘realism.’ It may use Brechtian alienation strategies to jar us, in order to ‘defamiliarize’ what we are seeing and how we are seeing it.

6. Performative documentaries 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, e.g. that of black, gay men in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) or Jenny Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991). This sub-genre might also lend itself to certain groups (e.g. women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, etc) to ‘speak about themselves.’ Often, a battery of techniques, many borrowed from fiction or avant-garde films, are used. Performative docs often link up personal accounts or experiences with larger political or historical realities.

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