Documentary Film: Definitions, Indexicality, Voice, Models, and Modes
Defining Documentary Film
The Golden Age of Documentaries
Began in the 1980s with an abundance of films that revitalized the form and prompted serious thought about its definition.
Continues to challenge assumptions and alter perceptions, enablig audiences to see the world anew inventively.
John Grierson's Definition
One of the oldest definitions: "The creative treatment of actuality."
Grierson, a key figure in documentary's rise, used this after seeing Robert Flaherty's Moana ($1926$).
Documentary filmmakers use creative skills to represent reality in distinct ways.
Documentary vs. Fiction
Documentaries are often structured as stories, but their stories stem from the shared world we all inhabit.
Unlike major media that recycle news with little formal innovation and are beholden to powerful sponsors, independent documentaries offer fresh perspectives, imagination, and verve.
Social Engagement and Vision
Documentary has become a flagship for cinema of social engagement and distinctive vision.
The "documentary impulse" has spread to the internet and social media (YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook), fostering mock-, quasi-, semi-, pseudo-, and bona fide documentaries tackling new forms and topics.
The internet's low dissemination cost and word-of-mouth enthusiasm, combined with a hunger for fresh perspectives, ensure a bright future for the documentary form.
Oscar Recognition
From the mid-$1980$s onward, the Oscars have marked the ascendancy of documentary as a popular and compelling form.
Despite its often sentimental affections and bold preferences, the Academy has consistently acknowledged outstanding documentaries of this golden age.
Examples of Oscar-Nominated Documentaries (Since 1980s):
The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein and Richard Schmeichen, $1984$): Traces the career of the first openly gay political figure; a significant influence on the feature film Milk ($2008$).
Radio Bikini ($1987$): About an atomic bomb blast causing radiation death and injury.
Eyes on the Prize (Henry Hampton, $1987$): Epic story of the civil rights movement, heavily dependent on historical footage to lend authenticity.
Hotel Terminus ($1988$): Search for Nazi Klaus Barbie.
Who Killed Vincent Chin? (Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pefia, $1988$): About the murder of a Chinese American man by an unemployed Detroit autoworker fueled by irrational rage against the Japanese auto industry; used local TV footage and filmmakers' own footage.
American Dream ($1990$): Study of a prolonged, complex labor strike.
Berkeley in the Sixties ($1990$): History of the free speech and anti-Vietnam War movements.
Born into Brothels ($2004$): Children of prostitutes raised in Calcutta brothels.
Super Size Me ($2004$): Humorous but serious indictment of the fast-food industry, dramatized by an attempt to live solely on fast food for the film's duration.
March of the Penguins ($2005$): Fate of Antarctica's penguin population.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room ($2005$): Implosion of Enron and its exploitative leaders.
Trouble the Water ($2008$): Events during and after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
Inside Job ($2010$): Expose of the $2008$ economic crisis.
Gasland ($2010$): Examination of fracking issues.
Exit Through the Gift Shop ($2010$): Portrait of graffiti artist Banksy and strange twists befalling the filmmaker.
Searching for Sugar Man ($2012$): Search for a popular American singer believed dead.
5 Broken Cameras ($2012$): Story of a Palestinian farmer confronting Israeli army intrusions.
20 Feet from Stardom (Morgan Neville, $2013$): Portrait of backup singers in music; features Merry Clayton singing with Mick Jagger on "Gimme Shelter."
The Act of Killing ($2012$): Account of mass murder in Indonesia reenacted by killers.
Citizenfour ($2014$): Portrait of Edward Snowden exposing US clandestine surveillance.
Virunga ($2014$): Examination of political tensions threatening a national park in Congo, home to mountain gorillas and oil.
Faces Places ($2017$): Agnès Varda and J.R. travel rural France creating art with people.
Free Solo ($2018$): Unassisted climb up Yosemite's El Capitan.
Minding the Gap ($2018$): Story of three skateboarders resolving family traumas.
American Factory ($2019$): Culture clash when a Chinese magnate off-shores production to the American heartland.
For Sama ($2019$) and The Cave ($2019$): Different portraits of medical aid in Syria's conflict.
Summer of Soul ($2021$): Return to $1969$ Harlem concerts by black musicians.
Flee ($2021$): Animated portrait protecting the identity of a gay man fleeing Afghanistan for Denmark.
Fire of Love (Sara Dosa, $2022$): Portrait of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft; uses their footage and a tentative voiceover tone; won an Oscar in $2022$.
Filmmakers' Approach
Contemporary filmmakers like Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation, $2003$ - a highly performative, moving recount of family life and coming-out story), Michael Moore, Waad Al-Kateab (For Sama), and Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I, $2000$) maintain distance from the authoritative commentary of earlier forms.
What Role Does Indexicality Play in Documentary?
Documentary's Core Challenge
Documentaries see the world anew and do so inventively, exemplifying "the creative treatment of actuality."
Challenge assumptions and alter perceptions.
The tension between "creative treatment" and "actuality" is central. Creative treatment suggests fictional license, while actuality demands journalistic responsibility to verifiable facts.
This balance between creative vision and respect for the historical world is a source of documentary appeal.
Representations vs. Reproductions
Documentaries are representations, not faithful reproductions (unlike X-rays or surveillance footage).
We judge representations by the pleasure, insight, and perspective they offer, rather than their status as exact copies of reality.
Indexicality Defined
The term describes the capacity of photographic images and sound recordings to refer to a point-by-point, precise correspondence with what they represent.
Examples: A photo showing spatial relationships, a fingerprint, an X-ray of body parts, bullet markings on a gun barrel.
Indexical images and sounds capture a precise trace of the "profilmic event" (what was before the camera).
This quality makes documentary images appear vital as evidence.
Beyond Indexicality: The Role of Editing and Language
While individual images/sounds are indexical, a whole documentary, joined by editing, exceeds its parts by telling a story, creating mood, sharing a perspective, or making an argument.
This is where the "creative treatment of reality" comes into play, moving beyond the authenticating power of the indexical image.
Sergei Eisenstein and others conceived film as a language, not just a document. Separate shots combine to produce a thought or feeling not prompted by a single shot alone.
Example: Cutting from a man's face to a bowl of soup creates a story about appetite, hunger, or dining, depending on context.
Facts exist inertly until made part of communication, which requires language and conventions (grammar).
Editing and mise-en-scène (what takes place within a shot) are part of cinema's language, used in documentary to address our historical world.
Facts, Information, and Interpretation
An indexical recording is a fact/document, a source of evidence, but it's information awaiting interpretation (like an X-ray for a radiologist).
Meaning must be assigned to facts through language.
A documentary is more than the sum of its indexical shots; it's a communication offering a particular way of seeing/interpreting the world, using evidence like an essayist.
Interpretations are unique to the filmmaker/viewer and don't have an indexical relation to reality. They must conform to verifiable facts but aren't uniformly consistent (e.g., courtroom trials, historical interpretations).
Indexical Images and Multiple Interpretations
The difference lies between the indexical image as local information/evidence and the holistic perspective/explanation it supports.
Rodney King Case ($1991$): Video showed police beating King. Prosecution: guilty (defenseless man). Defense: innocent (King preparing to lunge). Jury acquitted, protests followed (later some officers found guilty in a second trial). Reveals how the same indexical image can support different interpretations.
George Floyd Case ($2020$): Cell phone video showed officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for over minutes. Prosecution: guilty (overwhelming evidentiary value). Defense: argued reasonable force, but video evidence contradicted. Chauvin convicted.
The raw power of the indexical image greatly appeals to documentary film, creating compelling, shudder-inducing moments (e.g., Timothy Treadwell with grizzly bears in Grizzly Man, Merry Clayton's vocals in 20 Feet from Stardom, bomb blast in For Sama).
Table 1.1: Key Factors in the Shift from Reality to Representations of Reality
Facts: Information/data put to use. Indexicality (sounds/images faithfully correspond). Animated docs use iconic images (illustrative, not explicitly evidential), often with indexical sound.
Representation: A framework (language/formal system for organizing facts) and discourse (how filmmaker speaks to viewer, conveying perspective). Three major forms of discourse: Narrative (beginning, middle, end), Rhetoric (persuasive engagement), Poetics (aesthetic effect).
Interpretation: How a viewer understands the representation as a specific way of beholding/analyzing the world.
Understanding: Empathy with representation, a form of knowledge.
Disembodied: Factual info from a larger external system (grammar, geography).
Embodied: Experiential response, insight unique to how representation moves/engages viewer (tacit knowledge, "gut feeling").
Documentary's interest lies in the creative treatment or distinct representation of shared reality and how we interpret it.
A Modified Version of Grierson's Definition
Original: "The creative treatment of actuality." Helpful but omits the viewer's role and tension between creativity/actuality.
Modified: "Documentary film speaks about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves within a structured framework. This framework conveys a sustained, plausible perspective on the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes the film into a way of understanding the historical world directly rather than through a fictional allegory. Our task is to interpret the filmmaker's representation of the historical world appropriately."
Documentary vs. Fictional Allegories
Fictional narratives create imaginary worlds to stand in for everyday ones (allegory: everything has a second meaning, disguised commentary).
Documentaries refer directly to the historical world; their images present people and events from our shared reality.
Distorting facts, altering reality, or fabricating evidence jeopardizes a documentary's status (mockumentaries aim to do this, e.g., David Holzman's Diary ($1967$), This Is Spinal Tap ($1984$)).
Documentaries often "break the fourth wall" to speak directly to the viewer about our world. (Observational documentaries retain the fourth wall).
Plausibility: A plausible perspective is reasonably achievable without suggesting fakery or fictionalization. It needn't be sober-minded; outlandish views can be used for comedic/satiric effect (e.g., Cold Case Hammerskjold ($2019$), a parody of crime-solving documentaries).
Short clips (TikTok, Instagram) may have a foothold in documentary but lack sustained actuality/commentary.
Real People (Social Actors)
Real people present themselves Drawing on a lifetime of experience, unlike fictional characters who subordinate personal traits to an assigned role.
Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ($1959$) highlights how real-life self-presentation differs from stage performance.
Social actors' self-presentation is fluid, adapting to situation and new interactions.
Longitudinal Docs: Capture fundamental and permanent changes in social actors over time (e.g., Of Sons and Fathers ($2017$), Minding the Gap).
Historically, films like Battleship Potemkin ($1925$) or reality TV shows use individuals who seem to inhabit social roles comfortably, but these roles are strongly shaped by filmmakers/producers, making them partly fictitious or blurring boundaries (e.g., Survivor, The Real Housewives).
Moving from Concrete to Abstract
Documentaries represent real people and situations, but the concepts and issues addressed are almost always abstract and invisible (e.g., ecology, poverty, fear).
We can film signs and symptoms (e.g., affluent lifestyle, impoverished existence) and assign abstract concepts to them.
Example: Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine ($2003$) films survivors confronting tormentors at a notorious prison, giving visible embodiment to pain, suffering, and dignity.
Documentaries give visual/audible representation to topics for which written language gives us concepts. Images embody concepts, affecting us greatly.
Spoken commentary often guides viewers to the "correct" interpretation.
Documentaries offer a sensuous experience, activating feelings/emotions, tapping values/beliefs, with expressive power.
Example: Frederick Wiseman's Hospital ($1970$) observes patient/staff encounters, embodying abstract concepts like medical ethics, bureaucracy, class, quality of life.
Example: John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro ($1945$) shows what war is like, allowing thematic generalizations (e.g., "War is hell") from specific incidents. Huston's irony in commenting on architectural details amidst ruins highlights war's horror.
Tension Between Specific and General
Documentaries usually contain a tension between concrete situations and broader generalizations.
Without generalizing, they'd be mere records; without specifics, they'd be abstract treatises.
The combination of individual scenes/shots (locating us in time/place) and their organization into a narrative, rhetorical, or poetic perspective gives documentary its power and fascination.
Documentary Frameworks: Narrative, Rhetoric, Poetics
Absence of allegorical dimension and importance of social actors' self-presentation are key.
Films typically adopt one or more forms of discourse: rhetoric (exposition), narrative (storytelling), or poetics (formal patterns).
These tools of engagement (narrative, rhetoric, poetics) tell us about the world with an affective frame.
Storytelling Questions: Whose story is it (filmmaker's or subject's)? Does it derive from events/people involved or is it primarily the filmmaker's work (even if based on reality)? Does it provide a plausible representation? (e.g., Sabaya [$2021$]).
A story will be told from the filmmaker's perspective but corresponds to verifiable facts/events.
Many fiction films (e.g., Schindler's List [$1993$], Monster [$2003$]) are imaginative, allegorical representations based on true stories.
Documentaries like Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer ($1992$) feature the subject directly.
Comparing Werner Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly ($1997$) (documentary) and Rescue Dawn ($2006$) (fiction) shows how documentary differs.
The division between documentary and fiction lies in the degree to which the story corresponds to actual situations vs. being a filmmaker's product.
Case Study: Nanook of the North ($1922$)
Ostensibly Nanook's story, but largely Robert Flaherty's invention (family structure, hunting methods from a bygone era).
Often criticized as a travelogue conveying a limited/distorted view due to ethnocentric perspective.
Classified as documentary due to the story's match with Inuit ways (even if revived) and Allakariallak's embodiment of Inuit spirit, harmonizing with a distinct way of life and Western conception.
John Grierson coined "documentary value" for Flaherty's Moana ($1926$), contributing to the term's prominence.
Reenactments: Documentaries may use imaginative reenactments (e.g., Nanook itself can be seen as one giant reenactment) to correspond to known historical fact for plausibility (e.g., Kirsten Johnson's Dick Johnson Is Dead ($2020$) preenacts her father's death).
More than one story exists for any event (e.g., Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room vs. Enron executives' story; Gasland vs. gas/oil industry).
The "creative treatment of actuality" produces one possibility among many. A fact may be undisputed, an image indexical, but the overall perspective is a result of a way of seeing within a structured framework (discourse: storytelling, persuasion, poetry).
What Characterizes the Voice of Documentary and Its Relation to Storytelling?
The Voice of Documentary
Documentaries speak about our shared, historical world without relying on imaginary allegories.
Discourse is any organized series of representations; a voice addresses us as it speaks about our world.
This voice can be spoken words, written text, or cinematic techniques conveying the filmmaker's perspective.
Four categories provide frameworks: film technique, and within documentary, narrative, poetic, and rhetorical discourse.
Discursive Frameworks: The Language of Cinema
The voice draws on cinema's distinct qualities, with techniques like editing providing grammar.
Filmmakers make decisions throughout planning, shooting, and postproduction that constitute the film's structure and voice.
Decision-making involves:
Shot duration and juxtaposition: Continuous long takes possess an indexical relationship to time (vital for Black Lives Matter footage of police violence);
Framing/composition: Close-up or long shot, angles, lighting, color, camera movement (pan, zoom, track);
Sound recording: Synchronous sound, additional sound (voice-over, dubbed dialogue, music, sound effects, commentary);
Chronology: Accurate or rearranged for point/mood;
Archival vs. On-spot footage: Use of existing materials vs. newly recorded;
Interaction with subjects: Interviews, directions, staging scenes, reenactments vs. observation;
Modes of representation: Expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflexive, performative, or interactive.
Documentary voice is akin to style in fiction, but it addresses us as socially situated individuals about our common world, whereas fiction constructs a distinct world we enter imaginatively.
Voice attests to how the filmmaker uses cinema's language to engage with and convey engagement with the historical world, carrying an ethical component.
A topic can be expressed with different voices (e.g., abortion in Speakbody [$1979$], Abortion: Stories from North and South [$1984$], After Tiller [$2013$]).
Voice is how cinema's language conveys reasoning, feelings, analysis, and values.
Direct Address in Documentary
Voice serves as evidence of a perspective and an encounter, explicitly or implicitly.
Explicit Voice: Spoken aloud, written titles/intertitles.
"Voice-of-God" commentary: Speaker is heard but unseen, representing the film's viewpoint (e.g., Salt for Svanetia for Soviet industrialization, The City [$1939$] addressing urban problems for social change).
"Voice-of-Authority" commentary: Speaker seen, often an expert or professional voice-over artist (e.g., TV news reporters, Discovery/History Channel commentators).
Filmmaker as direct voice: Filmmaker speaks directly, signaling their efforts and perspective, becoming a character in their own film (e.g., Michael Moore, Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I, Faces Places, Varda by Agnès [$2019$]), Lynne Sachs (Film about a Father Who [$2021$]).
Community "We" Voice: Films speaking for minority or group experiences, achieving intimacy (e.g., The Times of Harvey Milk, Last Call at Maud's ($1993$), 13 Genders ($2004$), Disclosure ($2020$)).
Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied ($1989$): Extraordinary first-person voice, compelling fusion of personal and group experience as a Black gay man; a prototype of the performative mode.
Alan Berliner's Films: Intimate Stranger ($1992$) and Nobody's Business ($1996$) (father often resists filming, revealing struggle for control).
Direct address proposes a position: "See it this way." Can be galvanizing, reassuring, strident, or calm (e.g., Ken Burns's historical documentaries with Peter Coyote's voice-of-God narration).
Indirect Address in Documentary
Filmmaker's point of view is implicit, embedded in nonverbal communication (film techniques, body language, proxemics).
Effect is "see for yourself" rather than "see it this way."
Examples: Koyaanisqatsi ($1983$) (contrasting nature/industrialization), Lessons of Darkness ($1992$), Leviathan ($2012$), Honeyland ($2019$). These evoke feelings nonverbally.
Case Study: Nanook of the North (Flaherty): Nanook biting a phonograph record: duration, shot placement, Nanook's expression nonverbally reveal Flaherty's willingness to make Nanook the butt of a joke (viewed through postcolonial studies, it highlights power dynamics and ethnocentric perspectives).
Silent cinema (e.g., Berlin: Symphony of a Great City ($1927$), Rain ($1929$)) also use indirect address.
The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, $1988$) uses juxtaposition of interviews and images to argue innocence without voice-over. His intercutting of a key witness with cheesy B-movies undercuts credibility ironically.
This technique (stories emerging organically without filmmaker voice-over) is seen in American Factory, Attica ($2021$), After Tiller.
What Are the Rhetorical and Poetic Contributions to Documentary?
Three Basic Types of Rhetorical Discourse
Beyond cinematic language, documentaries relate to universal domains of narrative, rhetorical, and poetic discourse.
These classic divisions identify primary goals for rhetorical discourse: what to do now (deliberative), what happened then (judicial/historical), what is someone/something like (commemorative/biographical).
Rhetoric enables convincing arguments when multiple perspectives claim attention and imbues understanding with emotional resonance.
1. Deliberative Rhetoric: "What should we do about this?"
Explores socially important issues (welfare, global warming, abortion, AI, terrorism) and how to tackle them.
Seeks answers to major issues provoking debate.
Examples: Smoke Menace ($1937$) (urging natural gas), Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke ($2017$) (Hurricane Katrina response), Chasing Ice ($2012$) (polar ice caps), Michael Moore's Sicko ($2007$) (US healthcare), The Bleeding Edge ($2018$) (medical device industry).
2. Judicial or Historical Rhetoric: "What really happened?"
Reexamines past actions/events, asking "what happened then?"
Often involves creating a story with beginning, middle, end, using verifiable facts (inartistic proofs) and interpretations (artistic proofs).
Acknowledges that multiple accounts of past events exist, and plausible stories require careful selection.
Examples: Shoah ($1985$) (Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour documentary on the Holocaust, relying on witness testimony without archival footage, convinces through cumulative weight of stories), The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Esfir Shub, $1927$) (repurposes Czar Nicholas II's home movies into an attack on his despotic reign), Eyes on the Prize ($1987$) (weaves interviews, news reports, archival footage for civil rights movement history), Collective ($2019$) (Romanian healthcare corruption), Attica ($2021$) (prison rebellion).
3. Commemorative or Biographical Rhetoric: "What is someone or something really like?"
Revolves around biographical (personal) or sociopolitical (organizations/institutions) discourse.
Aims for praise or judgment, or a mix, with potential ambiguity.
Relies more on the impression of accuracy/plausibility than scrupulous adherence to fact.
Moves us toward clearer understanding or prolongs wonder at contradictions.
Examples: Errol Morris's films (The Unknown Known ($2013$) about Donald Rumsfeld's obfuscation, stressing hidden motives), All These Sleepless Nights (doesn't explain motivations).
Ironic Commemoration: Jay Rosenblatt's Human Remains ($1998$): Five dictators (Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini) narrated by actors using their own words about quirks/idiosyncrasies (beverages, food, deformities), juxtaposed with archival footage out of uniform. Creates dissonance between known heinous acts and quaint habits, humanizing them to jolt the assumption of inhuman monsters.
Portraits of Public Figures: American Dharma (Errol Morris, $2018$) and The Brink (Alison Klayman, $2019$) portray Steve Bannon. The Brink (
see for yourselfobservational style) identifies him as an extremist despite self-deprecating moments. American Dharma (Morris's open questions) appears more accepting, providing a platform for Bannon with minimal resistance.Alex Gibney's Exposes: (e.g., Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room ($2005$), Getting Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief ($2015$), The Armstrong Lie ($2013$), Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine ($2015$), The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley ($2019$) on Elizabeth Holmes's fraud). Counterweights media outlets taking claims at face value, recalibrating ethical guidelines for public figures constructing false images.
Musician/Concert Films: Celebrate music, offer insight (e.g., Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz ($1978$), Peter Jackson's Get Back ($2021$)), pioneered by Lonely Boy ($1962$), Keith Richards: Under the Influence ($2015$), Amy ($2015$) (posthumous, sensitive look at pressures).
These films use compelling evidence, make cases, and often adopt a neutral tone for credibility.
Poetic Discourse
Often speaks indirectly through non-authoritative voice-over.
Seldom advances an argument or tells a story primarily, though elements may be present.
Priority: Tempo and rhythm (achieved through editing, sounds, music) and juxtapositions of sound and image (ironic, incongruous, harmonious).
Generates an aesthetically appealing effect and sense of movement.
Values formal qualities (light, color, rhythm, movement) over social issues/narrative dilemmas.
Commentary: Often omitted or used to evoke/hint/suggest rather than declare/explain.
Examples: Song of Ceylon ($1934$), Night Mail ($1936$) (subtle voice-of-God), Pacific 231 ($1949$), Glass ($1958$) (no commentary, voice in poetic composition).
Models and Modes: Two Frameworks for Documentary
Defining Documentary Types
The general definition of documentary (creative treatment of actuality, real people, plausible perspective) doesn't distinguish different types.
Documentaries often violate specific definitions, and mockumentaries blur boundaries. What counts as documentary remains fluid.
Institutional opportunities/constraints, tech innovations, creative inspiration, and audience expectations constantly change the landscape.
Distinguishing Documentaries
Two ways: how they adopt distinct cinematic modes of representation and how they draw on pre-existing nonfiction models.
Modes: Relate to film technique/cinematic language (e.g., distinguishing expository from observational).
Models: Refer to ways reality is represented in non-cinematic media (diary, biography, report, etc.), often using narrative, rhetorical, and poetic discourse.
A film can adopt multiple models/modes.
Table 8.1: Major Nonfiction Models for Documentary Film
Investigation/report: Assemble evidence, make a case, offer perspective (e.g., iHuman, Enron, Attica, Harvest of Shame, Inside Job).
Advocacy/promotion: Stress convincing evidence/examples, urge adoption of viewpoint (e.g., An Inconvenient Truth, Salt for Svanetia, The Plow That Broke the Plains, The Power of Nightmares, Sicko, Obama's America 2016, Vaxxed).
History: Recount what happened, offer interpretation (e.g., Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, An Injury to One, Wild Country, Einsatzgruppen, Black Panthers, Edge of Democracy).
Testimonial: Assemble oral histories/witnesses' personal experiences (e.g., The Unknown Known, Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, Shoah, Attica, The Word Is Out).
Exploration/travel writing: Convey distinctiveness/allure of distant places, stress exotic qualities (e.g., Faces Places, March of the Penguins, Nanook of the North, My Octopus Teacher, Wild Safari 30: A South African Adventure).
Sociology: Study of subcultures, fieldwork, participant observation, description, interpretation (e.g., High School, Jesus Camp, Shinjuku Boys, Salesman, Stranger with a Camera, Last Men of Aleppo).
Visual anthropology/ethnography: Study of other cultures, fieldwork, language acquisition, reliance on informants (e.g., Dead Birds, Les Maîtres Fous, N!ai: Story of a !Kung Woman, Reassemblage, Sweetgrass, Wedding Camels, Restrepo, Honeyland).
First-person essay: Personal account of filmmaker's experience/viewpoint, similar to autobiography but stresses individual development (e.g., Nostalgia for the Light, The Gleaners and I, Nobody's Business, Strong Island, Sans soleil, Sherman's March, Super Size Me, Tongues Untied).
Poetry: Organized around rhyme, meter, rhythm, calls attention to film's form (e.g., The Bridge, Koyaanisqatsi, The Maelstrom, NY, NY, Rain, Window Water Baby Moving).
Diary/journal: Daily impressions, may begin/end arbitrarily (e.g., Afrique, je te plumerai, David Holzman's Diary (mockumentary), The Gleaners and I, Sherman's March, Unfinished Diary).
Profile/biography: Recounts individual/group story, maturation, distinctiveness (e.g., 16 in Webster Groves, 7 Up series, Philly, D.A., Citizenfour, They Shall Not Grow Old, Grizzly Man, The Last Waltz, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, The Roosevelts).
Autobiography: Personal account of someone's experience, maturation, outlook (e.g., Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, Film about a Father Who, Loads, Tarnation, Tongues Untied, Waltz with Bashir).
Note: Some films are listed multiple times, indicating hybridity. False claims in advocacy/promotion films like Vaxxed and 2016: Obama's America raise ethical questions about using documentary conventions to lie, unlike mockumentaries that eventually admit deception.
The Cinematic Modes: A Preliminary Overview
Documentary modes (expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflexive, performative, interactive) define the look and feel, developing from the $1920$s onward.
They indicate how a film uses cinematic language to address us.
Two complementary questions for any documentary: What model does it adopt? What mode(s) does it use?
Hybridity is common, where films combine elements from different modes (e.g., Enron (participatory) and Sicko (expository) both use interviews).
Filmmakers use a fluid, pragmatic approach to materials, drawing on previous work and basic characteristics of modes/models.
The reflexive mode is underrepresented in tables, as it questions the formal conventions of documentary itself.
Table 8.2: Specific Qualities of Documentary Modes (Detailed in sections below)
The modes loosely correspond to their chronological introductions, with a significant divide around $1960$ (rise of portable sync sound leading to observational and participatory modes).
Modes are a "pool of resources," not an evolutionary chain. Each mode remains available and expands possibilities.
Expository mode, dating to the $1920$s, remains highly influential (TV news, science/nature docs, biographies).
Dissatisfaction with existing modes and new technologies (digital cameras, cell phones, internet) drive the formation of new modes (e.g., observational mode arising from perceived "end of ideology" in the $1950$s; performative mode in $1980$s/$1990$s from identity politics and desire to speak for oneself).
New modes signal different ways to organize a film, different perspectives on reality, and different issues for an audience, rather than simply "better" ways.
The Expository Mode
Characteristics
Assembles fragments of the historical world into a rhetorical or narrative frame.
Combines the four basic elements: indexical images, poetic associations, storytelling qualities, rhetorical persuasiveness.
Distinguishing characteristic: Direct address to the viewer (titles or voices) that tells a story, proposes a perspective, or advances an argument.
Ideal for models like essays (The Edge of Democracy [$2019$]), diaries (For Sama), journalism (Attica), history writing (Ken Burns's Ben;amin Franklin [$2022$]).
Prioritizes direct address and clarity of exposition.
Voice-over Commentary
Voice-of-God: Speaker is heard but never seen, often anonymous, conveying objectivity or omniscience (e.g., The City [$1939$], Why We Fight series [$1942-45$], Blood of the Beasts [$1949$], Dead Birds [$1963$], I Am Not Your Negro [$2017$], Hemingway [$2021$]). Peter Coyote is known for this in Ken Burns's films.
This voice exists "above the fray" in an unspecified place of knowledge, presuming the capacity to judge actions without being caught up in them.
The professional commentator's official tone strives for credibility through detachment, neutrality, and disinterestedness.
Can be adapted for ironic points of view (e.g., 16 in Webster Groves, This Is Spinal Tap) or subverted (Land without Bread [$1932$]).
Voice-of-Authority: Speaker is heard and seen, sometimes the filmmaker himself (e.g., 16 in Webster Groves ($1966$), The Selling of the Pentagon ($1971$), Ways of Seeing ($1974$), Born into Brothels ($2004$), Film about a Father Who ($2020$)). John Berger exemplifies the essay as personal perspective.
Example: Joris Ivens's The Spanish Earth ($1937$): Urged support for Republican Spain. Exists in $3$ versions with different voice-of-God speakers (Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway) over identical image tracks. Hemingway's matter-of-fact but committed tone was deemed more effective than Welles's elegant, humanistic delivery for galvanizing support.
When the filmmaker is the speaker, the tone shifts from authoritative to personal, encyclopedic knowledge to essayistic/personal, disembodied to embodied knowledge. It conveys a more focused perspective than voice-of-God.
The "above the fray" quality disappears when the filmmaker confronts issues directly (e.g., Waad al-Kateab in For Sama [$2019$], chronicling experiences in besieged Aleppo from a diaristic, personal perspective; Lynne Sachs in Film about a Father Who [$2020$] about family confusion and infidelity).
Interviews with experts or authoritative voices can also present knowledgeable individuals (e.g., Edward Murrow in Harvest of Shame [$1960$], investigative journalists in Gibney's films). Also see the highly rhetorical, government-sponsored Red Nightmare ($1962$) with Jack Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday persona.
Witnesses/participants provide a factual/emotional mix, offering both information and personal impact (e.g., The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, American Factory).
Images and Editing in Expository Mode
Heavy reliance on spoken word for informing logic. Images serve a supporting role, providing aesthetic/emotional texture, illustrating, illuminating, evoking, or counterpointing what is said.
Commentary organizes B-roll (evidentiary) images to support verbal claims (e.g., Inside Job [$2010$] using graphics for the $2008$ housing crisis; An Injury to One [$2002$] tracing toxic mining consequences).
Editing maintains continuity of perspective rather than rhythm or formal pattern.
Fluidity in Time and Space: Allows jumping between times/places if it advances the commentary's perspective (e.g., The Plow That Broke the Plains [$1936$] merging shots of drought/erosion from Midwest; Why We Fight series using cannon shots from different battles; Night and Fog assembling B-roll from Nazi camps).
Emphasizes objectivity and a well-supported perspective, especially with an anonymous voice of God.
Disembodied vs. Embodied Knowledge
Disembodied: Factual information that remains the same regardless of who provides it (e.g., an oil refining process, Covid risk reduction measures).
Embodied: Personal, subjective dimension involving physical or emotional effects on the speaker (e.g., refinery smoke affecting a social actor in a specific way).
Prevalence
Valued for conveying complex ideas economically and presenting arguments straightforwardly. Ideal for factual information and arguing a case.
Extremely common in instructional/informational nonfiction films, opposite of reflexive mode.
Adds to knowledge without challenging organizing categories. Relies on common sense/belief more than logic.
Remains the most prevalent mode today. Often combined with other modes, leading to hybrid forms.
The Performative Mode
Characteristics
Gives strong subjective emphasis to the filmmaker's perspective, moving away from traditional realism towards an affective and expressive form of discourse.
Freely mixes expressive techniques common in fiction (point-of-view shots, musical scores, subjective states of mind, flashbacks, freeze-frames, unusual camera angles) with oratorical techniques for social issues that science or reason alone can't resolve.
Challenges what counts as knowledge: endorses personal, embodied knowledge (rooted in experience, poetry, art, rhetoric) over impersonal, disembodied (generalizations, abstract reasoning, science).
Aims to demonstrate how embodied knowledge provides entry into understanding general societal processes.
Meaning is subjective, affect-laden. Specific events hold different meanings for different people based on experience, memory, emotions, values, beliefs, context.
Underscores complexity of world knowledge by emphasizing subjective and affective dimensions.
Often draws on essayistic, diaristic, or confessional models, with the filmmaker personally affected by the story.
Results in a work more affective and idiosyncratic than most expository works, even when an expository element is included.
Key Features
Combination of Actual and Imagined: A common feature. Passion of Remembrance ($1986$) (Sankofa Collective) exemplifies this, combining documentary footage of protests with reflective commentary and enacted scenes to imagine the Black experience in $1980$s Britain.
Emphasis on Subjectivity of Experience and Memory: Filmmakers treat personal struggles as metaphors for larger social problems, use poems, enacted scenes, family histories, and personal traumas.
Examples: Vanalyne Green's Trick or Drink ($1984$) (eating disorders as social metaphor), Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied ($1989$) (Black gay identity), Ngozi Onwurah's The Body Beautiful ($1991$), Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I ($2000$) (mortality), Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation ($2003$) (mother's mental instability), Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir ($2008$) (wartime incident via animation), Boris Gerrets's People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am ($2010$), Lynne Sachs's Film about a Father Who ($2020$) (unfaithful father).
Represents a deflection from realist representation toward poetic liberties, unconventional narratives, and subjective forms. The film becomes a "stained glass window" (stylistic markings of the maker) rather than a clear "window onto the world." "My experience of the world is like this," these films declare emotionally, conveying tacit, implicit, or embodied knowledge.
"Performative" vs. Austin's "Performative Speech"
This use of performative differs from J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words ($1962$), where speech alters reality (e.g., "I pronounce you man and wife").
In documentary, performance draws on the acting tradition to bring heightened emotional involvement to a situation or role. Performative documentaries aim to help us feel or experience a situation viscerally, intensifying rhetorical desire for an affective impact.
Common in rock concert films (e.g., Woodstock [$1969$], The Last Waltz [$1978$], My Life as a Rolling Stone [$2022$]).
Early partial examples include Turksib ($1929$), Salt for Svanetia ($1930$), Land without Bread ($1932$).
The Mothers of de Plaza Mayo ($1985$) and Roses in December ($1982$) include performative moments within a linear historical narrative.
Prototypical Example: Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, $1990$): Explores gay subculture of vogueing and drag balls, immersing viewers performatively in its quality and texture.
Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied ($1989$): Begins with "Brother to brother" call, ends with "Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act." Urges viewers to experience the subjective position of a Black gay man.
Yance Ford's Strong Island ($2017$): Explores family trauma and race from a Black, gay perspective (brother's murder), emphasizing emotional anguish and racial injustice.
Aims to move audiences into subjective alignment with a perspective, joining the particular to the general, individual to collective, personal to political (e.g., Listen to Britain [$1941$], Three Songs of Lenin [$1934$]).
Animation as a Tool
Animation is a powerful tool for visual form and emotional expressiveness.
Examples: His Mother's Voice ($1997$) (mother's mind after son shot), Chris Landreth's Ryan ($2004$) (Ryan Larkin's schizophrenic perspective), Ken Paul Rosenthal's Crooked Beauty ($2010$) (Ashley McNamara's manic depression as heightened sensitivity).
Elements of performative mode in Errol Morris's films (Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control [$1997$], The Fog of War [$1999$]: B-roll, music, surreal juxtapositions) and Adam Curtis's hyperexpository films (The Power of Nightmares [$2004$], HyperNormalisation [$2016$]: barrage of images, heartfelt beliefs).
Corrective Tendency and Autoethnography
Often the voice of the underrepresented or misrepresented (women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ community).
Acts as a corrective to films by outsiders representing minorities.
"We, members of a marginalized group, speak about ourselves to you with passion as well as reason."
Shares rebalancing with autoethnography (ethnographically informed work by community members).
Emphasizes gaining knowledge and understanding through an entirely different form of engagement that stresses emotions, empathy, and visceral feeling rather than factual transmission.
Embraces expressive, poetic qualities for emotional effects, but always remains grounded in our shared, historical world.
Early Performative Manifestations: Night and Fog ($1955$)
Alain Resnais's film on the Holocaust is an early partial example, powerful in its emotional impact.
Its voice-over commentary and images align partly with the expository mode, but its haunting, personal quality moves it toward the performative.
More about memory and history from below (individual experience) than formal history.
The commentary (written by Auschwitz survivor Jean Cayrol) represents the unrepresentable: the sheer inconceivability of acts defying reason and narrative order, calling for emotional responsiveness that acknowledges the impossibility of understanding this event within a pre-established frame of reference.
Peter Forgacs's Work
Described his goal as evocative rather than polemical, explanatory, or judgmental.
Uses home movies (for Free Fall [$1997$] about Gyorgy Peto's life during WWII) re-organized into performative representations of social turmoil.
Focuses on specific events from a participant's viewpoint, creating suspense by highlighting the audience's hindsight knowledge that the participant lacks ("We know and he doesn't").
Invokes affect over effect, emotion over reason, to place analysis and judgment on a different, more visceral basis.
Invites viewers to see the world afresh and rethink their relation to it. Restores magnitude to the local/specific/embodied, animating the personal as a port of entry to the political.
What Are the Constituent Elements of Documentary Film?
Fluidity of Documentary Definition
Current definitions (Grierson's, or even more elaborate ones) have flaws: they don't differentiate types, identify constituent elements, or account for changes in what counts as documentary.
Documentary is constantly evolving; definitions are "playing catch-up" to its chameleon-like changes.
No fixed inventory of techniques, issues, forms, or styles. Alternative approaches are continually attempted.
Prototypical works: Serve as litmus tests, challenging and sometimes changing definitions (e.g., subjective reenactments in Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line ($1988$), which may have disqualified it for an Oscar nomination, extending to animation in His Mother's Voice ($1997$), Waltz with Bashir ($2008$), Flee ($2021$) for intensely subjective representations).
Nanook of the North ($1922$) remains a prototypical documentary, influencing narrative structure, character focus, and cultural understanding, even while its romantic narrative and distortion of indigenous family structure are rejected.
Four Arenas of Documentary Change
Understanding of documentary changes due to what happens in these four interacting arenas, which both uphold a sense of documentary at a given time/place and promote its transformation:
An Institutional Framework
"Documentaries are what the organizations and institutions that produce them make." (e.g., Hollywood feature films produced by Hollywood studios).
Labeling by institutions (Discovery Channel, PBS) often cues viewers that a work is a documentary.
Mockumentaries: Like This Is Spinal Tap ($1984$), build on this institutional framing by announcing themselves as documentaries but proving to be fabrications, creating ironic impact based on audience's partial belief.
Institutions may impose a "way of seeing" (e.g., voice-over commentary for John Grierson's British production units in the $1930$s, PBS documentaries).
Ken Burns: A master of this form (The Civil War [$1990$], Jazz [$2001$], Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies [$2015$], Hemingway [$2021$], The U.S. and the Holocaust [$2022$]).
Agencies like CPB, BFI, BBC, Arte, RAI, Discovery, History, ESPN, CNN support documentary production. Distributors (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Vimeo) and NGOs (IDA, Ford Foundation) also function to support circulation and shape the work.
A Community of Practitioners
Filmmakers share assumptions/expectations but also innovate against established limits.
Share a mandate to represent the historical world.
Gather at specialized film festivals (e.g., Yamagata, Hot Docs, IDFA) and contribute to journals (e.g., Documentary, Dox, IndieWire) and online publications.
Share common concerns (digital cameras, location sound, ethics of observation, distribution).
Individual practitioners shape traditions in dialogue with others. What begins as an "anomaly" (e.g., early observational films like The Young Fighter [$1953$], Primary [$1960$]) can become transformative innovations and new standards.
This dynamic quality reflects the ongoing engagement of practitioners with issues, institutions, subjects, and frameworks.
A Corpus of Texts: Conventions, Periods, Movements, and Modes
The diversity of documentary films (e.g., Nanook of the North, Man with a Movie Camera [$1929$], Hoop Dreams [$1994$], The Act of Killing [$2012$]) contributes to its definition through shared conventions.
Documentary as a genre: Conventions distinguish it (narrative framework, voice-over, interviews, location sound, B-roll, social actors in everyday roles).
Openings: Set the tone (mood in The Gleaners and I; situation in American Factory; poetic tone in Blood of the Beasts ($1949$); collage in Hale County This Morning, This Evening ($2018$)).
Problem-solving openings: Establish a problem, background, examination, recommendation/solution (e.g., An Inconvenient Truth [$2006$], The City [$1939$] - depicting urban misery solved by green communities, sponsored by American City Planners; also The Plow That Broke the Plains [$1936$] and The River [$1937$]).
Variations: Triumph of the Will ($1935$) uses problem/solution (Germany's post-WWI disarray solved by Hitler/Nazis) to gloss over problems and stress the "solution."
The Cove ($2009$) addresses dolphin slaughter and challenges of documenting it, presenting a problem beyond film's scope requiring international action.
Editing: Documentary editing demonstrates historical linkages, unlike continuity editing in fiction. Evidentiary editing (B-roll editing) supports or illustrates stories, amplifies arguments, and relates to critical perspectives (e.g., The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter [$1980$] showing shifting propaganda; Isle of Flowers [$1989$] using disjointed cuts to critique social structures).
Verbal Soundtrack: Coherence often depends on speech (commentary, synchronous speech, acoustic effects, music). Words often clarify perspectives better than images. Speech fleshes out events, making them "history reclaimed."
Documentary Movements: Groups of individuals sharing common approaches (e.g., Soviet silent cinema like Dziga Vertov; British documentary movement under Grierson; Free Cinema in $1950$s Britain; observational filmmaking (direct cinema) in $1960$s America; historical retrospection in $1970$s/$1980$s).
Manifestos: Often accompany movements (Vertov's "WE: A Variant of a Manifesto," Werner Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration" attacking observational cinema, Lindsay Anderson's "Stand Up! Stand Up!" advocating social commitment).
Periods: Specific stretches of time with common film characteristics (e.g., $1930$s focus on social/economic issues with B-roll and voice-over; $1960$s with portable sync sound and focus on compelling individuals, rise of observational/participatory modes; $1970$s/$1980$s returning to past with archival material/interviews, often "history from below" (e.g., In the Year of the Pig [$1969$], The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter).
Documentary Modes: Expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflexive, performative, and interactive. Hybridity is common. Modes are pervasive, not evolutionary. New modes arise partly from dissatisfaction with others, technological possibilities, institutional incentives/constraints, impressive prototypes, and changing social contexts (e.g., $1960$s for observational/participatory; $1980$s/$1990$s for performative due to identity politics, desire for marginalized voices to speak for themselves).
A Constituency of Viewers
Audience expectations shape the definition of documentary. We bring common-sense assumptions:
Documentaries use film language to offer representations of reality (not factual documents or fictional allegories).
About real people performing as themselves.
As representations of the historical world, they tell stories, persuade, or move us poetically.
We assume a tight correspondence between image/sound and reality (indexicality), giving images value as documents (like fingerprints).
We expect individual shots/sounds to correspond highly to events, but the film as a whole goes beyond a mere record to communicate a perspective (representation, not reproduction).
We oscillate between recognizing indexically recorded social reality and understanding the expressively communicated perspective on it.
"Discourses of Sobriety": Documentaries align with ways our culture speaks directly about social/historical reality (science, politics, economics, medicine, military strategy), claiming to intervene by shaping our regard for the world. They share an air of sobriety.
Non-Sober Documentaries: Some are playful, whimsical, or even salacious (Jean Vigo's Apropos de Nice [$1930$], Jorge Furtado's Isle of Flowers [$1989$], Mondo Cane [$1962$], Tiger King [$2020$]) challenging the sober-mindedness.
Audience Expectation: To learn, discover, or be moved, to find fresh ways of regarding the historical world. Documentaries use evidence to say "This is so," coupled with a tacit "Isn't it?"
Emotional Impact: Seeing real dead soldiers in Hoston's Battle of San Pietro ($1945$) (an indexical "whammy") has a different emotional impact than staged deaths in fiction films (e.g., Saving Private Ryan [$1998$]).
Documentaries activate epistemophilia (desire to know) and scopophilia (pleasure in looking), promising information, knowledge, insight, and awareness. Filmmakers share their knowledge.
Documentaries raise questions (Who is The One Who Knows? What kind of knowledge? Embodied vs. disembodied?). Knowledge and its use extend beyond the film to our engagement with the historical world.
Questions Documentaries Can Address:
How did a state of affairs come to pass (e.g., poverty in Harvest of Shame [$1960$], Holocaust in Night and Fog [$1955$])?
What does it feel like to be a high school student (High School [$1968$]) or military recruit (Soldier Girls [$1980$])?
How do people conduct themselves under stress (Last Men of Aleppo [$2017$]) or when tested for obedience (Obedience [$1965$])?
What are interpersonal dynamics in a historical context (Capturing the Friedmans [$2003$])?
What is the source of a problem and how to address it (Housing Problems [$1935$], The Hour of the Furnaces [$1968$])?
Reasons for war (Why We Fight series [$1942-45$], Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight [$2005$])?
How different cultures organize their lives (Dead Birds [$1963$], Wedding Camels [$1980$], Honeyland [$2019$]) or encounter each other (First Contact [$1983$], Cannibal Tours [$1988$], Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death [$2005$])?
What Are the Observational and Participatory Modes of Documentary?
The Observational Mode
Developed as an alternative to expository/performative modes, which construct patterns/perspectives from gathered materials.
Core idea: Filmmaker simply observes what happens in front of the camera without overt intervention.
Post-WWII Developments (around $1960$): Innovations in $16$mm cameras (Arriflex, Auricon) and tape recorders (Nagra) allowed easy one-person handling and perfect synchronization of separately recorded sound and image. This made observational and participatory modes feasible.
Filmmakers abandoned control over staging/arrangement. They chose to observe lived experience spontaneously.
"Purest" Observational Films: No voice-over, supplementary music/sound effects, intertitles/graphics, reenactments, repeated behavior for camera, or interviews.
Examples: The Young Fighter ($1953$) (early mix of voice-over and sync footage), Primary ($1960$), Les raquetteurs ($1958$), portions of Chronicle of a Summer ($1960$), The Chair ($1962$), Dant Look Back ($1967$), Monterey Pop ($1968$), High School ($1968$), Gimme Shelter ($1970$) (death caught on camera).
Recalled Italian neorealism but without fictional scenarios, observing "life as it is lived." Social actors interact, often absorbed in their own demands/crises, ignoring filmmakers.
Scenes reveal character/individuality through observed behavior, relying on viewer inference as unseen witnesses.
The filmmaker's role as observer calls on the viewer to actively determine significance.
Ethical Considerations of Observational Mode
Voyeurism: Is observing everyday affairs inherently voyeuristic? Does it place the viewer in a less ethically comfortable position than fiction?
Informed Consent: Cases like the Maysles brothers' Grey Gardens ($1975$) raised discomfort about judging eccentric lifestyles. Did filmmakers obtain informed consent, and could participants truly understand the consequences, especially across cultural boundaries?
Frederick Wiseman: Requests verbal consent but assumes right to record in tax-supported public institutions, giving no control over the final result. (e.g., High School [$1968$]).
Contrast Example: Two Laws (Alessandro Cavadini, Carolyn Strachan, $1981$) involved full consent and collaboration from Aboriginal participants on all aspects.
Unacknowledged/Indirect Intrusion: Do people alter behavior to satisfy filmmakers' unspoken desires? Do filmmakers seek subjects for viewers' wrong reasons (e.g., exoticism, spectacle)? (Jean Rouch's Les Maîtres Fous [$1955$] as a lightning rod for this debate).
Responsibility to Intervene: What if a social actor is in danger? Film the self-immolation of a Vietnamese monk, or dissuade? Turn over a knife with blood (Berlinger/Sinofsky in Paradise Lost [$1996$])? What about inadvertent complicity (The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst [$2015$])?
Duration and Evidentiary Value
Observational films excel at conveying the duration of actual events, breaking from dramatic fictitious pace or hurried montage.
Uninterrupted long takes: Serve as indexical records of elapsed time and action, proving crucial in cases of police violence (e.g., Black Lives Matter footage).
Even edited, observational footage can compellingly convey lived time (e.g., Wiseman's Model [$1980$] condensing hours of commercial shooting into $25$ minutes; Free Solo [$2018$] showing Alex Honnold's ascent).
Extended discussions (e.g., MacDougall's Wedding Camels [$1980$] focusing on price negotiation) shift attention to the feel and texture of the discussion itself (body language, intonation, pauses).
David MacDougall notes the "density and vitality" of rushes (unedited footage) compared to edited film, where structure takes shape but a sense of loss occurs.
An uninterrupted long take is a document, more than a documentary. Editing highlights "particular meanings," increasing discursive value but decreasing pure evidentiary value.
The "fly on the wall" metaphor (filming as if absent) invites debate on how much events would differ without the camera's presence, leading to an undecidable "disquiet or mystery."
Guiding Events toward Meaning
Masked Interview: Filmmakers establish a general purpose for a scene with subjects before shooting, then film observationally. Or, they pose questions but cut themselves out of the final edit, making it seem like a spontaneous monologue (e.g., Jesus Camp, After Tiller).
Staged Events: Events like press conferences may be filmed observationally but wouldn't exist without reporters/cameras. This reverses the observational premise that events would occur the same way regardless of the camera.
DA Pennebaker (Dont Look Back) and Allison Klayman (The Brink) sidestepped this by observing interviews conducted by others.
Case Study: Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will ($1935$): An early observational documentary where events (Nazi rallies, speeches) were heavily planned and choreographed for filming, including re-filming portions of speeches. It demonstrates cinema's power to represent the historical world while participating in its construction, carrying an "aura of duplicity" (something Robert Drew, DA Pennebaker, and Fred Wiseman sought to avoid).
The Participatory Mode
Also emerged around $1960$ with sync sound capabilities.
Key contrast to observational: Filmmakers overtly interact with subjects.
Questions become interviews or conversations; involvement grows into collaboration or confrontation.
What happens in front of the camera is a direct result of the filmmaker's active presence and interaction.