Documentaries Genres Chris Reade

Reflexive Documentary

A reflexive documentary is basically when the maker of the film acknowledges his presence in the film and provides a narrative to the film.You would mainly see this with experimental documentaries, were the viewer is just as interested in how the film was constructed as they are with the actual content.

Example – ‘All this Mayhem’

‘All this mayhem’ is a skateboarding documentary that uses a reflexive style when filming, In the trailer you will see the director (who is also one of the skaters) providing a narrative to the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wDiszmA2o8&safe=active

Observational Documentary Observational documentaries attempt to simply and spontaneously observe lived life with a minimum of intervention. Filmmakers who worked in this sub-genre often saw the poetic mode as too abstract and the expository mode as too didactic. The first observational docs date back to the 1960’s; the technological developments which made them possible include mobile lightweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment for synchronized sound. Often, this mode of film eschewed voice-over commentary, post-synchronized dialogue and music, or re-enactments. The films aimed for immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations.

Example – ‘Companion care’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf-lmVRDtGY&safe=active

Companion care is a documentary about taking care of animals in a veterinarian showing there side of the story. It is observational as it is basically showing the events around this person who cares for these animals, you can also see there are no interviews which is a convention of an observational documentary

Poetic Documentarywhich first appeared in the 1920’s, were a sort of reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film. The poetic mode moved away from continuity editing and instead organized images of the material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space. Well-rounded characters—’life-like people’—were absent; instead, people appeared in these films as entities, just like any other, that are found in the material world. The films were fragmentary, impressionistic, lyrical. Their disruption of the coherence of time and space—a coherence favored by the fiction films of the day—can also be seen as an element of the modernist counter-model of cinematic narrative. The ‘real world’—Nichols calls it the “historical world”—was broken up into fragments and aesthetically reconstituted using film form.

Example – ‘Gravity’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pA33mf6ouw&safe=active

Gravity is a short documentary, that was made by some people in university about skateboarding, throughout the documentary you can see the emotive state and the way the music links with the documentary. We can see this is a poetic documentary as the emotions used to express the skateboarding in this video, its shown like a poem.