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.