In this chapter the author Bill Nichols reflects on how documentary filmmaking found its voice. He points out that no one set out to invent this voice or build a documentary tradition. In the present day, it comes with an aspiration of filmmakers to understand how things got to be the way they are. The goals of those before them were to make a film that answered their needs and intuitions about how to represent the subject of their choice. This tradition of experimentation continues to this day but in relation to new forms and new techniques from animation to reenactments. This is what allows documentary to remain a lively and vital genre. The rise of documentary involves the story of the cinema’s love for the surface of things with its distinctive ability to capture life as it is. This distinctive ability served …show more content…
1. The filmmaker was a hero who travelled far and wide to reveal hidden corners and remarkable occurrences that were part of our reality. 2. Film images possessed the power to reproduce the world by dint of a photomechanical process in which light energy passed through lens onto a photographic emulsion. (Nichols 122) The author further presents the four key elements that lay the foundation for documentary film. Indexical documentation, poetic experimentation, narrative storytelling and rhetorical oratory. The poetic experimentation in cinema comes from the combination between cinema and the various modernist avant-gardes that flourished in the early 20th century. As well as poetic experimentation, the development of an even more dominant narrative element cinema continued after 1906. History and biography usually takes the form of narratives but in a nonfiction mode. Rhetorical oratory, a classic voice of oratory sought to speak about the historical world, addressing questions of what to do, what really happened, or what someone or something was really
In this documentary, the conventions and techniques included are; real footage, recorded audio, written codes, montages, use of authority figures/experts, facts and statistics, interviews, bystanders, animation, background music etc. The four conventions/techniques that I will be discussing in this essay will be real footage, use of authority figures/experts, sound and bystanders.
This report aims to make light of certain elements of documentary making that are perhaps more susceptible to influence on the director’s part, and once again explore the effect of these decisions on the audience’s reaction to the information presented.
Also, in order to fully understand the meaning of this film we must answer two
As a viewer, the documentary’s intention to inform is more completely fulfilled by research conducted beyond the scope of the camera lens. Had I never written this paper, for instance, the reason for all the violence embedded within the subject matter would remain as enigmatic as the documentary itself.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
... history and the thoughts they evoke for Marker. It goes beyond documentary to create an essay-film.
...use of documentary style lighting and discontinuous editing that diverges from the Hollywood “invisible” editing. Through understanding the historical climates these two seemingly similar French cinematic movements were in, the psychology of a generation can be visualized in a way truly unique to the indexicality of the cinematic medium.
By seeing the cinema pre World War I as primitive the mother of all creation, necessity was utilised and the economic and technological immaturity, did not hold back the creators but the limits freed them. Gunning terms this as a linear evolutionary process. Gunning, T 1993
Taking this into account documentaries are sub grouped into three different category documentary movie, documentary theme, and news documentary. A documentary movie relies heavily on the expressive principles and merits of the creative cinematic image. This type of documentary
In the early years of narrative cinema there was little pressure on filmmakers for the ‘evolution of film forms before nickelodeons’ (Salt, 1990, pp31) as cinema neither became a mass nor high cultural product and was still a novelty but ‘Production companies’ profits were based principally on the sales of longer fiction films’ in the later years (Musser, 1990, pp256) so focus was made for the production of popular narratives so I will show how the early development of narrative evolved from trick films to complex narrative. I will analyse the short film Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903, Smith) and an extract from the seminal The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W.Griffith).
Traditional ideations of film and documentaries have been to create scripts that are structures to fulfill a set idea. The challenge with scripting an idea is that the script writer(s) have a subjective view of the documentary. The vastness of documenting a situation is restricted by the script making it impossible for a documentary film to capture objective realism in their work.
With the advent of television, films start progressing "by leaps and bounds." One kind of cinema is a documentary film. Thanks to the documentary film, which is simple, concise and understandable form, tell us about nature, culture, history and science, and replenished our "body of knowledge." This is the positive role of cinema in which the means of the common man gets a huge amount of information without losing its finding and processing of your precious time. It increases the overall level of culture. The story of “Australia” makes us closer to the problems of Australian native people, and still, it tells us a beautiful story of Australian people which would be erased if it had any other form except film.
Now when you go back to the beginning of the making of film, it did not look and run the same way it does today. It did have a similar purpose, which was the “motion of pictures.” Now this was after the invention of photography, so the purpose of this was to put individual images in a way they looked as if they were moving.
2. Nichols, Bill. ‘Documentary Modes of Representation (The Observational Mode).’ Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press. 1991. 38-44
‘Then came the films’; writes the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, evoking the arrival of a powerful new art form at the end of 19th century. By this statement, he tried to explain that films were not just another visual medium, but it has a clear differentiation from all previous mediums of visual culture.