Is a documentary always more realistic than fiction film? If so, why? If not, why not? What makes a film more or less realistic?
In this essay, I will explain why a documentary is always more realistic than a fiction film. I will show my thesis by exploring elements that influence how realistic a film is: film editing and format, genre, and transparency. I will use the documentary of Armadillo (2010), by Janus Pedersen, and the fiction film of The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), by Danièle Huille as examples.
To begin with, some of the significant differences between documentaries and fiction films are transparency and aesthetics. Documentaries present existing, authentic narratives supported by original stimuli of the situation- audio, video, or images, for example. Thus, the purpose of documentaries is to show reality; to be transparent; to show the world through them, according to Walton. Therefore, documentaries are not representational , like Scruton would argue, and, by extension, they are not art.
To continue, fiction films strive to be a representation of a narrative that creates a “pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye,” according to Bazin. With this, Bazin means that fictional films are made to represent reality through artistic components, given that film is a form of art. Hence, fiction films are less real than documentaries. Last but not least, because occurrences in fictional films are acted and never had an authentic existence in this universe, fiction films are less real than documentaries.
However, Armadillo is a documentary that may be considered less realistic than a fiction film like The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach because of Pedersen’s film format. Armadillo presents the w...
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...co.uk/nisimasa/article/idfa-2010-stunning-war-documentary-armadillo.html.
Rubinoff, Kailan R. "Authenticity as a Political Act: Straub-Huillet’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and the Post-War Bach Revival." November 2011, 2-3. Accessed February 16, 2014. http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2011-1/rubinoff.pdf.
Scruton, Roger. "Photography and Representation." Critical Inquiry 7, no. 3 (1981): 577. Accessed February 17, 2014. doi:10.1086/448116.
"Stunning War Documentary "Armadillo"" Cafebabel. Accessed February 17, 2014. http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/nisimasa/article/idfa-2010-stunning-war-documentary-armadillo.html.
Walton, Kendall L. "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism." Accessed February 16, 2014. https://learn.bu.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-2046970-dt-content-rid-6473306_1/courses/14sprgcasph159_a1/Walton.pdf.
Films are necessary in our time period because the human eye can articulate the message intended through sight allowing visual imagination to occur. In the book, world 2 by Max Brooks, he creates a character by the name Roy Elliot who was a former movie director. Roy Elliot manages to make a movie titled “Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges” and some how it goes viral. Similarly, Frank Capra’s film, “Why we Fight” expresses a sense of understanding the meaning of wars. Films do not inevitably portray truth because they display what the film director views as important and beneficial for people to know.
...lly has a critic. To strengthen the arguments and persuade viewers to their side of the debate, film makers tend to present only one side of the story. Specific placement of an object, the choice of words and the selection of scenes are possible elements that could be woven into documentaries to shape viewers’ perspectives on certain issues. Fat Head is a great case in point, which is likely to convert some public opinion about the ideology of healthy eating. Documentaries may contain biases that mislead the viewers; presenting ‘facts’ but perhaps not revealing the entire picture. Therefore, in a sense, documentaries can be truthful, but also fallacious. It is imperative to evaluate the techniques used in documentaries, in order to distinguish readily from what is fantasy. It could be concluded that Fat Head and Super Size Me are two version of the same reality.
This report aims to make light of certain elements of documentary making that are perhaps more susceptible to influence on the director’s part, and once again explore the effect of these decisions on the audience’s reaction to the information presented.
Analysis of Michael Moore’s Treatment of His Subject Matter within the Documentaries Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911. “A documentary may be as a film or television or radio programme that provides factual information about a subject. Typically, a documentary. is a journalistic record of events presented on screen.” The main conventions of documentaries tend to be that the documentary has voice-over commentary; the main focus is on the issues rather than the issues.
First, Anna’s documentary may not require the audience to be actively involved as much as print. It is less demanding, and require less energy. Documentary also give the viewers visual effects which means that we, as viewer, do not have to assume or guess the emotions or actions that are taken place. To add to the advantages, films, especially if they are documentaries, happen at a slower pace. It can take years to create a film and therefore, more information can be gathered. However some disadvantages is manipulation. Content can be edited, erased, or contrived. It could be a gate keep and only show what it wants the audience to see. When using print, we, as readers, have to be active. We are forced to analysis the story and look in-between the lines. We want to understand the story and identify the resolution, and with that, we have to be interested in the topic. I also think that not having video or film with print is an advantage because it is fun trying to imagine the images. We can create our own perspective of the situation instead of relying on someone else’s perception. Sadly, this can also be a disadvantage because, as viewers, we create our own perception, but it could be the wrong perception. Another disadvantage of print is the pace. New is faster is most of the time have a deadline. I am pretty sure Paige, who wrote Cynthia’ story, had a limited amount of
Documentary has been heavily associated as a representation of the truth and reality due to its absence of fictional elements and control by the filmmaker (Chapman, 2009). It aims to entice the audience perception of the information presented as fundamental and legitimate (Beattie, 2004). With today's technology, the question of manipulated facts and proclaimed evidences presented in documentaries has heightened concerns in providing the audience with the truth and the real. Hence, with reference to the documentary on "Biggie and Tupac" (2002) directed by Nick Broomfield, we will explore how the documentary has managed to capture the real in terms of structure, style and modes of documentary.
As a viewer, the documentary’s intention to inform is more completely fulfilled by research conducted beyond the scope of the camera lens. Had I never written this paper, for instance, the reason for all the violence embedded within the subject matter would remain as enigmatic as the documentary itself.
Filmmakers engage the past as a historian but not specifically in a way actual historians are doing. Historians use archived facts ranging from documents, photos, or objects from a specific time era to understand history. Contrastingly filmmakers as a historian can only bring to life a certain part of history without altering the past by focusing specifically on an aspect of the subject at hand. Scholars Marita Sturken and Barbie Zelizer argue how well-known filmmakers use film techniques or credibility in order to portray what happened in the past. Filmmakers as a historian is limited to only details they can use based on documents and archived history to re-tell a history through mise-en-scene to become a faux “historian”. Sturken and Zelizer would argue that filmmakers are not real historians; specifically how film can be made to manipulate the past towards the vision to get a narrative through that appeals to the film viewer and director. Filmmakers are not real historians since they can be biased to specific details of what occurred in the past.
Since the target group holds different social beliefs and values it's therefore important that one choose an appropriate method to convey his message without offending anyone. The method of persuasion chosen should also be able to persuade the audience and not alter the facts. There are several reasons that make a documentary film persuasive and influential hence making it the most appropriate method of representing the information. First, currently the documentary film is gaining popularity from its audience at a higher rate than any other method of representation. With the development in mass media and communication technology people prefer watching documentaries streaming them from them from the internet to their mobile phones or the televisions. Research proves that the number of people watching documentaries from the year 2008 to 2016 has increased from 70.9 million to 93.3 million in the United States of America (Scarborough, 2017). There is a few documentary films that talks about the Ridges, that is why it will be very effective to inform people about the history of this asylum by making a documentary so they can watch it. Secondly, documentary films are convincing, realistic and motivating since it incorporates other language techniques that makes it more interesting to follow. These persuasive language techniques include narrative, poetic, rhetoric, logic
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
...use of documentary style lighting and discontinuous editing that diverges from the Hollywood “invisible” editing. Through understanding the historical climates these two seemingly similar French cinematic movements were in, the psychology of a generation can be visualized in a way truly unique to the indexicality of the cinematic medium.
In Photography and Representation, Scruton advances the view that photography cannot be described as a representational art form in the same sense as painting, and that the photograph is unworthy of aesthetic appreciation in and of itself. Indeed, Scruton suggests that it is not even possible to have an aesthetic interest in the photograph, as such interest is necessarily directed towards its subject. In this sense, photography is merely a facilitator of seeing. It is no more a representational art form than viewing a scene through a pair of spectacles, or observing an object through a magnifying glass. It is a simply a tool for seeing-through, and what one perceives in a photograph is quite literally the object
Sontag, Susan. "Essay | Photography Enhances Our Understanding of the World." BookRags. BookRags. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
The first adaptation is a television film, released by BBC in 2003, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe. It is remarkable for its innovative style, close to experimental, very unusual for the historical fictional drama genre. The film was shot with a digital camera, but what is most striking is the modern use of camerawork – handhelds, the shaky movements at the beginning, the two sisters confessions looking straight into the camera, like in an interview – give a documentary style to the appearance of the movie. While most films of the same genre are trying to recreate the atmosphere of the time, by using the classical parameters, this film is trying to achieve exactly the opposite. This cinéma vérité style has the subtle purpose of bringing the viewer closer to the story and effectively involved throughout the narrative. In the same time the film focuses on the developmen...
One of the integral things that must be addressed when making a film is the ethics involved. Ethics are a constant issue that have to be carefully considered when filmmaking. This difficult decision-making is highly prevalent in that of documentaries, because of the difficulties associated in filming ‘real people’ or “social actors, (Nichols, 2001).” More importantly, the issues faced by a filmmaker differ between each of the documentary modes. Each particular documentary mode poses different formal choices that must be made in order to operate in an ethical fashion. Two films that have been made both display examples of how ethics must be considered when embarking on a documentary are Etre at Avoir [To Be and to Have], (2001) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). These films have been made in different documentary modes, highlighting that there is not one mode which is easier or has fewer ethical issues associated with it. Additionally, what must be considered is how these style choices in these different modes affect the power relationships between the filmmaker, the subject and its audience, (Nichols, 2001).