Media Literacy I:

Socially Committed
Documentaries in Close-Up

“Cinema and Human Rights”

7 April 2011
Vreni Hockenjos
 “When documentaries are at their best, a sense of
urgency brushes aside our efforts to contemplate
form or analyze rhetoric. … Documentaries offer
pleasure and appeal while their own structure
remains virtually invisible, their own rhetorical
strategies and stylistic choices (go) largely
unnoticed. ‘A good documentary stimulates
discussion about its subject, not itself.’ This serves
as many a documentarist’s motto, but it neglects
to indicate how crucial rhetoric and form are to
the realization of this goal.”

Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (1991), x.

I. What Is a Documentary
Film?
II. Documentary Modes of
Representation
III. Ethical Issues
I. What Is a Documentary
Film?
II. Documentary Modes of
Representation
III. Ethical Issues
Fiction Documentary
 Fiction Documentary
= depicts a world = depicts a world that exists
fabricated for the independently from camera
screen (“real life”)
 Documentary films are…

“…the more or less artful

reshaping of the historical
world.”

John Grierson, documentary film pioneer (1898-1972)

Fiction Documentary
 Documentary
Fiction
Documentary
My Brother’s Keeper
(Jørgen Flindt Pedersen, 2008)
 http://youtu.be/MdLiL_XO6pU

Surf’s Up
(Ash Brannon, Chris Buck 2007)
 http://youtu.be/Fgn3J4u32hg

Bowling for Columbine

(Michael Moore, 2002)
  Location shooting
 Voice-over commentary

 Use of non-actors

 Interviews

 Use of “name tags”

 Hand-held camera

 Inclusion of found footage, documents etc

Typical Characteristics
  On audio-track?
 On video-track?

 Individualized or Disembodied?

Presence of the filmmaker?

I. What Is a Documentary
Film?
II. Documentary Modes of
Representation
III. Ethical Issues
 Documentary Modes of Representation
 Expository Mode
 Observational Mode

 Interactive or Participatory Mode

 Reflexive Mode

Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary

(2nd ed. 2010), 142-212.
  Works for the impression of objectivity
 “Voice-of-god” commentary

 Overly didactic: Viewers are directly addressed

 Commentator’s/Filmmaker’s argument is

dominant, interviews and images are

subordinated
 Editing serves to establish and maintain rhetorical

continuity (rather than spatial or temporal)

 Linear narrative pattern: cause – effect, problem –

solution
 most common type of documentaries, typical

television format

Expository Mode
  Observes things as they happen
 Stresses the nonintervention of the filmmaker: s/he is

invisible & uninvolved (“Fly on the Wall”)

 Editing enhances impression of lived or real time with long

takes & synchronous sound

 In its purest form: no voice-over commentary, external

music, intertitles, reenactments, or interviews

 Social actors are more engaged w/ themselves, do not

address camera
 Aims at providing an insight into the lived experiences of

others.
 Popular from the 1960s onwards thanks to lighter, easily portable

camera equipment, Direct Cinema Movement

Observational Mode
  Filmmaker is very visible, openly interacts with
social actors
 Filmmaker addresses social actors rather than

viewers
 Editing operates to maintain a logical continuity

between individual viewpoints

 Argument is not made explicitly but implicitly

through selection and arrangement of scenes

 Often unexpected juxtapositions, graphic

intertitles, unusual framings, contradictory

statements
Participatory or
 Cinema Verité Movement

Interactive Mode
  Focus lies on the process of representation itself,
offering a meta-commentary on documentary
means
 Self-conscious about form, style and conventions

 Emphasis is placed on relation filmmaker-viewer

 Reflexivity can be both formal and political

 Defamiliarizes other documentary modes:

viewers expect the unexpected

 Often in the tradition of Brechtian Verfremdungs-

effects (“Alienation effects”)

Reflexive Mode
 Documentary Modes of Representation
 Expository Mode
 Observational Mode

 Interactive or Participatory Mode

 Reflexive Mode

Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary

(2nd ed. 2010), 142-212.
I. What Is a Documentary
Film?
II. Documentary Modes of
Representation
III. Ethical Issues
 Filmmaker

Filmed Viewers
Subjects
 Filmmaker

Filmed Viewers
Subjects
 “How may we represent or
speak about others without
reducing them to
stereotypes, pawns or
victims?”

Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 139.

Film still from Boca de Lixo (Eduardo Coutinho, 1993) in Michael
Chanan, The Politics of Documentary (2007).
 “But there is shame as well as shock in looking at
the close-up of real horror. Perhaps the only
people with the right to look at images of
suffering of this extreme order are those who
could do something to alleviate it – say the
surgeons at the military hospital where the
photograph was taken – or those who could learn
from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not
we mean to be.”

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of

Others (2003), 42.