The 6 different types of documentaries

1. Poetic documentaries
- First appeared i the 1920's
- Moved away from smooth editing
- Organised images of the material world by means of association and patterns in terms of both time and space
- life like people were absent
- Films were fragmentary, impressionistic and lyrical


2. Expository documentaries
- They speak directly to the viewer
- Feature authoritative commentary
- Films are rhetorical
- Feature a "voice of god" type narrator it often sounds objective

3. Observational documentaries
- Spontaneously observe a lived life with minimal intervention
- The films aimed for intimacy, immediacy and revelation of individual human character in ordinary life situations
- Film maker aimed to be a fly on the wall

4. Participatory documentaries
- It is impossible in these documentaries for the act of filming to not effect the subjects being filmed.
- the film maker is a part of the film
- We also get a sense of how events in the film are altered by the film makers presence
- The film maker becomes almost like a social actor
- the encounter between film maker and subject becomes critical as an element in the film

5. reflexive documentaries
- They do not see themselves as a transparent window on the world
- They draw attention to their own constructed ness
- They prompt us to question the authenticity of documentary in general
- It is the most self conscious of all the documentaries

6. performative documentaries
- They stress subjective experience and emotional response to the world
- They are strongly personal, unconventional and perhaps poetic or experimental
- They may include hypothetical enactments of events  designed to make us experience a specific perspective that is not our own
- Many techniques borrowed from fiction and avant grade are used


Today we also started watching the documentary supersize me which started out being very interesting and taking a very personal look through the point of view of one mans life, into the fast food industry and obesity and excuses people make for being fat as well as peoples terrible eating habits. Its very interesting so far. I also believe that it is a Participatory documentary as the man in it is experiencing everything and is apart of all the action.

The fake documentary

So today in media, since our assignment is to film a documentary we watched one in class. It was this crazy amazing document about how Peter Jackson found film reels in his old aunts shed and they were his relative who made the first colour film and recorded the first place flying which happened in New Zealand and built a Jerusalem like city to film a four hour epic but he was in trouble because he could not fund the movie and was in trouble with Russia. He also had many dramatic occurrences in his life. The love of his life fell in love with his brother, his brother was killed in war, the girl that he loved, who also starred in the film died in the last shot of the film along with her unborn child, he met a new woman who was interviewed in the documentary, he died helping someone who was shot in war and it was all recorded on film, he had to bury the rolls of film so they could be his and not the Russians, but it turns out none of it was true, none at all! That made the whole class crazy and it just goes to show that a good document is not necessarily a true one.