Documentary 'Mini task'

What is a Documentary?

A Documentary is "a Film, Television or Radio programme that provides a  factual report on a particular subject"*

Expository Documentaries:

• Use Voice-overs to address what is happening to the audience.
• Provide Strong arguments
• Usually Rhetorical
• Are used to Persuade the viewers.

An example of an expository documentary is the March of the Penguins

In an observational documentary the film makers goal is to present a "slice of real life" so the film maker acts as a sort of fly on the wall, observing but not interfering with the subjects. This allows the audience to decide their opinion on the documentaries stance.

Cops was an american TV documentary series that has been one of the longest running TV shows in the US since it started in 1983, with its 29th season just having premiered on 4th June. The show follows a form  of cinema called Cinéma vérité or Observational Cinema, this means the programme is fully observational without a presenter or voice over narration.

In an Interactive Documentary the film maker is directly interacting with the subjects in the documentary. This type of documentary however are usually manipulated by the maker to support their opinion and argument. An example of an Interactive documentary could be Louis Theroux's Law and Disorder in Philadelphia where Theroux follows law enforcement out on their patrols.

In a reflexive documentary the filmmaker will use shots of everyday life but edit them in a way to show them in a different light than the truth. In Koyaanisiquatsi, a 1982 film, the director Godfrey Reggio shows the audience time-lapse slow-motion images of natural U.S. landscapes and U.S. cities. He uses footage he and his team filmed as well as stock footage to try and show the relationship between nature, humans, and technology. Koyaanisiquatsi is the first of the "quatsi" trillogy that all strive to show this.

In a Performative documentary the subject of the documentary is told through a mix of narration, interviews and re-enactments. Dreams of a life is a 2011 drama-documentary telling the story of Joyce Carol Vincent a woman who died in her bedsit in December 2003 and was not discovered until January 2006. In the film Carol Morely, the director, interviews her friends, family, and acquaintances along with reenactments of her life to try and tell her story

In today's media, documentaries are used to either tell the all the facts, or to tell the facts and create an argument or opinion by using only certain facts to support their argument. In my opinion documentaries should be used to be informative to the watcher and provide facts not opinions, and should discourage misinformation. I also believe that in documentaries the filmmaker should also be able to create an argument however they should still use the facts and not bend them to their advantage or leave out ones that disagree.