Life is nothing more than a series of stories that are just waiting to be told. Real life is capable of telling just as interesting and dramatic stories as the next big blockbuster superhero movies. A successful documentary is able to convey factual information and truth about the real world, while also telling an engaging and well crafted story. By using photos, videos, interviews, and statistics, documentaries are able to take events and ideas from the real world and convey them as an engaging and thought provoking story. Food Inc., The Garden, The Gleaners and I, and Super Size Me are all documentaries that tackle a relatively similar topic, yet accomplish it in vastly different styles. While each film is approached by the filmmakers in …show more content…
Super Size Me’s Morgan Spurlock is a very charming and comical person, who is able to lead the people he is interviewing, or talking to, through a conversation in a light hearted way (Super Size Me @ 27:35). On a similar note the narrator of the film The Gleaners and I is and elderly French woman, Agnès Varda, who is quirky, eccentric, and in the simplest terms, an artist. Her interesting qualities make the interview segments in her film take on a much more real feeling to them, as the people she is interviewing do not seem as if they are talking in front of a camera, but more like they are talking to another human being. These two narrators are both the brains behind the camera, and faces in front of it. Spurlock’s film has a clear and obvious message that is trying to be conveyed about fast food, and overconsumption in America. Varda’s film, on the other hand, has a common theme throughout about waste and how society uses food, but there is a message that is hidden beneath it’s layers. Gleaners is a film about finding beauty in the small things that are largely ignored or thrown away by society as a whole. As Varda says in the film “There is another woman gleaning in this film, that's me” (Gleaners @4:40). She is an artist that is able to look around her and see beauty everywhere she look, from the facinating people that glean through the garbage, to the passing trucks on the freeway. These little moments that see picks up on her camera are her own way of
The Problems of Documentary Producers and the Audience in Jamaica ER and Head on the Block
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.
Food Inc. addresses many political issues during the film to draw in the audience. Issues such as: the environment, education, workers’ rights, health care, climate change, energy control, to name a few. Director Robert Kenner exposes secrets about the foods society eats, where the food has come from and the processes the food went through. It is these issues that are used as politics of affect in both an extreme visual representation and a strong audio representation that has the biggest impact on the audience and their connection to what they are being told. This paper aims to discuss the film Food Inc. and the propaganda message for positive change, as well as, the differences between seeing food and deciding...
Documentary films have become a very popular in the last few years with the success of Michael Moore’s films fueling interest to learn while being entertained. Two filmmakers have benefited from this new interest in the non-fiction film movement, including directors Morgan Spurlock and Lee Fulkerson. The two filmmakers both made documentaries regarding healthy eating, or the lack thereof, in North America. Spurlock’s film, Super Size Me was about a healthy man who wanted to see what would happen to his body if he ate nothing but items from McDonalds for an entire month. On the other hand, Fulkerson’s Forks Over Knives is about a man on a quest to improve his health by consuming a plant and whole food based diet only. Despite the differences in their respective journeys the films of Spurlock and Fulkerson both combine several modes of documentary cinema including, the expository mode's use of narration, reflexive mode's use of the filmmakers on screen presence and the participatory mode in that they are both on a personal, and thus relatable, quest for knowledge.
Super Size Me begins with Director and actor Morgan Spurlock being 32 years of age at the time of filming in 2003. Spurlock is recorded as being physically above average, which is attested to by several doctors as well as a nutritionist and a personal trainer. He asks these professional to track his health and wellness during the “McDiet”. Spurlock’s McDiet is a test where he will eat only food from McDonald’s for thirty days to see how it would affect his health. Throughout the filming of Super Size Me, Spurlock’s health g steadily degenerates until it eventually reaches a state of critical danger for himself, even before the experimental thirty days have concluded. While Spurlock is testing his McDiet, he also investigates further into particular
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.
In today’s world we tend to be caught up in our own personal bubbles. We don’t realize what goes on outside of our world and the myriad of subcultures that exist. The main problem with this is, once we become aware of the people that live outside of our culture and our norms, we tend to not understand their lifestyle and think that they are abnormal or psychotic. Through the various documentaries that we have explored this semester, I have experienced a change in emotion and thought. Every documentary we watched did not make sense to me. However, I realized that once you really dig deep and try to understand these people and their motives, you can uncover the way they affect our society.
The information is presented in an efficient manner as it correlates and appeals with viewers existing knowledge and lifestyle. The documentary begins with a lethargic women who appears to lack motivation due to following an unhealthy lifestyle and diet. This example, that continues throughout the whole documentary,
It has been asked, "Are reflexive or cinema vérité documentary films more accurate at truthfully representing reality?” This question can be answered many ways. One obvious path is to side with reflexivity, because it is honest about the shortcomings of filmmaking. However, we cannot be so quick to assume to know what the question is asking. The question must be broken down first in order to come to a satisfactory answer.
Firstly, I love their filming skill which utilizes the hidden camera footage. To be a documentary, hidden camera footage is the most exciting element as it can expose the secrets that people do not realize. The hidden camera footage show audience an ethic issue among the plastic industry. As I mentioned above, most of the profession of the plastic industry even unconcerned the by-product of the plastic and how it harms our earth. Because of this filming skill, audience can appreciate the truth and it also can attempt the aim of the documentary, recording the truth without any disturbance. Secondly, one of the strength of the documentary is that it has enough conviction. An example of how a point is strongly made is the convincing BPA experiment. As the documentary mentioned, BPA have been found in 93% in human. Among this thesis, Angela Sun tests what is the effect on her blood after touching the plastic which involve BPA by other experts. Ultimately, the consequence of the experiment is obvious enough to indicate the harmful effect of BPA on human body. Finally, the documentary chooses the right evidences to demonstrate the point. After watching the documentary, I feel upset and sorry about that although all of the plastic garbage are made by human, the environment has to sustain most of the harmful consequences and human
The emotional feel or atmosphere created by the documentary was just trying to help. You could tell that they want to help people and make sure they are all healthy and can live the right lifestyle. While watching this film I encountered many things I found questionable. I found three claims to be bias/ controversial in this documentary: it uses correlation as causation, they claim someone having health issues can be solved by cutting meat out of their diet, and lastly they only use one study to prove their method, and it is the one that one of the main people in the movie made.
What is obesity? Dctionary.com states that “Obesity is a medical condition in which a person has excess body fat or being overweight; corpulence" therefore an obese person puts them self at risk for major health problems.” The movie Super-Size Me directed and written by Morgan Spurlock sheds light on the fast food market and the obesity crisis in the United States. His compelling experiment brings to light the physical and emotional impact of consuming three square meals per day at McDonalds for thirty days. Several lawsuits were filed against McDonald’s restaurant for knowingly selling food that is very unhealthy. To substantiate the claim proof was required to show that eating McDonald’s everyday can be dangerous and affects the human body.
McDonald’s, one of America’s fastest growing fast food restaurants, has made more than its share of money within the last twenty years serving more than 46 million people daily. They have twice as many restaurants as Burger King and more restaurants than KFC, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell Combined. Often children have the dream of eating fast food for every meal of every day. Well, Morgan Spurlock took the challenge to see how dangerous it would be to eat McDonalds for every meal. He also took the challenge in response to a lawsuit against McDonalds by a family whose children became obese by the contents of its meals. Directed and starring Morgan Spurlock, who is married to a vegan chef and a healthy man for his age, Super-Size Me is a film that followed Spurlock for 31 days as he follows certain rules set by a series of physicians. He was only allowed to meals off the McDonalds menu including water. Also, he couldn’t exercise but had to walk the same amount of steps as the average American. Filmed all over the United States, Super-Size Me was made to inform the public on the manufactured foods they consume daily. The film also raises awareness on the dangers of what manufactured foods do to the body. Super-Size Me showed how one of the most popular fast food restaurants around today may be leading future generations to severe health problems.
The ideation of objectivity remains a highly debatable subject among philosophical elites. Some philosophers may argue that human’s understanding of objectivity is subject to the scope of understanding of the term and exposure (Livingstone & Plantinga 10). When the term objectivity is entwined with realism, it yields a complex ideation that remains highly debatable and less agreeable among erudite authors (Livingstone & Plantinga 23). However, to understand and appreciate the concept of realism and objectivity in film, it becomes critical to adopt a definite definition. First, the term reality in film is used to describe concepts that are visible in nature as experienced on a daily life by one or more individuals (Livingstone & Plantinga 24). The term objectivity in this case is used to define a set of ideations or perspectives that are incorporated in the film (Livingstone & Plantinga 24). Documentaries are used to create a form of reality, an experience or ideation of the person or group of person experiencing an event or phenomenon. The argument in this analysis is that it is impossible for documentary films to objectively capture reality.
One of the integral things that must be addressed when making a film is the ethics involved. Ethics are a constant issue that have to be carefully considered when filmmaking. This difficult decision-making is highly prevalent in that of documentaries, because of the difficulties associated in filming ‘real people’ or “social actors, (Nichols, 2001).” More importantly, the issues faced by a filmmaker differ between each of the documentary modes. Each particular documentary mode poses different formal choices that must be made in order to operate in an ethical fashion. Two films that have been made both display examples of how ethics must be considered when embarking on a documentary are Etre at Avoir [To Be and to Have], (2001) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). These films have been made in different documentary modes, highlighting that there is not one mode which is easier or has fewer ethical issues associated with it. Additionally, what must be considered is how these style choices in these different modes affect the power relationships between the filmmaker, the subject and its audience, (Nichols, 2001).