Documentary

1. Documentary

2. Definition and Origins • Documentary—a movie that aims to inform viewers about truths or facts • -term first used in 1926 by John Grierson to describe a movie called Moana about the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family • -have to go beyond strategy and organization used with typical movies such as plot and narration

3. Questions to ask while viewing • How are documentary films different from narrative ones? • What attracts us to them? • How do they organize their material? What makes them popular, useful, and uniquely illuminating?

4. History • Origins of documentary can be seen in political speeches, academic lectures, visual practices, paintings, diaries, letters, songs, and newspaper reports. • 18th and 19th centuries saw journalism develop into a public forum for expressing ideas, announcing events and recording daily happenings • 1895-1905 saw creation of actualities—moving non-fiction snapshots of real people and events • Scenics—offered exotic or remarkable images of nature and foreign lands • Topicals—captured and sometimes re-created historical or newsworthy events

5. History • -Robert Flaherty considered the father of documentary (1920s) • His movies were anthropological and focused on nature—mostly recorded other civilizations • Soviet Documentaries focused of creating strong ideological messages. • After the intro of optical sound recording in 1927, documentaries took off in 30s and 40s. • 30s and 40s saw a focus on politics and propaganda

6. History • Cinema verite—spontaneity and inventiveness when capturing reality, filmmakers partake and participate in the reality that they film (50s-70s) • Shooting ratio—ration of footage shot to footage used; increased with the advent of video (1980s) which made filmmaking easier and less expensive • -Genre of personal documentaries emerged (I.e. Supersize Me) • Added funding for documentaries came from video rentals, cable and satellite TV (I.e. HBO, Discovery Channel) • This is where reality TV comes from

7. Non-fiction & Non-narrative • Non-fiction films—present factual descriptions of actual events, persons, or places rather than their fictional or invented re-creation • Non-narrative films—are organized in a variety of ways that eschew or de-emphasize stories and narratives, while employing other forms such as lists, repetitions, or contrasts as the organizational structure

8. Organization • Documentary organization—show or describe experience according to a certain arrangement, logic, or order different from that of narrative organization • Cumulative organization—present a catalog of images or sounds throughout the course of a film • Contrastive organizations—present a series of contrasts or oppositions meant to indicate different POV on its subject • Developmental organizations—present places, objects, individuals, or experiences through a pattern of development with a specific non-narrative logic or structure

9. Positions • Rhetorical positions—organizational POV • Explorative positions—mimic scientific POV that announce or suggest that the driving perspective of film is a search into particular social, psychological, or physical phenomena • Interrogative positions—rhetorically structure a movie in either terms of an implicit or explicit question-and-answer format or other techniques that identify a subject as being under investigation • Persuasive positions—articulate a perspective that expresses some other personal or social position using emotions or beliefs and aim to persuade viewers to feel and see in a certain way (I.e. An Inconvenient Truth)

10. Roles and Purpose of Documentaries • Revealing new or ignored realities • Confronting assumptions • Altering opinions • Serving as a social, political, historical, and/or cultural lens • Social Documentary—representing how people live • Political Documentary—investigate and celebrate political activities • Historical Documentary—concentrates of recovering and representing events or figures in history