...The development of documentary: observational documentaries There are various different types of documentary modes, including expository, poetic, first person and interactive. However, the documentary mode that interests me the most, is observational. This is because I feel that the observational mode captures the most realistic aspects of the subject. Other modes of documentary have much more interaction, interference and manipulation with the outcome of events. In this essay I will discuss different examples of observational documentaries spanning from the 1900’s to the present day. I will also discuss the development of the documentary mode and the roles of director and producer within a documentary production. The observational mode consists of merely the observation of the subject’s daily life and circumstances, with unobtrusive camera equipment. The traditional aim is for the filmmaker to have no engagement with the subject; therefore there is no interference regarding the outcome of events. By maintaining the observational mode, the director allows the subject to forget the presence of the camera. Consequently, the subject behaves more naturally, giving the audience a better sense of their real emotions and real behaviour. Usually there is no narration or interviews in the observational mode; however there will sometimes be footage of the subject expressing their own views directly to the camera, which emphasizes the real-life emotions of the subject. The filmmaker...
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...Early film (pre-1900) was dominated by the novelty of showing an event. They were single-shot moments captured on film: 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 coined until 1926. Many of the first films, such as those made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, were a minute or less in length, due to technological limitations. Films showing many people (for example, leaving a factory) were often made for commercial reasons: the people being filmed were eager to see, for payment, the film showing them. One notable film clocked in at over an hour and a half, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight. Using pioneering film-looping technology, Enoch J. Rector presented the entirety of a famous 1897 prize-fight on cinema screens across the country. The French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen started a series of surgical films sometime before July 1898. Until 1906, the year of his last film, Doyen recorded more than 60 operations. As Doyen said that his first films taught him how to correct professional errors he had been unaware of. For scientific purposes, after 1906 Doyen combined 15 of his films into three compilations, two of which survive, the six-film series Extirpation des tumeurs encapsulées (1906), and the four-film Les Opérations sur la cavité crânienne (1911). These and five other of Doyen's films survive.[8] Frame from one of Marinescu's science films (1899). Between...
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...‘Documentary Photography’ In the article Between Objectivity and Subjectivity: Understanding Photography written by Pieter Swanepoel, Swanepoel states that the Photographer has been seen rather as a “lowly button pressor” than an artist (Swanepoel, 2005: 204). Swanepoel in this statement suggests that the photographer is just an opperator of the mechanics of a camera and not important to the meaning and outcome of the photograph, however many photographers manipulated their images through technical means when capturing the photograph as well as developing it. Looking at two of the works by South African photographer Santu Mofokeng, Easter Sunday Church Service (1996)(Figure1) and Eyes Wide Shut (2004)(Figure 2) one clearly sees that there is a deep thought process, as well and the social background of the photographer and the place time where the photograph is taken, that is considerated when capturing the photograph, but has also deeply influenced both photographs as well. Born in Soweto in 1956, Santu Mofokeng was documentory photographer in the midst of Apartheid South Africa (Haynes, 2009: 34). Although Mofokeng formed part of the Afrapix Collective, in which they chose the anti-apartheid resistance to photograph, due to Mofokeng’s socioeconoic status and the conditions of apartheid towards black people, he could often not get to where the photos needed to be shot in time as he did not own a means of transport (Haynes, 2009: 39). Instead of shooting and exposing the...
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...Documentary Review Miss Representation Done By Farah Abu Farah Bibliography Minero, Emelina. "Eating Disorder Recovery Support, Inc." Eating Disorder Recovery Support, Inc. N.p., 5 Apr. 2012. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. ""Hollywood Likes to Point to The... - Miss Representation | Facebook." "Hollywood Likes to Point to The... - Miss Representation | Facebook. BBC, 12 Sept. 2013. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. "Jane's Quotes in Miss Representation." Missrepresentation.org, 2011. Web. American females have been struggled a constant combat for inclusive equality in a culture that maintains an accommodation for men. Despite the fact that remarkable paces have been created for women, until our present day we are still known as victims of distortion and social prejudice. Miss Representation film demonstrates the humiliating interpretations of females' association in media through the lack of women's power in culture. Miss representation is an intuitive documentary film directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and Kimberlee Acquaro. It disputes the restrictive and hideous realities of female's image in American media, demonstrating the overall impact on women and girls' self assurance and their healthy body, while supplying to the largely depression of women in modern culture. Assemble from the principle, the medium of film forces the media producers to be more ethical through employing affirmative female role models. The message of the film clearly illustrates how observers are been overwhelmed...
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...Prof. Adam Pfleegor Professional Enhancement Response July 2, 2012 Reflection Paper Response to “Hoop Dreams” Many things in this documentary stood out to me involving the culture of this ethnic group in Chicago. The people’s lives covered in this film were portrayed to be extremely simple, but complex. The film provided public exposure to the myriad problems of race, poverty, parenting concerns, coaching motives, and the amount of emphasis a young black gentleman places on sport. Encompassed by all of these issues was always disregard for one another, as well. Throughout the whole film, I could not help but notice the painful trend of negligence and carelessness towards black individuals. This black culture addressed in the Chicago area didn’t seem to give one another much value either. For some reason there is a lack of motivation to succeed early on unless it is sport. The parents do not seem to enforce a positive work ethic, honesty, and respect. It is no wonder that there was so much violence, drugs, premature pregnancy, and academic drop-outs. From generation to generation in that community, parents fail to teach their children high standards. It could be that children are raising children, which was the issue in William Gates case. In addition, if all they know is basketball growing up and before they reach 16 years old they have a baby on the way, they surely didn’t have enough time to retain anything in their short life before parenthood other...
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...Factual moving image productions Introduction There are many types of genres that come under the overall category of ‘Factual’. There ones that inform the viewers, educate and provide solely as entertainment. The variations of factual productions are: Documentary, News-Broadcasts, Fly-On-The-wall, Biographical, Public participation, chat shows and fact based entertainment. These tend to include key features such as psychographics, persuasive devices, provide information, and attend to a target audience. A factual product differentiates from a promotional/fictional product. A factual product is designed to inform and educate the viewer; however, a fictional production is more towards entertaining the audience. Overview There are several types of factual moving image productions. One of these is a news broadcast. A news broadcast is a programme in which informs the audience on the current events happening around the world today. Examples of a news broadcast would be: BBC news at six, Good Morning Britain and ITV News. The general objective of a news broadcast is to educate and give information to the viewers. The audience profiling for a news show, ‘News at Ten’ for example, would be: working class, due to it being on so late in the evening (A person who works would not have enough time to watch news broadcast in the afternoon). However, a news show broadcasted in the early morning could be targeted at students due to their early schedules. The gender profile for a news...
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...My Documentary will primarily focus on the identities of myself, and my two triplet sisters, Molly and Caroline. I will have interviews with my older sister, Hannah, and my parents, in order to paint a complete picture. The overall message of the documentary will be to show how three people, the same age, growing up in the same environment, can turn out to be very different. I think that the best way to accomplish this would be to shoot interviews, ask questions, and show our different hobbies/personalities. I want to begin the documentary will a montage of old home videos/pictures and conclude the montage with short clips of us today. Then, I want to go straight into the interviews. I am going to start off with the most commonly asked questions like, “What’s it like to be a triple?”, “Can you read each other’s minds?”, and “Are you identical.” These questions would help to start the documentary by debunking some misconceptions about triplets in a lighthearted, fun way. After these questions, I’ll add interviews with my parents and my older sister. For my parents, I want to ask questions like: “What was your immediate reaction when you found out you were going to have triplet.” I know they...
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...New documentary production in Peru has engaged in a range of reflexive visual and representational strategies that place it in dialogue with global documentary cinema more broadly. For example, we might cite the influence of Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas’s (1922-) “diary films” or actress-director Sarah Polley’s (1979-) Stories We Tell (2012), an autobiographical documentary that focuses on her family. Bill Nichols’s concept of a “reflexive mode” of documentary outlines a practice that is deeply aware of the process of documenting in film. Distinctive examples of this reflexive tradition include Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) and Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha (1952-), but could also be said to incorporate Peruvian filmmakers like Juan...
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...A few weeks ago, I featured an interview with the director, Justin Zimmerman, and I am finally getting around to reviewing this fine documentary. I had the privilege of screening this film last year at the Artemis Film Festival, and I was quite moved by what I saw. Just as a word of warning in relation to the content, there are some very disturbing scenes of animals (not that any rescues go awry, but this also deals with the issue of animal shelters, so just be warned). Also, there is some occasional strong language in the film. This is a documentary, and this is real life. Therefore, it is essentially raw and unfiltered when it comes to the life of Armando and his team. You may want to screen this first before showing it to your children. Before seeing this film, I had no idea at all that groups like this existed. As I settled down to watch the first few frames, I was reminded of the time that our cat was stuck in a tree for a couple days and how hard it was to wait with the realization that she may not come down. She was so frightened, and there was no group nearby that we could call. I breathed a sigh of relief when my mom called with the news that our cat had finally jumped down. So I know from experience that animals can get caught in...
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...Fiction and Non-Fiction Documentary Films Name Institutional Affiliation Introduction Non-fiction documentaries often face tight budgets that force them to rely on actors to produce the plot that was intended. Fiction and nonfiction documentaries are anything but just academic and sensational arguments of the differences, for instance filming of a pack of lion over a year is obviously non-fictional as the main characters are unable to act. However, there are events such as for the movie mentioned below that involves that actually took place, but must be reacted to given a storyline of the actual events that took place. Nonetheless, it is always important to know that the fiction and nonfiction documentaries can be understood in relative terms, and that both the two categories of documentaries always aspire to tell a truth about the real world, but fiction is not constrained by the real world. Fiction develops a world for its story to take, and yet a documentary finds its story in the world we live in, and yet a fictional documentary becomes a marriage of these two concepts in films. The Naook of the North is the typical documentary that was built around the nonfictional story line with acting set in into the film. The story is a documentary about Eskimos, and it was the first documentary in the period, a first feature-length documentary and it was preserved by U.S. Library of Congress as a culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” movies in a National Film...
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...English 101 1/25/2012 Digital Nation is a documentary explaining how immersed we are in computer technology. It explains the positive and negative effects technology creates in today’s society. In the past decade technology has transformed the way we live our lives. I think the problem is technology is still fairly new. So there is not enough data to study to find solutions to all of the problems. The issue I found to be the most complex is how can we use technology to better prepare our students for the future? In the state of New Jersey a principle improved one of the worst schools in the state by making technology available. Every student in every class has a computer to do all of their school work online. This new way of teaching proved to be successful with test scores improving in reading and math. I wonder if every school in the country can mirror this new concept and improve it then we could change the future of our country forever. It’s no secret Americans are lacking in math and science compared to other countries. I just read an article in the New York Times that said Americans lack talent in engineering. That’s why China is manufacturing 80% of Apples products. I am hopeful this new way of teaching can create a spark to change the world’s issues like this in America. The other side of me wonders if schools can afford to make technology available to every student. With all the state budget cuts caused by the great recession money for schools has become scarce...
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...“Minsan sa Isang Taon” 1. Identify the economic problems shown in the documentary. Various problems were shown in the documentary “Minsan sa Isang Taon”. First and foremost is the Malnutrition problems of the B’laan children which is so called “Kwashiorkor” brought about by a severe lack of protein because all they eat is sweet potato. Problem in the system of education was obviously shown also. Because their community were so distant from the civilization, maybe all they know is how to write and read and in worst case, they know nothing. Halfway through their journey, Environmental problems were envisaged by the group were they witnessed a very devastated mountain wherein most of the trees were cut away. The documentary also reveal the huge predicament in transportation were the Abaca Farmers need to walk for about six hours just to sell their processed abaca. It is then clearly shown the Unemployment Dilemma of our country. It’s hard to think that abaca farming is their only way to earn money, sad to think, maybe Kaingin is their alternative way.Rising Insurgency in our country were also revealed. With the continued problems in our country, many groups have posed grave threats to the Government and so the group need to backed-up by some CAFGU and Philippine Armies. All throughout, this issues were the reasons why 20% of the Filipino people were below poverty line and I am pretty sure that the B’laan tribe belongs to that portion. 2. How ECONOMICS can help address...
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...“Thin” Reaction Paper “Thin” a documentary about women facing their eating disorders. “Thin” focused on four particular women Polly, Shelley, Brittany, and Alisa. These women were all brave enough to realize they had a problem and wanted help with the exception of Brittany. Sometimes when I hear about women with eating disorders I can be unsympathetic. I just feel there are so many things in life to think about other than what people think of you. Then I had to realize media has a lot to do with the way our young women picture themselves. We all want to look like this superstar. They all see this fat, ugly person when they look in the mirror and I realized I do the same thing, if we admit it we’ve all done it. The only difference is I’ve come to embrace this so called “fat” person. I wasn’t happy with my body image so I’m doing something about it but in a healthy way. These woman have so much more going on mentally they probably should have gotten therapy way before it got this far. These women just had so much more going on than they can show in a short documentary. I felt the documentary was ok. I don’t know what the director was going for but the documentary was a bit fluff. I don’t think it really went as deep as it could have. I mean the stories were real but the Renfrew just seem like it wasn’t really helping that much. The fact that they would throw you out as soon as you’re insurance ran out, even though it’s clear you still need to be there, was disgraceful. It showed...
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...Toxic Hot Seat Opinion Paper The HBO film Toxic Hot Seat is a documentary bringing the threats of flame retardant furniture to the public’s attention. The California legislative branch passed a bill called Technical Bulletin 117, which forced furniture manufacturers to make their products flame retardant for sale to the Californian population. These manufacturers found it would be less costly to just make all the furniture they sell to all of America flame retardant. The documentary than went into depth of how the chemicals used to make the furniture flame retardant can cause cancer and other health defects throughout time. Many of the protestors of this technical bulletin were firefighters because of the dangers these pieces of furniture brought when burning and letting off smoke. The smoke that comes off the furniture was mixed with the chemicals used to protect it are extremely deadly and could cause a person to develop cancer much quicker. Many scientists, political figures, firefighters and concerned parents have tried to eliminate the Technical Bulletin 117 for many years after discovering the dangers of the furniture but have come up short and unsuccessful in banning it all together. In my opinion, I believe the California legislator made the right choice to make furniture flame retardant because at the time it seemed like it was a phenomenal idea. Giving people 12 more seconds to evacuate their home before their furniture was fully engulfed in flames was a great...
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...The Interrupters The thought of watching an almost two hour documentary seems rather boring, but that is the opposite emotion I received while watching “The Interrupters”. Every second was engaging, and every story brought emotion to my heart. It’s one thing to hear about gangs in communities, but actually seeing things they do is another. Gangs are not something anyone should be apart of, and it’s terrible to see how many adults and teenagers, just like myself, are devoting their lives to violence and horror. The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they were once apart of. Shot over the course of a year, The Interrupters captures a period in Chicago when it became a nation symbol for the violence in our cities. During this period, the city was overwhelmed with numerous shootings, fights and even deaths. There were three specific incidents in the documentary that stood out to me. Tio Hardimar, creator and director of the Violence Interrupters program, mentioned how when he was 14 years old, this boy beat him up; then his stepfather walked outside and killed that young boy right in front of Tio’s eyes. Tio stated, “I felt good about it, really.” Violence is the answer to every problem. That’s how all those kids were raised, and that’s all they knew. It is disturbing to see how violent these communities are, and how no one cares. Another incident that occurred was...
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