DOCUMENTARY AND REPORT

A documentary is a cinematographic expression that reflects an author's point of view

on a given reality. As opposed to fiction, it is a form of cinema able to represent more
accurately the real. This definition puts us in front of diffuse boundaries between
apparently opposing practices and called documentary and fiction genres.
Some common characteristics of documentary film in order to have a general sense of
the territory within which most discussion occurs. A filmic reality produced from the
point of view of an author, even if it is about a real situation, is still a fictional invention
that begins the moment he chooses how a particular shot will be filmed. Fiction is a
form of discourse that is built around events and happenings that only exist in the
imagination of its creator. In documentaries, the characters pre-exist and post-exist to
the filming. A documentary filmmaker interrogates and listens to the real to mediate the
spectator’s relationship with this filmed world.
CLASS 2: Historical Moment of Documentary.
Documentary films speak about actual situations or events and honour known facts.
They speak directly about the historical world and sometimes, allegorically. Fiction
narratives are fundamentally allegories. Even thought performative documentaries mix
allegorical forms, the source or content that generates this information comes from
historical reality.
Documentaries are about real people. Direct address occurs when individuals speak
directly to the camera or audience; it is rare in fiction, where the camera functions as an
invisible on looker most of the time. We can see how fiction enters documentary, and
how documentary enters fiction.
Documentaries tell stories about what happens in the real world. It tells us about how
things change and who produces these changes. The story is a plausible representation
of what happened.
 Grierson: the “creative treatment of actuality”.
The "treatment" includes storytelling, but such stories, must meet certain criteria to
qualify as documentaries. The division of documentary from fiction, like the division of
historiography from fiction, rests on the degree to which the story fundamentally
corresponds to actual situations, events, and people versus the degree to which it is
primarily a product of the filmmaker's invention (the raw material is reality, but the
narrative is an invention). There is always some of each. The story a documentary tells
stems from the historical world but it is still told from the filmmaker's perspective and
in the filmmaker's voice.
 Nanook of the North: the first documentary released in 1922.
Nanook of the North (1922), serves as a model for how to write about documentary
films, is a vivid case in point. Whose story is it? The story is ostensibly that of Nanook,
an intrepid Inuit leader and great hunter. But Nanook is to a large degree Robert
Flaherty's invention. His nuclear family matches European and American family
structure more than Inuit extended families. His hunting methods belong to a period
some 30 or more years prior to the time that film was made. The story is of a bygone
way of life that Nanook embodies in what amounts to a role and character performance
more than a presentation of self in everyday life at the time of filming.
Nanook could be labelled either fiction or documentary. Its classification as
documentary usually hinges on two things: the degree to which the story Flaherty tells
so carefully matches the ways of the Inuit, even if these ways are revived from the past,
and Allakariallak, the man who plays Nanook, embodies a spirit and sensibility that
seems as much in harmony with a distinct way of Inuit life as with any Western
conception of it. The story can be understood as both a plausible representation of Inuit
life and of Flaherty's distinct vision of it.
The documentary is not a reproduction of reality, it is a representation of the world we
already occupy. Such films are not documenting as much as expressive representations
that may be based on documents. Documentary films stand for a particular view of the
world, one we may never have encountered before even if the factual aspects of this
world are familiar to us.
 The term “documentary film”
The question “whose story is” it leaves considerable room for ambiguity. Documentary
re-enactments are a prime example of this. Here the filmmaker must imaginatively
recreate events in order to film them at all. All of Nanook of the North can be said to be
one gigantic re-enactment, but it retains significant documentary qualities. John
Grierson said Nanook possessed "documentary value." This is apparently how the term
documentary film gained prominent use. What the re-enactment creates, however, needs
to correspond to known historical fact if it is to remain plausible. John Grierson was
the founder of the British documentary film movement and its leader for almost 40
years. He was one of the first to see the potential of motion pictures that treats about
people’s attitudes toward real life and to urge the use of films for educational purposes.
He was the first to name this kind of film like “documentary films”.
Documentary practitioners speak a common language regarding what they do. Like
other professionals, documentary filmmakers have a vocabulary of their own. It may
range from the suitability of various digital cameras for different situations to the
techniques of recording location sound, and from the challenges of observing social
actors effectively to the pragmatics of finding distribution and negotiating contracts for
their work.
 Six main documentary filming modes.
Periods and movements characterize documentary. Each mode also exhibits
considerable variation based on how each filmmaker shoots, their relationship to the
subject, to the characters, in short to the reality that will be portrayed. The six main
documentary filming modes are:
1. POETIC MODE: emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic • qualities,
descriptive passages, and formal organization. Examples: The Bridge (1928);
Song of Ceylon (1934); Listen to Britain (1941); Night and Fog (1955); and
 Koyaanisqatsi. This mode bears a close proximity to experimental, personal, and
avantgarde filmmaking.
2. EXPOSITORY MODE: emphasizes verbal commentary and an argumentative
logic. Examples: The Plow That Broke the Plains; Spanish Earth (1937); Trance
and Dance in Bali (1952); Les Maitres Fous (1955); and television news. This is
the mode that most people associate with documentary in general. Expository
documentaries initially relied heavily on omniscient voice overs by professional
male commentators. The mode remains in great use today but many voice overs
are by females rather than males and a great many are by the filmmaker him- or
herself rather than a trained professional.
3. OBSERVATIONAL MODE: emphasizes a direct engagement with the
everyday life of subjects as observed by an unobtrusive camera. Observational
filmmaking began in the 1960s but it remains an important resource today,
although it is now frequently mixed with other modes to produce more hybrid
documentaries.
4. PARTICIPATORY MODE: emphasizes the interaction between filmmaker and
subject. Filming takes place by means of interviews or other forms of even more
direct envolvement from conver<sations to provocations. Often coupled with
archival footage to examine historical issues.
5. REFLEXIVE MODE: calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that
govern documentary filmmaking. Some ways of intersecting.
CLASS 3: Documentary and Avant Garde.
Avant Garde is more experimental and freer, which leads to documentaries being
nowadays more related to this topic. The 20s and 30s are the avant-garde decades.
Precisely when the documentary is instituted as a cinematographic practice that deals
with the real. But the vanguards themselves assert freedom of creation and
experimentalism.
Hybridization in cinematographic practices linked to the representation of the real.
3 songs about Lenin by Vertov  dialectic dialogue structured in three songs that gives
us the feeling of the seasons and the parts of the day.
Displacement of the borders in dispute between the documentary, fiction and
experimental cinema or the redefinition of the criteria to establish the cartography of the
documentary territory. Documentary cinema in its main axis of development has been
created and recreated as a social cinema, exploring many different ways to represent,
analyse and think about the ways of life and the functioning of modern and non-modern
societies, and in many cases with the intention of acting on them.
Documentary cinema manifests a willingness to engage cognitively with the viewer, to
generate knowledge about social reality in the first instance. On the other hand, works
of an aesthetic and emotional nature provide information, since knowledge is not
constructed and communicated solely through rational and argumentative means, and
therefore other cinematographic and artistic practices as a whole are equally legitimate
carriers and builders of knowledge.
Considering the documentary as a discursive practice means fixing its origin not in the
origins of the cinematograph with the Lumières, but between the 1920s and 1930s, with
the appearance of a set of works that, in opposition to hegemonic cinema, fiction, and
news, open the way to the generation of another cinema that tries to talk about the world
and make direct statements about it (it is the same as defining something in opposition
to something else. for example, defining a culture by pointing out the differences
between another culture).
Limitations that maintain borders:
1. Experimentation in languages.
2. Negotiation with the viewer (parameters of legitimacy and credibility).
3. Cinematographic avant-gardes that link the documentary with experimental art
practices.
Audiovisual strategies and resources:
- Visual constructivism gives first vanguard in the social documentary.
- The conflict of the image as a discursive resource on the real.

 Important filmmakers.

- Dziga Vertov  pioneering Soviet filmmaker, whose films and manifestos

played a central role in 20th century documentary, experimental film, and
political cinema traditions.
- Walter Ruttmann  He studied architecture in Zurich and then painting in
Munich. In ‹Berlin. Die Sinfonie einer Großstadt› he applied the principles of
his abstract studies and film montage to realistic photographs from the city of
Berlin.
- Joris Ivens  Dutch motion-picture director who filmed more than 50
international documentaries that explored leftist social and political concerns.
- Jean Vigo  French film director whose blending of lyricism with realism and
Surrealism, the whole underlined with a cynical, anarchic approach to life,
distinguished him as an original talent.
What are Documentary Modes? In 1991, American film critic and theoretician Bill
Nichols proposed that there were six different modes of documentary—poetic,
expository, reflexive, observational, performative, and participatory—each containing
its own specific characteristics. While some documentary films may have an overlap in
traits, each mode is a category that can be boiled down to a few specific elements. Not
all documentaries are the same, and different types of documentaries will require
different documentary techniques from the cinematographer. There are six main types
of documentary genres:
1. POETIC MODE  A poetic documentary eschews linear continuity in favor of
mood, tone, or the juxtaposition of imagery. Since poetic documentaries often
have little or no narrative content, the director of photography is often asked to
capture highly composed, visually striking images that can tell a story without
additional verbal context. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) is an example of a
 poetic documentary that focuses on visuals and artistic style to help reveal an
inner truth.
2. EXPOSITORY MODE  Expository documentaries set up a specific point of
view or argument about a subject and often feature “voice of God” style voice-
over. For expository documentaries, the cinematographer is responsible for
collecting footage that supports and strengthens the spoken argument of the film,
including stock footage, archival footage, b-roll, or re-enactments of historical
events. The Dust Bowl (2012) is filmmaker Ken Burns’ historical account of the
disastrous drought that occurred during the Great Depression. Burns uses photos
and facts to supplement the causes and impact of one of the worst droughts to
plague North American farmland.
3. PARTICIPATORY MODE  Participatory documentaries are defined by the
interaction between the documentary filmmakers and their subject. Therefore, a
cinematographer is equally responsible for capturing the interviewer as he is the
interviewee. Participatory documentaries, also known as interactive
documentaries, often present the filmmaker’s version of the truth as “the” truth,
focusing on direct engagement with subjects and capturing real emotional
responses and interactions. Many of the interactions that are captured support the
filmmaker’s point of view or prove the film’s intent. Many of Michael Moore’s
documentaries, like Bowling for Columbine (2001), are participatory but also
blend elements of observational and performative modes.
4. OBSERVATIONAL MODE  A style of documentary embraced by the cinema
verité movement, observational documentaries attempt to discover the ultimate
truth of their subject by acting as a fly-on-the-wall—in other words, observing
the subject’s real-life without interrupting. Cinematographers on observational
documentaries will often be asked to be as unobtrusive as possible in order to
capture their subjects in a raw, unguarded state. An example of this direct
cinema type of documentary is Primary (1960), a film chronicling the Wisconsin
primary between John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey.
5. REFLEXIVE MODE  Reflexive documentaries focus on the relationship
between the filmmaker and the audience. Since the subject matter is often the
process of documentary filmmaking itself, a cinematographer will shoot behind-
the-scenes style footage of the entire film production process, including editing,
interviewing, and postproduction. Dziga Vertov’s reflexive documentary Man
With a Movie Camera (1929) made history with its actor-less presentation of
urban Soviet life.
6. PERFOMATIVE MODE  Performative documentaries focus on the
filmmaker’s involvement with their subject, using his or her personal experience
or relationship with the subject as a jumping-off point for exploring larger,
subjective truths about politics, history, or groups of people. A cinematographer
is often asked to capture the documentary production process, as well as intimate
footage that illustrates the direct and often personal relationship between
filmmaker and subject. Supersize Me (2004) by filmmaker Morgan Spurlock
documents his experience eating only McDonald’s fast food for 30 days,
chronicling the body issues, health problems, and the ensuing doctor’s visits in
an attempt to question the food sold at the famous fast-food chain.
  The challenge of Sound

The arrival of sound did much more than turn the moving pictures into the talkies. By
adding a new sonic dimension to the screen, it radically altered its nature as a
representational space, in the process rendering ‘silent’ cinema rapidly extinct. For
documentary, however, this evolutionary break was initially a mixed blessing, because
sound was introduced to serve the purposes of shooting fiction in the studio, and for
many years it remained deficient for location recording. There is a familiar pattern here
of corporate battles over rival systems using different technologies, until one of them
wins out; it would happen again with analogue video and is now going on with new
kinds of digital video discs. The optical system that emerged as standard in the 1930s
used a photoelectric cell to turn the signal from the microphone into a light beam which
could be photographed.
CLASS 4: Documentary, Reality and the Truth. Social and Political Documentary.
 Institutionalization: Great Britain from 1929-1939.
The idea of documentary in its present form came originally not from the film people at
all, but from the Political Science school in Chicago University round about the early
twenties. Background and Underpinnings  Grierson was strongly influenced from
early age by the Scottish labour movement and what was then called “Clydeside
socialism” (Glasgow). He had chosen the University of Chicago as his base because of
its distinguished social science faculty. He was fascinated by the newness and
originality of American Culture and by the ways in which Europeans were being
changed into Americans. Grierson postulated that what was needed was to involve
citizens in their government with the kind of engaging, excitement generated by the
popular press, which simplified and dramatized public affairs. Two filmmakers and
films not part of the Hollywood Industry suggested to Grierson a way to harness the
motion picture to the job of education citizens. one was Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship
Potenkin, 1925). The other Robert Flaherty (Moana, 1926). It was to Flaherty´s second
film, Moana, that Grierson first applied the term documentary.
 EMB  Empire Marketing Board
The EMB had been established in 1926 to promote the marketing of products of the
British Empires and to encourage research and development among the member states.
Grierson surveyed and reported on the use of film by governments abroad. He also set
up for EMB personal screenings of films that seemed to him to provide some
suggestions for what would become the documentary film. There were the features of
Flaherty, with their detail of the life of traditional cultures. There were the films of the
USSR, which dramatized revolutionary events in order to indoctrinate and educate the
Soviet people.
Drifters, 1929, was the first documentary sponsored by EMB. It was written, produced,
directed, edited by Grierson. It was a short feature in length that dealt with herring
fishing in the North Sea. Grierson chose to establish a collective filmmaking Enterprise,
a sort of workshop and schoolhouse, out of which the British Documentary Movement
would emerge.
Grierson’s catchphrase for what the EMB films were designed to do was “to bring the
Empire alive”. He pursued this purpose by showing one and then another part of the
empire to the rest. What he wanted films to do was to make the state and the society
function better. He thought that collective effort, cooperation, and understanding could
lead to a better world – not only better food and better housing, better teeth and better
schools, but a better spirit – a sense of being part of a valuable society with space still
left for individual satisfactions and eccentricities.
In 1933, Tallents moved to the GPO as its first public relations officer, on condition that
he could bring the EMB Film Unit and the Empire Film Library with him. A vast
enterprise, the GPO handled not only the mail but the telephone, wireless broadcasting,
a savings bank, and a whole host of government services. Out of the more than one
hundred films made by the GPO came some lovely and lasting ones. Examples: Six-
Thirty Collection (1934), Song of Ceylon (1934), Coal Face (1935), Night Mail (1936)
Grierson’s goals were always social, economic, and political. Art for him was “the by-
product of a job of work done”. As an informal teacher he trained and, through his
writing and speaking, influenced many documentary filmmakers, not just in Britain but
throughout the world. As a producer he was eventually responsible to one extent or
another for thousands of films and played a decisive creative role in some of the most
important of them.
 Distribution
Though documentaries were sometimes shown in theatres, theatrical showings were
limited. Grierson developed a method of nontheatricak distribution and exhibition. It
began with afternoon screenings at the Imperial Institute of London, expanded to
include the Empire Film Library for the free loan of 16mm prints of films by mail, and,
later, at the General Post Office, came to include traveling projection vans going out
into the countryside.
 Private Sponsorship
Grierson began to reach out to private industry as an additional source of funding. Not
only did he find sponsors, but he also convinced them to eschew advertising in favour
of backing films in the public interest - that is to say, films whose subjects Grierson
thought needed attention. The oil industry was especially receptive. With documentary
growing space, private units were being formed by alumni of the EMB and GPO units
to make films for the emerging non-government sponsors. In 1937, Grierson resigned
from the GPO to set up a central coordinating and advisory agency to put sponsors in
touch with producers (and the other way around), oversee production, plan promotion
and distribution, and the like. Film Centre was the organization he established for that
purpose in 1938.
Some filmmakers worked within the British documentary system made over three
hundred films between 1929 and 1939. Three main lines of subject/purpose/style
emerged roughly in the order in which they are dealt with below. First, following
Drifters (1929), were the documentaries that undertook to interpret one part of the
empire - or one region of Britain, one of its industries, or one of the government
services - to the population at large. Often poetic and experimental, this group included
such films as Industrial Britain (1933), Granton Trawler (1934), Song of Ceylon
(1934), and Coal Face, (1935). The second line of British documentary, which began in
the mid-thirties, consisted of calling public attention to pressing problems faced by the
nation; of insistence that these problems needed to be solved; and of suggestions about
their causes and possible solutions. Such matters sometimes involved differing political
positions and in any case did not relate directly to the concerns of the Post Office. The
subjects included slums. (Housing Problems)
CLASS 5: Modes of documentary.
Poetic mode  sensorial sensations with no continuity and narrative. COMPLETAR
PPT
CLASS 6: History, Memory and Archive. The first found Footage.

CLASS X: Cinema vèrite.