Expository Documentary

• Expository documentary is a mode of documentary which focus’s on social problems within the world.

• It emphasises rhetorical content.

• It usually uses a voiceover (can be god like) which is used to drive the narrative.

• This is a much more spoken in relation to poetic who leaves the audience to gather the information via visual interpretation.

• Nichols described the editing in expository documentaries as “evidentiary editing,” a practice in which expositional images “...illustrate, illuminate, evoke, or act in counterpoint to what is said…[we] take our cue from the commentary and understand the images as evidence or demonstration…” (Nichols 2001)

Example of Expository

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnjx6KETmi4 – The inconvenient truth.

Observational

• Unlike the content of poetic documentary, or the “rhetoricalness” of expositional documentary, observational documentaries tend to simply observe, allowing viewers to reach there own conclusions.

• The camera is unobtrusive. Allowing the events to occur naturally.

• Pure observational documentarians proceeded under some bylaws: no music, no interviews, no scene arrangement of any kind, and no narration.

• The fly-on-the-wall perspective is championed, while editing processes utilize long takes and few cuts.

Example of Observational

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNNSJcGnRNw- Big brother

Poetic Documentary• Poetic documentaries typically show excessive amounts of creative camera

work and experimental editing (montages) in order to connect or translate a mood or emotion onto the audience.

• Poetic Documentaries often have a style of editing that offers discontinuity in graphic qualities, violations of the 180 degree rule, and the creation of impossible spatial matches.

• This is Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage. He states that "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" when he noted that montage is "the nerve of cinema", and that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema".

• Soviet montage theory shows an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for "putting together").

• An example of this that is commonly used in filmic documentaries such as Robert Flaherty’s ‘Nanook of the North’, is juxapostional editing.

• This style of editing is the process of showing one thing and another which are unrelated and through combining the two or making a sequence, creates a new meaning.

Expository Documentary• Documentary forefather John Grierson offers an explanation for the move away from

poetic documentary, claiming filmmakers, “got caught up in social propaganda…We got on to the social problems of the world, and we ourselves deviated from the poetic line.” (Sussex 1972) The expositional mode diverges sharply from the poetic mode in terms of visual practice and story-telling devices, by virtue of its emphasis on rhetorical content, and its goals of information dissemination or persuasion.

• Narration is a distinct innovation of the expositional mode of documentary. Initially manifesting as an omnipresent, omniscient, and objective voice intoned over footage, narration holds the weight of explaining and arguing a film’s rhetorical content. Where documentary in the poetic mode thrived on a filmmaker’s aesthetic and subjective visual interpretation of a subject, expositional mode collects footage that functions to strengthen the spoken narrative. This shift in visual tactics gives rise to what Nichols refers to as “evidentiary editing,” a practice in which expositional images “...illustrate, illuminate, evoke, or act in counterpoint to what is said…[we] take our cue from the commentary and understand the images as evidence or demonstration…” (Nichols 2001) The engagement of rhetoric with supporting visual information founded in the expositional mode continues today and, indeed, makes up the bulk of documentary product. Film features, news stories, and various television programs lean heavily on its utility as a device for transferring information.

Poetic Documentary

• Continuity editing is not used, which means that a sense of specific location is lost.

• Emphasis of visual association, tone or rhythm - Images are juxtaposed to create meaning – Kuloshov effect.

• Descriptive passages are often used.• Actors often don’t become full characters.• Demonstrates different possibilities in the transfer of

knowledge.• However, there is a lack of specificity in poetic

documentaries.• Examples of Poetic documentary makers : Ivens, Bunuel

and Dali, Fischinger, Menken, Flaherty. • Example: Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934)

Robert Flaherty

Joris Ivens

Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934)

Interactive / Participatory Documentary

• How it came to be: When more mobile equipment was available, filmmakers could make their perspective more evident – they become part of the events recorded.

• This mode engages with individuals more directly whilst not using exposition interview styles.

• Archive footage is often used to avoid re-enactments / staging and ‘voice of God’ commentaries.

• However, it relies a lot on history and can be too intrusive in it methods.

• Examples of directors: Rouch, de Antonio, Connie Field, Michael Moore, Broomfield.

• Example: Kurt and Courtney (Broomfield, 1988)

Michael Moore

Connie Field

Kurt and Courtney (Broomfield, 1988)

Reflective Documentary • Makers of Reflective documentaries consider the quality of the

documentary, they consider its process and its implications on their audiences.

• For example In Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929,)

He has footage of his brother and wife shooting footage and editing, respectively. The goal of shooting these images was, “to increase the audiences understanding of the process of how film is constructed.

Another example is Ruby Mitchell’s ...No Lies (1974,) which was different to Dziga’s man with a movie camera, as it

questioned the observational mode, Ruby’s no lies commented on observational

techniques and their capacity for capturing authentic truths. In this way, the reflexive mode of documentary often functions as its own regulatory board, policing ethical and technical boundaries within Documentary film itself.

Reflective Mode

• (Vertov, Godmilow, Raul Ruiz) 

•   Reflective mode makes the convention representation more obvious and apparent, it also challenges the impression of reality which other three modes normally conveyed unproblematically. 

•   Reflective mode is the most self-aware mode - its reflexivity helps audience acknowledge how other modes claim to construct "truth" through documentary practice.

•   It uses many of devices of other modes but sets them on edge so viewer attends to device as well as the effect. 

Performance Mode• (Resnais, Julien, Riggs) 1.Performance mode is like a Reflexive Documentary, it also raises

questions about knowledge

2. Performance mode emphasizes personal experience (in tradition of poetry, literature)

3. Performance mode tries to show the audience how understanding such personal knowledge can help us understand more general processes of society

4. performance mode mixes elements of different documentary modes to achieve a link between subjective knowledge/understanding of the world, and more general understandings, i.e. historical ones.