DocumentariesFirstly, what is a documentary? It is a film or TV program thatfocuses on real life (non-fiction) and includes footage of events as they happened. A documentary style movie about 911 & the war in Iraq might feature actors for re-enactment scenes, real or fictional, in thewar scenes recreating certain battles or events. In comparison to this,a documentary film about 911 & the war in Iraq might predominantly feature news reel footage of real fighting, with commentary from experts and veterans who were in the war
, ‘Fahrenheit 911’ used this
approach, personally I feel this is the best way to do so, because it getsa better reaction from the audience.It is this attention on documenting on reality, drama or a fictionalthat typically separates these movies from summer blockbusters andother popular films.Secondly, the history of documentaries is vast; the first films ever made were documentaries
,
they were single-shot moments captured onfilm, for example; a train entering a station, a boat docking, or factory workers leaving work. These short films were called "actuality" films;the term "documentary" was not used until 1926.
The first feature length documentary ever made was ‘Nanook of TheNorth’ by Rober
t Flaherty; it is a silent documentary where Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk Nanook and his family inthe Canadian Arctic. Robert Flaherty has been criticized for stagingseveral sequences in the documentary and thereby distorting thereality of his subjects' lives
, this means it didn’t comply with
Cinémavérité
which means ‘Truthful cinema’
. Cinéma vérité is a styleof documentary filmmaking, using naturalistic techniques combinedwith stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects.
Robert Drew’s chronicle of the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary campaign of
John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey is widely considered to be the founding film of American cinema verité. It was the first documentary in which the synchronized soundcamera moved freely with characters through a breaking story. "At that time I was proposingthat we make a new kind of history of the Presidency," recalls Drew, "that we would see andfeel all the things that bore on the presidency at a given time -- the expressions on faces, themood of the country, the tensions in the room, so that future presidents could look back atthis and see and learn." Paragraph from:
Robert Welland
As I’ve previously mentioned documentaries are about real life, and
one of my most favourite
documentaries is called ‘Dark Days’ itshows the gritty, ‘hard up’ side of life, it follows the lives of the New
York homeless. It was made by Marc Singer and he was daring
enough to document on homeless ‘community’ which live underground
in the subway tunnels, I particularly enjoy this documentary becausehe portrayed homeless people in a way, that makes them seem likeany other family and they are humanised instead of put down. There
isn’t a narrator in this, the audio comes from the films footage.
In a complete contrast to ‘Dark Days’, I’ve also previously watched a documentary on Paul
Smith a English fashion designer, this shows Paul Smith talking about his life from when hestarted out to present day, he is in front of the camera for most of it telling the audience about
his creative and playful world. There is a big difference between this documentary and ‘Dark Days’, but also there are similarities, the main and only similarity really is that they are to
inform, nevertheless they have completely different themes; Dark Days is gritty andemotional, Paul smiths is informative, factual and upbeat. I should also add that another similar implement is that they are both shot in a very artistic style, Dark Days is black andwhite and every object seems to reflect rays of light, which gives a satisfying look to thedocumentary, and also Paul Smiths is very artistic as well, it is shot in colour and there isfrequent use of manual focus to draw attention to certain objects or people.
