Book Review

The book Aavanappadam: Paanigalum Kotpaadugalum by A.Dananjayan analyses the four

modes documentary films which are expository, impressionistic, interactive and reflexive. The
author discussed the different kinds of documentary films. Especially it reveals that there are lot
of arguments about the Anthropological documentary film and the documentary. He critics the
documentary film of ‘The Nanook of the North’.

The book explores the different modes of documentary films. The first one is expository, the
method which is explained the concept through the visuals as well as the sounds or voice over.
The voice over is important in the expository. The preference is only for the voice over to
explain the narrations. But this expository method has criticism. The voice over is felt as a
dominate personality, gods, unknown person’s sound. A documentary film has no need for the
voice over. The visual should narrate the story or concept.

The impressionistic method is like a poetic. It is not directly narrating the story, it represent
through the visual and music. The meaning of interpretation is leave to the viewers. The
documentary is beautiful to watch. But the Negative side of the method is that the director has
failed to convey the meaning to the audience.

The observative method of the representation is mostly used for the anthropological
documentaries for example ‘The Nanook of the North’ by Robert Flaherty. He explains the
modes of representation with Robert Flaherty’s documentary film. In this kind of films there is
no artificial or any making. The Reality is captured as it is. So that the documentary film ‘The
Nanook of the North’ was succeed. Technically the same shots are used in the feature films too
which are Diverse camera angles, Shots and reverse shots, Establishing shots and close-ups,
Pans and tilts. These shots are called cinematic codes. One of the Directors Emile de Antonio
had criticized Robert Flaherty’s film ‘The Nanook of the North’ it is false story of the Eskimos
people. The first thing is the characters are not the real people, who were actors. The name of the
hero not Nanook his name is Allakariallak. The Eskimos are used the transmitter, they were
accesing the western technology. But in this film the director ignore these and showed them as
an ancient people. For hunting also the Eskimos used gun, the directed showed on the screen
knife. So the question arise that where is the reality or truth?

The interactive and the reflexive method of documentary have the director also inside the frame
and who has been interacting with the character. For example the director captures the tribe’s life
style; the director has not known anything about them. So he can interact with them and convey
the viewers. Louis Kommolli says that this utterly thinks that the viewers are fools. The viewers
have the understanding about the tribe this interaction of the directors the film is detached with
the viewers. This type of the documentary film makes sensitive among the viewers.
This book reveals the both side of the criticism with the world documentary films. The author
refers many international documentary directors and their documentary films. We can easily
identify the mode of representation of the documentary film.