Lauren's Documentary blog

According to Bill Nichols, The expository mode of documentary film making “rel[ies] heavily on an informing logic carried by the spoken word” and “addresses the viewer directly to…propose a perspective or advance an argument.” In expository documentaries the information being spoken is the most important aspect as it is the catalyst for informing the audience of the overall point of the film. It also allows the audience to understand the history of a particular event and the filmmaker’s side on the argument. The images however, “illustrate, illuminate, evoke, or act in counterpoint to what is being said.” That is, the images and narrative work in conjunction with one another to convey meaning.

Stranger With a Camera (2000) by Elisabeth Barret uses this mode of documentary film making to explain an extremely convoluted issue that happened in her home town when she was a young girl. In this film, she goes in depth about the strange murder of Canadian film maker Hugh O’Connor by native Kentuckian Hobert Ison. This resulted in the town’s positive view of Ison as O’Connor was seeking to make them look unseemly in his film.

This documentary uses a personal narrative by Barret to recount what happened initially in 1967 then goes into detail about the state of Kentucky at that time to add a point of reference to the shooting and why the people reacted the way they did. She then does into detail about how she felt and how her friends felt before going and interviewing people in the town to understand why this happened.

She uses the five elements of voice, according to Nichols, to come to her final conclusion and relay it to her audience. She uses Invention to show “evidence or ‘proofs’ in support of a position or argument.” She does this by interviewing people that knew each man and going back to look at all of the details from both sides. She uses the arrangement of the film to create the maximum effect of the film. She does this by arrange it in a linear way and using personal testimonials and her own narration to convey the whole truth as best she can. She uses style by creating a unique voice to the film. She arranged the film in such a way that gave everyone a voice, including Kentucky. This made it a more rounded film, rather than just a presentation of facts. She uses memory in a way that shows her own retelling of the story as well as others. She does this by juxtaposing images, old footage, O’Connor’s footage and interviews, as well as her own recounting of what happened to shape the story. Finally, Barret uses delivery to create a sense of community and purpose. Since she is from Kentucky she has a thick accent but speaks very well. Her use of personal narration is extremely important to the recounting of this murder and the towns involvement in It because it feels like she belongs and not like an outsider.

Lauren Documentary Theory Final

For my final documentary assignment I have made a short documentary implementing both the autobiographical mode and the poetic mode of film making. For this documentary project, I have created an abstract retelling of my life using some video shot by me or of me throughout my life and also some archival footage from Texas Archive of the Moving Image. TAMI is a non-profit organization, which preserves home footage shot in Texas and puts it on an online archive (Texasarchive.org). By using these two sources of video, I have put together a broad re-telling of my life and juxtaposed it with a spoken poem by Sarah Kay called “Should I have a Daughter.” By weaving in the poetry, music, and images I have been able to create a sort of conceptual retelling of my life thus far.  This documentary implements these modes because I am, using the images to provide a non-chronological version of my life, but also poetic sue to the fact that the poem used frames the content in a way. This, coupled with the music and the archival footage, makes the short more abstract and poetic rather than just an observational autobiographical documentary.

While my film uses many of the modes of documentary film making. The one that is the most prominent is the poetic mode. According to Bill Nichols “the poetic mode is particularly adept at opening up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information, the prosecution of a particular argument or point of view, or the presentation of reasoned proportions about problems in need of solution.” My goal, in my short documentary was to give an alternative to the simple transfer of information by making my short 22 years of existence into something more abstract. Worthy of learning from. The poetic mode is characterized by the “stress of visual and acoustic rhythm, patterns and the overall pattern of the film.” My documentary does this by using music and jump cuts to create a sense of nostalgia, rather than concrete memory. I used archival footage with my own home movies and personally shot footage to continue this sense of nostalgia and memory. Because it is non- chronological and nonlinear, the film is not edited with continuity editing, another characteristic of the poetic mode.

My film is also very participatory and Performative in many ways. While I am not interviewing people, I am featured in the film. The short documentary goes from my life as a child to today in a non-chronological fashion. It is meant to use the music an poem and images to create a sense of my life thus far. Because of this, I am in many of the home videos and the personally shot footage. In this way I am personally participating in the way that the film is being shaped and how people view it, due to the fact that I am in the film itself.

Additionally, Because It is a personal recounting of my life; it can be seen as many of the personal modes of documentary film making. Personally, I like to say that it is mostly autobiographical. I say this because; Bill Nichols states that the autobiography mode is “a personal account of someone’s experience, maturation, or outlook on life.” I use this mode to explain my documentary because it is meant to use all of these aspects (images, music, poetry) to create a sense of nostalgia for me personally but also to show a point of perception. I wanted the audience to see an outlook on my life. This outlook being that no matter how many times you fall down, you can always get back up. This outlook is hopefully, exemplified by the mixing of the images, music, and poem. My film can also be seen as a first person essay or diary/journal mode of documentary. First person essays are “a personal account of some aspect of the author/filmmaker’s experience or point of view” and the diary mode is “daily impressions that may begin and end somewhat arbitrarily.” Clearly, the first person essay is more likely than the diary mode, but I put this one in as well because the film is nonlinear and begins and ends arbitrarily.

The final mode that my short documentary can be seen as is reflexive. The Reflexive mode of documentary is a mode that “calls attention to the conventions of documentary film making and sometimes of methodologies such as fieldwork or the interview.” My film is somewhat reflexive because I use archival footage. In the film, I mix both, archival footage with my own footage. Because of this, It may become unclear what is my actual family footage and what is archival. This lack of clarity is intentional as it shows a sense of the subjectivity of memory and nostalgia.

Anthropological or ethnographic documentaries are a type of visual anthropology in film making. According to an article by Clifford Geertz, anthropology is the study of human groups in a society. This mode of documentary “does not explain everything…but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating what that something is.” Ethnography is a tool in both anthropological and communication research which consists of observing a culture within their natural habitat and chronicling what you find there without altering the significance or happenings in a specific place.  This is a helpful tool because it allows researchers to observe cultures different from their own and make unbiased assumptions on how they live day to day. Ethnographic documentaries do this same thing. While they do not alter or change anything in the society, like in all documentary film, the presence of a camera alters how those observing act.  According to Max Weber, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” This is an interesting way to explain this mode of documentary storytelling because it allows audiences to understand that these documentaries, while on the surface are objective, they do contain interpretation.

Some documentaries have more interpretation than others. For example Ilisha Barbash’s Sweetgrass documents life as a shepherd in the mountains of Montana in 2003. With slow languid images of sheep or farm life, there is not a lot of room for interpretation, Just observation. However, other more specific documentaries like Ax Fight, editing plays a role in how it is viewed. In this documentary a tribe is shown hosting another tribe in their territory. When there is a dispute among the two clans a fight breaks out amongst them. The film shows it in four ways: the first just observing them, the second with some context, the third with the background information and reasoning behind the fight, and then a final edited version. Each edited version takes on a new significance as the editing changes the meaning of the Ax fight itself.

For my 3^rd documentary mode activity, I picked the anthropological/ ethnographic mode of film making because it is an extremely interesting way of delving into a world that is different than yours. I created a comic strip that depicts the evolving life and activity of those in a fandom. Fandom, for these purposes, refers to the unabashed obsession with television series, comic books, movies, etc that fanboys and fangirls feel all around the world. I chose this topic because I feel like it is an interesting culture that gets a lot of criticism in and out of the culture itself.

For the activity, I borrowed comics made by very talented artists on the internet, as I cannot draw at all, and added my own commentary. In my comic it shows a person in the beginning throws of an obsession. It begins by finishing a seven season television show in three to five days, for example. It then escalades into a need to know everything about the topic and people thinking you are crazy. My comic ends with them deciding to go to a convention in order to meet friends who also love what they love. If I were making a real documentary, it would obviously follow them to the convention and observe the fandom in their natural habitat so to speak.

Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley has managed to create a diverse and riveting place within the film industry in the past 20 years. Although her claim to fame has been through narrative television and film, her latest directorial venture The Stories We Tell brings audiences into her personal life.

The Stories We Tell is an extremely interesting documentary to look at in depth, due to the fact that it weaves many different documentary modes together to create a story with complex objectives. The documentary delves into the sordid affair which resulted in her birth. By using second-hand accounts of those who were affected; her father, brothers and sisters, her mother’s friends and family, they weave together a narrative structure that discusses how her mother, long passed from Cancer, may have had an affair whilst in away from the family. While the film does focus on the story of how Sarah discovered that her father was not, in fact her biological father, the scope of the documentary is much broader.  Through the use of her personal story, Polley explores the bigger idea of the inconsistency of memory. She does this by implementing various techniques from many different modes of documentary film making.

Bits of Essay films, participatory films, and reflexive films litter The Stories We Tell in order to create this “Cacophony of voices” (Polley) that show a wide range of interpretations of this story. For example, Many people in the film are interviewed and some even read their manifestos of the happenings (Ie: her father and her biological father), combining both the interviewee process of the participatory film and the cause and effect story arc of the essay. Polley herself also can be found in the film, filming or interviewing others, or reading emails, etc. Adding to the participatory aspect of the film.

Throughout the film, there are what we assume to be home movies which account the day to day life and the Polley house. Many of which contain footage of her mother Diane. What we come to find out, however, is that this footage is not super 8 footage from Polleys childhood, as is assumed, but instead it is footage that was staged and filmed for the purposes of the documentary. By recreating moments that may or may not have happened it adds a sense of reflexive mode to the entirety of the film. This changes the viewing process as it is revealed and the audiences in allowed to finally grasp the overall objective.

(Left: Diane Polley. Right: Rebecca Jenkins, who played Diane in The Stories We Tell)

The Stories We Tell uses these combinations of modes create a sense of subjectivity and remind the audience that memory is not an objective storyteller, nor is a documentary film due to the fact that you can never be sure that what someone is saying is absolute honesty. This is an interesting way of mixing the modes of documentary film making in order to convey an overall theme. Which can still be interesting despite an abstract theme like memory.

Time of the Month- Reflexive Doc Photos

The Reflexive mode is an interesting style of documentary film making because it challenges the assumptions of what documentary film making is. Typically, audiences will describe documentaries as films that tell the truth. How, however, can we differentiate documentaries that tell the truth from narrative films which follow events that actually happened. Bill Nichols’ defines documentary films as “films [that] speak about actual situations or events and honor known facts; they do not introduce new, unverifiable ones. They speak directly about the historical world rather than the allegorical world.”

This is where the modes of documentaries come into play. The six modes, as explained by Bill Nichols are used as a vehicle for the overall objective of the narrative of the documentary. For example, a film maker like Ross Mcelwee tends to participate in his films in order to shed light on certain aspects of himself through his relationships with others.

According to Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary the reflexive mode contains a “intensified level of reflection on what representing the world involves.” The reflexive mode is a style that is very self-referential in that it knows that it is a movie and is concerned with how the film is representing something else. One example of reflexive mode is a film we watched in class, Trinh’s Sur Name Viet Given Name Nam. This can be seen as reflexive because  the interviews “conducted” in the film are actually actresses performing already conducted interviews.

Another interesting example of this is the mockumentary The Blair Witch Project and Sarah Polley’s The Stories We Tell.  In The Stories we Tell, audiences watching the film think that what we are watching is super 8 footage from her childhood yet at the end it is revealed that those scenes were actually staged and filmed to look older. So while she participates in the film itself and it is truthful to a certain degree much of it is staged. The Blair Witch project is the same in that it was one of the first “found footage” films that came out, marketed as a real documented account while it was actually scripted. It was however, filmed by the actors with handheld cameras like a documentary.

For the second documentary mode activity I have made a sort of photo essay of a reflexive documentary. My friend is directing a reflexive participatory mockumentary called Time of the Month about a young girl who suffers from clinical lycanthropy. According to Wikipedia Clinical Lycanthropy is defined as “a rare psychiatric syndrome that involves a delusion that the affected person can transform into, has transformed into, or is a non-human animal.” essentially, the film follows Kate, the director and her crew as they interview and follow a teenage girl named Maggie who believes she is a werewolf.

Time of the Month is filmed as through it is a documentary reflecting a young girl’s real phyciatric illness and struggle and the crews observing it but it ends up that she is a real werewolf. Although this is the narrative of the story, that everything is true and happened in real life, it is however, all scripted and filmed for entertainment.

This photo essay of the making of process of the film reflects the reflexive mode of documentary because it allows audiences to “reflect on how what you see and hear gets you to believe in a particular view of the world.”

The participatory and reflexive modes of documentary are extremely similar on the surface but differ greatly in their execution. Many people, myself included, find it hard to differentiate between the two without closer examination.

The participatory mode of documentary filmmaking relies on a narrative centered around the filmmaker interacting directly “with his or her subjects rather than unobtrusively observ[ving] them” (Nichols.) Interviews, like the one on one interview you may see on talk shows, are a great example of participatory interaction. Interviews in general are instrumental to documentaries but in others the interviewer is neither seen nor heard. In the participatory mode, “what happens in front of the camera becomes an index of the nature of the interaction between filmmaker and subject” (Nichols.) one way in which this mode benefits from the filmmaker having a large role in the narrative of the film is that it gives the audience “a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result.”  Some examples of this style of documentary filmmaking include Chronicle of a summer (1967) and Ross Mcelwee’s Photographic Memory. Chronicle of a Summer  is a French film that implements the use of street “interviews” to conduct a sort of social experiment. The interviewer would ask people if they were happy and see what the result would be.  Photographic Memory explored the filmmaker’s relationship with his son Adrian while simultaneously revisiting his own youth and his time in France. Both documentaries are examples of this mode because, in each case, the filmmaker’s involvement in the realm of the documentary narrative is instrumental to the overall objective.  Many documentary filmmakers believe that the participatory mode is the true cinema verite or film truth.

The Reflexive mode is slightly different in that it contains an “intensified level of reflection on what representing the world involves.” The reflexive mode is a style that is very self-referential in that it knows that it is a movie and is concerned with how the film is representing something. An example of this mode is Trinh’s Sur Name Viet Given Name Nam. This is due to the fact that the interviews “conducted” in the film are actually actresses performing already conducted interviews. This challenges the assumptions of what documentary filmmaking is.

The ways in which the participatory and reflexive mode recount information is very similar  but its differences lie in how the story of the film unfolds and what the objective of the film is.

Doc mode activity 1: Observational

According to Bill Nichols there are six modes of documentary film making: Expository, Poetic, Observational, Participatory, Performative, And Reflexive. Observational documentaries are exemplified by the filmmaker acting as an invisible object recording the things around them but not influencing them in anyway. Because nothing is staged in these documentaries, the filmmaker must rush to meet the action and record what is happening in real time. This results in the footage often being slightly shaky or amateur looking (Nichols).  Another common convention of these documentaries is the lack of music or dialogue. In many ways, Man with a Movie Camera is primarily observational. While the film is very Avant guard and poetic in its editing and music use, Dziga Vertov primary objective is to show life in Russia at the time; focusing of observing daily life by acting as a fly on the wall and filming them.

(Man with a Movie Camera, 1929)

The films that truly exemplify this mode for me are the films of Frederick Wiseman.  This Cinema Verite style or Cinema truth is an interesting style of documentary film making because it relies on the audience to create the narrative.

(Titicut Follies 1967)

In High School for example, Wiseman shot of 100 hours of footage of daily life at an American high school. He then, edits the footage together without any music and focuses on the reality of what is happening with the people in his films. In one scene in High School, the camera sits in a low angle in the corner watching a meeting between a principal, the student, and her parents. There are few cuts and it just focuses on the conversation. This results in there being no clear theme or conclusion to these films but the audience takes what they want from the reality that they are seeing.

(High School, 1968)

Taking the common traits of the observational mode of documentary film making I have created a short example which I have linked above. This 2:00 documentary is shot with an iPhone 5 camera at Austin Film Festival’s office in Austin, TX. This vignette depicts the employees and interns in the office two weeks before the festival begins. While the footage itself is shaky and without the use of a proper camera, it encompasses the observational style of documentary film making that was discussed in Nichols’ book Introduction to documentary. I have used no music or narration and simply observed the goings on in the office in order to provide an example of my life as an intern there. In the short, I focus on the building itself and the people in it but do not introduce anyone in the office. I did this to create a sense of reality for someone who was just observing the office objectively. This is unique to the observational mode of documentary because instead of focusing on the particulars to create a overall story arc, this mode acts as a fly on the wall and observes the overall ambiance of a uninterrupted scene.

The genre of film that dominated production during World War II was short documentaries called Bugle-call films. These bugler films were so named because they represented a kind of call to arms and rallied support. Bugles are a brass instrument which is used in the military to both “relay messages from the officers to the camps and to assemble leaders and give marching orders.”  Metaphorically, Bugler films serve the same purpose.  These films were made in order to garner support for the war, inspire others to serve, and educate their respective audiences about the enemy. In many ways the bugler films are propaganda films (like Triumph of the Will) which revere the country and condemn the enemy by using rhetoric, misleading history, and footage found from other films.  Stylistically bugler films differ from country to country depending on their stance in the war, their position of power, and their geographical proximity to war zones.

German bugle-call films of this time showed both reverence for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich but also attempted to garner support by films that show the moral condemnation of Jews. In Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will the tone was of awe of Hitler and of Germany. She used the juxtaposition of Hitler speaking or waving to images of adoring crowds to portray him as a saint like leader who would bring Germany out of the economical downside of World War I and into their rightful position of power.  This is done by showing Hitler from high angles and cutting together impassioned speeches. Conversely, Hippler’s The Eternal Jew was a grossly anti-Semitic film that showed footage of the Warsaw ghetto with narrative that concluded that Jews were “an unclean, cheating, parasitic species” (Barnouw). In general, the tone of the documentaries in Germany was of confidant reverence that hoped to sway the people into believing in their cause.

The United States used bugler films much differently than the Germans. Capra’s Why we Fight series was very much geared toward the soldiers and was used for information purposes. He used footage from Triumph of the Will to show the dangers of a mob mentality and it was very Caprian in that it contained an air of hope that we would come out victorious. John Huston’s bugler films however were very different. I’m not sure that you can call The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light bugler films because rather than show the military in this great light he observes the war as it actually is. By showing films that shows the toll of foot soldiers, both mentally and mortally, it allows the audience to see the price of the war in a way that they had never seen.

Bugler films in Britain differed greatly from those produced in Germany and the United States because, rather than showing scenes of war or of leaders, they depicted the struggles of the daily man. The films made by Humphrey Jennings during World War II were more like vignettes about how people were coping with living in a war zone. They contained a tone that felt very much like the “keep calm and carry on” and “Make due and mend” mindset of the time. Rather than showing the bombings or British soldiers fighting, He showed people dancing and soldiers drinking in a pub during their downtime. This was interesting because it attempted to retain a sense of humanity during war.

Overall, the bugle-call films from Germany, Britain, and the United States varied in content, tone, and stylistically. In general, the films made in Germany attempted to portray Hitler and Germany’s power using both a stylistic representation of the war and propaganda against Jews. The United States used history, footage from other bugler films, and a tone of “let’s go save the day” to rally people to support our effort in the war. Britain used a calm everyday observational style that showed how despite the war the people’s spirit would not be broken.

One of the aspects that I find the most interesting about documentaries is that although it is oftentimes seen as objective truth or reality, this is not necessarily the case. Documentaries breed powerful responses in many cases because of the subjective nature of the film making style. While they do document a reality, the way that I have always looked at documentaries is as a lens by which filmmakers document their own reality. That is, regardless of how unbiased or observational a filmmaker may want a film to be, all past experiences and current ideals may seep into a story by means of film style or through editing. This subjectivity is either unintentional or intentional. Michael Moore’s films are examples of intentional biased “truth”, where he frames situations and interviews in a way where he already knows the outcome. Nanook of the North is another example where the plot and characters are fabricated in order to create a truth or reality. Ziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is an example where some bias may have been unintentional and can vary from viewer to viewer. Some people take away either pro or anti-communist rhetoric through the avant-garde style of the film. All films, or other forms of mass communication, can generate any number of opinions and one person may take away something completely different from their peers. The same is true for documentaries. Since documentaries are meant to convey reality however, the filmmakers must often use the medium to persuade the viewers into aligning themselves with their view or reality. Documentaries are specific rhetorical texts in this way because the main goal, of many, is to persuade the audience into believing something after seeing the facts. The concept of reality is also fuzzy because unless the subject has no idea they are being filmed, they will act differently in front of the camera; which affects the reality as the subjects are always performing to some degree. This is one of the reasons it is hard to categorize this particular genre. While audience members are easily able to determine what a documentary is when they see one it is harder to get them to pinpoint what the conventions of the genre actually are. In the first chapter of Bill Nichols’ book, Introduction to Documentary, he goes through three common misconceptions of documentary film and what they actually portray. Through these, he has determined a more precise definition which takes into account all of these things:

“ Documentary films speaks about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible proposal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory.”

– Bill Nichols

This definition is helpful in determining what documentaries seek to accomplish and how frameworks are instrumental in producing a successful documentary. Although some Documentary filmmakers seek to avoid these filmmaker frameworks and are strictly observational, like Frederick Wiseman’s High School, the editing of the film creates a narrative that the audience can then draw conclusions from.

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