1

Poetic Mode: emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities, descriptive

passages, and formal organization. Examples: The Bridge (1928), Song of Ceylon (1934), Listen to
Britain (1941), Night and Fog (1955), Koyaanisqatsi (1983). This mode bears a close proximity to
experimental, personal, or avant-garde filmmaking.
Expository Mode: emphasizes verbal commentary and an argumentative logic. Examples: The
Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Trance and Dance in Bali (1952), Spanish Earth (1937), Les
Maîtres Fous (1955), television news. This is the mode that most people identify with documentary
in general.
Vezi jean-gabriel periot
V https://vimeo.com/391958174 Gunda Viktor Kossakovsky 2020 (previous Aquarela).

These films combined a series of “attractions” with a coherent narrative, the poetic
orchestration of scenes, and an oratorical voice that confirmed a perspective on the historical world
(v Nanook of the North) 94.

Observational Mode: emphasizes a direct engagement with the everyday life of subjects as
observed by an unobtrusive camera. Examples: High School (1968), Salesman (1969), Primary
(1960), the Netsilik Eskimo series (1967–68), Soldier Girls (1980).
Participatory Mode: emphasizes the interaction between filmmaker and subject. Filming
takes place by means of interviews or other forms of even more direct involvement. Often coupled
with archival footage to examine historical issues. Examples: Chronicle of a Summer (1960),
Solovky Power (1988), Shoah (1985), The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), Kurt and Courtney (1998).
Vezi Proba de microfon (Daneliuc, 1980)

4 instanțe: realizatorul – camera de filmat (discursul) – obiectul filmat (profilmicul) –

audiența

Performativ_1 Reflexiv Observational Performativ_2

Poetic
Expozitional / argumentativ
Participativ

Reflexive Mode: calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that govern documentary
filmmaking. Increases our awareness of the constructedness of the film’s representation of reality.
Examples: The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Land without Bread (1932), The Ax Fight
(1971), The War Game (1966), Reassemblage (1982).
Performative Mode: emphasizes the subjective or expressive aspect of the filmmaker’s
own engagement with the subject and an audience’s responsiveness to this engagement. Rejects
notions of objectivity in favor of evocation and affect. Examples: Unfinished Diary (1983),
History and Memory (1991), The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), Tongues Untied
(1989), and reality TV shows such as Cops (as a degraded example of the mode).The films in this
mode all share qualities with the experimental, personal, and avant-garde,
 2

Table 6.1
Documentary Modes
Chief Characteristics
—Deficiencies
Hollywood fiction [1910s]: fictional narratives of imaginary worlds
—absence of “reality”
Poetic documentary [1920s]: reassemble fragments of the world poetically
—lack of specificity, too abstract
Expository documentary [1920s]: directly address issues in the historical world
—overly didactic
Observational documentary [1960s]: eschew commentary and reenactment; observe things as
they happen
—lack of history, context
Participatory documentary [1960s]: interview or interact with subjects; use archival film to
retrieve history
—excessive faith in witnesses, naive history, too intrusive
Reflexive documentary [1980s]: question documentary form, defamiliarize the other modes
—too abstract, lose sight of actual issues
Performative documentary [1980s]: stress subjective aspects of a classically objective
discourse
—loss of emphasis on objectivity may relegate such films to the avant-garde; “excessive” use
of style.

P 138 |

Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)

Nanook bites a record. Is this an act of playful hamming for the camera, or is this Flaherty’s
way of demonstrating the backwardness of his subject? The two sample essays that follow take
different paths in interpreting this classic documentary film.

TWO TYPES OF FILM

Documentaries of wish-fulfillment are what we would normally call fictions.
Documentaries of social representation are what we typically call nonfiction.
ability to see timely issues in need of attention, literally. We see (cinematic) views of the
world. 2
 3

engages with the world

1. a likeness or depiction of the world that bears a recognizable familiarity.
2. documentaries also stand for or represent the interests of others.
3. documentaries may represent the world in the same way a lawyer may represent a
client’s interests: they put the case for a particular view or interpretation of
evidence before us. / make a case or argument 4 persuasion

forms of alliance can take shape between the three-fold interaction among (1) filmmaker, (2)
subjects or social actors, and (3) audience or viewers.
I speak about them to you

we have a role and identity of our own as viewers and audience members that is itself a
distinct aspect of our own social persona 15

It speaks about them or it to us. 17

I or We speak about us to you. 18

WORKING OUT A DEFINITION

But documentary is not a reproduction of reality, it is a representation of the world we
already occupy. 20
“fuzzy concept.” = Documentaries adopt no fixed inventory of techniques, address no one set
of issues, display no single set of forms or styles. Not all documentaries exhibit a single set of
shared characteristics. 21
AN INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK The context provides the cue; 22
An institutional framework also imposes an institutional way of seeing and speaking, which
functions as a set of limits, or conventions, for the filmmaker and audience alike. 23
A COMMUNITY OF PRACTITIONERS
Documentary filmmakers share a common, self-chosen mandate to represent the historical
world rather than to imaginatively invent alternative ones. 25
of what counts as a documentary as a sign of the variable, open-ended, dynamic quality of the
form itself. It is the practitioners themselves, through their engagement with institutions, critics,
subjects, and audiences, that generate this sense of dynamic change 26
A CORPUS OF TEXTS
To belong to the genre a film has to exhibit characteristics shared by films already regarded
as documentaries 26
Norms and conventions
· the use of a Voice-of-God commentary, interviews, location sound recording,
cutaways from a given scene to provide images that illustrate or complicate a point
made within the scene, and a reliance on social actors, or people in their everyday
roles and activities, as as the central characters of the film are among those that are
common to many documentaries 26
· is the prevalence of an informing logic that organizes the film in relation to the
representations it makes about the historical world. A typical form of organization is
that of problem solving 26-7 The logic organizing a documentary film supports an
underlying argument, assertion, or claim about the historical world 27 things share
relationships in time and space not because of the editing but because of their actual,
historical linkages. 28 an array yoked together less by a narrative organized around a
central character than by a rhetoric organized around a controlling logic or argument.
28 In each case editing serves an evidentiary function 30 We tend to assess the
organization of a documentary in terms of the persuasiveness or convincingness of its
representations 30
· 6 modes:..........
 4

A CONSTITUENCY OF VIEWERS
The sense that a film is a documentary lies in the mind of the beholder as much as it lies in
the film’s context or structure. 35
Most fundamentally, we bring an assumption that the text’s sounds and images have their
origin in the historical world we share. 35
an indexical relationship / it is a document of what once stood before the camera as well as
of how the camera represented them. 36
a creative treatment of actuality, not a faithful transcription of it 38 construct their own
perspective or argument about the world, their own poetic or rhetorical response to the world 38
rhetoric = the vehicles of action and intervention, power and knowledge, desire and will,
directed toward the world we physically inhabit and share. 39
Documentary film and video stimulates epistephilia (a desire to know) in its audience. 40

RHETORIC
nichols 2001: 33-34
invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

invention
ethical, emotional, demonstrative
arrangement
opening, already agreed - the issue, direct argument, refutation, summation
create memory
delivery (commentary and perspective) 58

THE QUALITIES OF VOICE

The voice of documentary can make a case or present an argument as well as convey a point
of view. 43 The voice of the film betrays its maker’s form of engagement with the world in a way
that even he might not have fully recognized. 44
the specific pattern of encounter that takes place between filmmaker and subject. 46 offers a
perspective on the world

THE TRIANGLE OF COMMUNICATION

at least three stories that intertwine: the filmmaker’s, the film’s, and the audience’s. 61
Put differently, documentary films usually contain a tension between the specific and the
general, between historically unique moments and generalizations 66
they bundle shots and scenes into larger categories or gestalts, what we call concepts. 66
social concepts = Social practices gain support from the ways in which various ideals get
attached to them. These ideals or values are then adopted by those engaged in a specific social
practice. 67-68
then, we can say documentary is about the effort to convince, persuade, or predispose us to a
particular view of the actual world we occupy. 69 a rhetorical or persuasive effort aimed at the
existing social world 69 also activates our social consciousness 69
at least three stories that intertwine: the filmmaker’s, the film’s, and the audience’s. 61
a rhetorical or persuasive effort aimed at the existing social world ... also activates our social
consciousness 69
Legislative or Deliberative
This is the domain of encouraging or discouraging, exhorting or dissuading others on a course
of public action.
Judicial or Historical
 5

This is the domain of evaluating (accusing or defending, justifying or criticizing) previous

actions.
Ceremonial or Panegyric
This is the domain of praising or blaming others, of evoking qualities and establishing
attitudes toward people and their accomplishments. 72
THE POWER OF METAPHOR
Documentaries give us the sense that we can understand how other social actors experience
situations and events that fall into familiar categories (family life, health care, sexual orientation,
social justice, death, and so on). Documentaries offer an orientation to the experience of others and,
by extension, to the social practices we share with them. 74
In sum, documentary films and videos speak about the historical world in ways designed to
move or persuade us. 80
NEO-REALISM
Photographic realism location photography, straightforward filming, and continuity editing
where the distorting and subjective uses of editing favored by the avant-garde are minimized.
92
Psychological realism
Emotional realism

Showing (in the tradition of the “cinema of attractions”), telling (in the tradition of narrative
cinema), and poetic form (in the tradition of the avant-garde) provide three of the legs for
documentary film. 94