FINAL FOR I.T.F.: CHAPTER 7 (Documentaries)

Documentary film

a film intended to represent presumed truths, actual events, and real experiences

Mockumentaries

Films that use documentary style to present and stage fictional, often humorous realities

Topicals

an early genre of film that strove to capture or re-create historical or newsworthy events

cinéma vérité

real objects, people, and events are filmed in a confrontational way, exposing objective and subjective truths of the subjects and acknowledging the filmmaker's involvement as interlocutor. (also known as direct cinema)

Actualities

Early nonfiction films that presented snapshots of real people and events were called

Portable recording equipment

Introduced in 1968, Portapak was what kind of technology that helped advance documentary filmmaking?

anthropological documentaries

Documentary films that explore different global cultures and peoples, both living and extinct

documentary reenactment

The technique of recreating or theatrically staging a presumably true event

cumulative

The type of documentary organization that presents a catalog of images or sounds throughout the course of a film`

Aim of documentary

ask, reveal, persuade, and attack

Developmental organizations

present places, objects, individuals, or experiences through a pattern that has a non-narrative logic

Conventional documentary histories

operate under the assumption that the facts and realities of past histories can be recovered and accurately represented.

Rhetorical Position

The ________________________ of documentary films include:

To explore the world, to analyze an event/problem, to reflect the filmmaking process, and to persuade the audience.

distribution/availability

Beginning in the 1980s, the ______________________ of documentaries increased due to cable television, the video rental market, film festivals, and a greater presence at theaters

Developmental

Night Mail (1936), a film that follows the progression of a mail train from London to Scotland, is an example of which kind of documentary organization?

personal documentary

Super Size Me (2004), a film that documents the personal health consequences of filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's diet of McDonald's fast food for a month, is an example of a _____________________________.

Interrogative

A rhetorical position organized in a question-and-answer format is best described as _____________.

documentary film

a visual and auditory representation of presumed facts, real experiences, and actual events in the world

narrative cinema

Documentary films usually employ and emphasize strategies and organizations that differ from those that define _______________________.

economics

Documentary movies operate according to an __________________ of information.

actualities

moving presentations of real people and events

scenics

depicted exotic and foreign locations

topicals

presented current events

optical sound recording

The introduction of __________________________ in 1927 greatly affected documentary films by allowing the addition of educational or social commentary to accompany images.

Nonfiction films

present presumed factual descriptions of actual events, persons, or places, rather than their fictional, or invented, re-creation. (most documentaries are like this)

Non-narrative films

organized in a variety of ways that de-emphasize stories and narratives while employing other forms such as lists, repetitions, or contrasts as the organizational structure.

documentary organizations

The formal strategies used in documentary film that show or describe experiences according to a certain arrangement, logic, or order that is different from that of fictional narrative organizations.

Cumulative organizations

a series of images or sounds that accumulate over the duration of the film.

Contrastive organizations

a series of images or sounds that contrast or are in opposition to provide different points of view on a subject.

rhetorical positions

shape the film according to certain beliefs and perspectives.

Explorative positions

announce or suggest that the film's driving perspective is a scientific search into particular social, psychological, or physical phenomena.

Interrogative/analytical positions

rhetorically structure a movie in a way that identifies the subject as being under investigation - either through an implicit or explicit question-and-answer format or by other, more subtle, techniques.

Persuasive positions

articulate a perspective that expresses a personal or social position using emotions or beliefs and aim to persuade viewers to feel and see in a certain way.

Reflexive and performative positions

call attention to the filmmaking process or perspective of the filmmaker in determining or shaping the documentary material being presented.

social/ethnographic

The two primary traditions of documentary are the ________________ documentary and _____________ film.

Social documentaries

examine and present both familiar and unfamiliar peoples and cultures from around the world from a perspective that focuses on a particular problem or social issue. (Ex: political and historical documentaries)

Ethnographic documentaries

cultural explorations aimed at presenting specific peoples, rituals, or communities that may have been marginalized by or are invisible to the mainstream culture. (Ex: anthropological, cinema verite or direct cinema)

Personal/subjective documentaries

create films that look more like autobiographies or diaries.

Reenactments

use documentary techniques in order to re-create presumably true or real events.

Mediated Reality

documentaries that are not objective reality

Direct cinema

portable equipment; long takes