What makes for a good, compelling documentary film?One page, proofread.
SSIGNMENT 9 – WHAT MAKES A GOOD DOCUMENTARY (due Nov. 4th) One could argue that from the very beginning of motion picture technology, the camera was meant to capture a moment of life and share that recorded moment with the world. C ertainly, this is a key part of a documentary film. Yet it is undeniable that until artificial intelligence runs the camera, what we see is always going to be determined by who set up the camera and who edits the film. Af ter all, those specific choices tell us not only what to look at but how to look at it. The very juxtaposition of shots can also tell us volumes in terms of what the filmmaker thought was the real story. While narrative film presents a fictional version of life that echoes reality, a documentary film is thought to truly present reality—but in fact, it is reality as seen by the filmmaker from their perspective. The public tends to mix up journalism with documentary, since both purportedly deal with the presentation of facts that are seen, heard, and read about in life, but while journalism is supposedly straight unbiased reporting that allows the viewer to form their own uninfluenced opinion, a documentary is like an essay—factual, yes, but the documentary’s maker(s) is pushing to add up thoughts to a particular conclusion. Much as an essay will have a thesis statement, a documentary film will have a specific thrust or outlook and will spend the rest of the film backing up that “thesis.” Sometimes the theme is subtle, but other times it can be designed for use as specific propaganda.In our session on Documentaries, we looked at several short pieces, including moments from the Lumiere Brothers’ first films, a sequence from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, some material about Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will(set during the Nazi Olympics), and then a segment from Michael Moore’s Sicko (on the failings of the American healthcare system). Finally, we viewed Albert and David Maysles classic documentary Grey Gardens, which captured the unseen lives of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’ poor relatives living in a decaying house in the Hamptons—arguably one of the most celebrated documentaries of all time. Based on what we explored, the question is: what makes for a good, compelling documentary film?One page, proofread.
