Group 2 – to lead discussion on reading – What is Documentary?
There are few things about documentary. First, the documentary founding father, Join Grierson defined documentary as a “creative treatment of actuality." As documentary is always about the society, that will be mentioned below. Second, documentary is always about the present or the past, to record what was happened in the society. Third, documentary gives criticism to the society by discovering issues. Third, a documentary is expected to talk about human development, such as how people meet difficulty and they learnt something from it. Also, a documentary can be controlled, premeditated, or unpredictable; and it can have commentary or no speech, with literary, oral tradition, music, painting, etc. Moreover, documentary is no limits of possibles to talk about the society, but it should be objective, and this called actuality, to make it critical and tell the truth to the audience. And for a true documentary, it should contain the richness and ambiguous of life, such as to include different dimensions, like inner and outer dimension of something, in the documentary.
Observational & Expository modes of Documentary
For observational mode, it requires only one cam-man and one side person to show more reality of the society. As fewer people are used, people would not notice they are filming by others. For the features of this mode, synchronous sound incorporated that the sound is recorded on the camera. Also, long shot is commonly using for observing that to reduce the possibility that the people know they are filming by somebody. And Salesman is one of the example of an observational mode of documentary.
For expository mode, it comes before the observational mode because the instrument were much larger, and larger crew is use as the technology was not good enough at that time. An expository biggest feature is the voice-of-god, it means a voice of authority that it is telling the truth to the audience, the narrative is know more than the audience. Last, this mode is to record what happen everyday that the large crew would not affect the observation of the documentary. And Night Mail is one of the example of an expository mode of documentary.
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