Week 2: Documentary

This week in class, we learned about the different types of documentary style. There are six documentary types. They are expository, observational, interactive/participatory, reflexive, performative, and poetic. Each of these styles are used to create documentaries that different from one another but have the same underlining effect of a documentary for the audience.

Expository is a documentary which directly addresses the audience with claims about what is going on the screen. This type of documentary can also be described as a voice of god narration. For example, March of the Penguins is a documentary that only has voice over narrations. Reason for being an expository documentary because penguins cannot talk so someone has to do the talking. The voice over helps explains what is going on with the penguins over the period of time in the documentary. In other words, it is an authoritative voice that speaks to the audience about the corresponding footage demonstrating that it is, indeed, true.

The next type of documentary is observational. Observational documentary is described as interviews and editing in chronological order is a good thing. Also, the narration of this type of documentary is seen as an intrusion. This documentary type sees that directing participants to redo a scene as bad thing. Which is understandable because I believe the scene can come out not authentic. For example, Senna is a documentary that had many of interviews with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, a competitor, teammate, and friend. Also, the documentary was edited in chronological order from the beginning of Senna’s race car driver days to the last grand prix he was in. There was no chance in directing the participants to do a redo because this documentary had real film and interviews of Ayrton Senna and anyone else that was a part of his life.

Interactive/participatory is the next documentary type. This type is the complete opposite of what an observational documentary would be. Interactive or participatory is where there are interactions between the filmmaker and the subject which most of the time will be a human being. Most of the participation between the filmmaker and subjects is because the subject is being interviewed. In the documentary this will be clearly shown to the audience. For instance, I related this type of documentary to reality television shows like Keeping up with the

Another documentary type is reflexive. Reflexive is defined as a documentary that shows the process of itself being made. This can include videos which shows the cameraman and anyone else present for the documentary process. Furthermore, the final product is made out of film that likely happens regularly in documentary filmmaking but is not usually accepted in other documentary types. I believe this type to be more truth because of the film that they capture for the documentary.

Performative is a documentary type which is staged to be filmed. For example, Supersize Me is a great example of this type. Morgan Spurlock is the creator of this documentary. He eats McDonald’s food for all three meals for thirty days and when he can get supersize, he has to get that size in what he orders. In the end, this documentary was very informative about the damage McDonald’s food can have on a body when consumed on a daily basis.

The last documentary type is poetic. Poetic provides an experience before advancing a dispute of knowledge. The experience is not gained through testimony. I do not know a lot about this type of documentary type, so I do not have an example to give you or for me to help understand.  

I think that most of the documentary movies that I have seen will be expository because I have watched a lot of the Disney movies about animals.