Doc Mode #2: Reflexive

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.”