What Is Documentary Film

Matthew Foster Intro to docudrama Film midterm exam Paper What Is Documentary Film? I once heard a quote from an unknown man who said, Words are only voice communication until you invest most meaning into them. I didnt fully comprehend what he meant by this statement. Surely every word has its own definition, giving it some type of meaning. So why would they cosmos meaningless without me? Not until I entered this class and focused on documentary select did I re evaluate this statement.What the man meant was we can all see the same doom and read it for its literal translation. But when you apply your unique aspect to the words, they embrace on a greater meaning, resulting in a unique substance and new posture on the sentence. Thats what I think documentary film is. An unique outlook of a common ground. Documentary film is the yeasty exercise of certain historic events to present a certain perspective or point of view. It is a makeation of our real humans with the ey es of a particular person or party.M all theorists have express that the true essence of documentary is the actuality, recording life as is with real social actors on real world locations. Actualities, predecessor to documentary, dealt with footage from real events, places, and things without any structure or arrangement into a argument or dogged whole. This gave an stance of objectivity, being free of point of view, relating it more to newspapers in its approach. Without this part of arrangement, recorded content would be just that, a record of historical events.For if we define documentary as objective or as a record, we set an unreachable standard for the genre, and limit our actualiseing of the rooms in which actual documentary films function. (Plantinga, 41) Neither a fictional invention nor a factual reproduction, documentary draws on and refers to historical reality while representing it from a distinct perspective. Documentary films speak most actual situations or eve nts and celebrate known facts they do not introduce new, unverifiable whizs. They speak instanter about the historical world rather than allegorically. Nichols, 7) This is where they differ from non fictional cinema. Documentaries represent the real world, the world that it is depicting. The images and people shown in documentaries are that of the same one we share. The fictional narratives of Hollywood create one world to stand for another, generating a second meaning which we use in turn to help understand the real world we live in. This perspective of historical reality is influence through the documentaries voice. The voice of a documentary is each films specific way of expressing its way of seeing the world (Nichols, 68).Although history is looked at as being objective, documentaries are not of necessity. While the world being shown in a documentary is shared by the viewer, the voice of the documentary establishes a perspective of a certain individual of the world that we share. Documentaries are not necessarily objective. Neither do they imitate or re-present reality. Documentaries are fundamentally rhetorical, communicative constructs which make assertions and implications about reality through their images and sounds, and which express and consider claims about a subject (Platinga, 47).Voice is constructed through the imaginative manipulation of the documentary process. This manipulation of raw footage employs style and conventions to develop a works perspective and sire particular meanings and effects. Documentary manipulation and interpretation of reality is expressed through representational styles and conventions and forms of argument and narrative which together work to produce a realistic and authoritative representation of the socio-historical world. (Beattie, 14)With the creative manipulation of raw footage, it has been a debate in the cinematic world if the depiction of the socio-historical world is factual and righteousnessful. Docum entary can be defined, generally, as a work or text which implicitly claims to truthfully represent the world, whether it is to accurately represent events or issues or to assert that the subject of the work are real people (Beattie, 10). This truth claim rest on a contract of trust amongst filmmaker and viewer.Producers of these documentary films and filmmakers adhere to a list of mandates handed pop by governing authorities and associations, having extensive research guidelines and reporting of of witnesses, as well as its structured conventions to shape the audiences perception and interpretation of what is viewed to be an accurate depiction of the world. In conclusion, documentaries would lack to be documentaries if not for the creative manipulation of its content. Without a voice, a subject, meaning, it would merely be records of what happened, much deal the guy from Exit Through the Gift Shop.We would have boxes and boxes of raw footage, only with no purpose or direction. We still see the common world we share, just from a different perspective. Works Cited Nichols, Bill. How Can We Define Documentary Film? Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, IN Indiana UP, 2001. N. pag. Print. Platinga, Carl. The Mirror Framed A Case For Expression in Documentary. Wide Angle 13 (1991) 41-42. Web. Beattie, Keith. confide Me, Im of the World Documentary Representation E. S. Bird Library. Syracuse, NY (2010) 10-14. Web.