A documentary or documentary is a non-fictional film intended to ‘document the reality of documents, mainly for the purpose of instruction, training or maintenance of a historical record’. Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of “a cinematographic practice, a cinematographic tradition and a way to receive an audience, a practice without clear boundaries.”. For the time being, students should start by identifying some things that distinguish a documentary from a news item. You may notice that both forms use interviews, but the duration of those interviews is usually longer in a documentary. Or you may find that news reporters try to separate themselves from their topics, while documentaries often share personal stories and are interested in conveying certain perspectives rather than ensuring that all possible voices are heard.
Documentaries were enthusiastically supported by various public and government organizations, such as the National Film Board of Canada, in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, public and non-profit institutions, such as the US public service broadcasting service, remain an important source of financial support for documentaries. We recommend that you start with Introduction to the documentary, the classic text by Bill Nichols describing the six modes (or “subgenres”) of documentaries.
If you watch Shoah, the famous 5-hour Holocaust documentary, you will learn that oral stories and interviews contain the same level of objective information as written memory. For comparison, reading Anne Frank’s diary can be a more pleasant experience because it invites the reader to her personal story. In recent years, some new types of documentaries have emerged that blur the boundaries between social documentaries and ethnographic films and even between non-fiction and fiction. Personal or subjective documentaries make films that are more like autobiographies or newspapers. Recreations use documentary techniques to presumably mimic real or real events.
He wrote two of the first texts about Une nouvelle source de l’histoire cinema (eng. A new source of history) and La photographie animée (eng. Animated photography). Both were published in French in 1898 and were among the first written works to consider the historical and documentary value of the film. Matuszewski is also one of the first filmmakers to propose to create a film archive to safely collect and maintain visual material. And some feature films cover very serious topics these days, with some post-911 war movies that seem more realistic than the stories they tell.
We can first organize written and documentary texts according to your medium, or the material form in which the information is communicated. Different types of text include memoirs, diaries, legal files, censuses and newspapers. Textbooks, encyclopedias and academic books based on collections of research fillers. Recorded in films along with these audiovisual media, including archives and archive material, oral stories and direct interviews. Descriptive and convincing documentaries that aim to present an argument on their subject also end up on the shelves. Continuous mechanical recording of a raw tape lacks the touch of someone who selects and edits to express or communicate something to someone.
If you are a film lover or film and media student, it is essential to know the difference between documentaries and narrative films. In this article we discuss the main differences that distinguish the two types of films. We will also provide an overview of the primary subgenres out there and the different characteristics each has. “Real people” vs. Actors: In general, documentaries use real people in real life situations to tell a story while a feature film uses actors. Of course, at some point, documentaries contain ‘reaction actions’ that actors use to mimic a scene, and feature films can use ‘real event clips’.
Drilling approaches the issue of truth and facts much more humorously by using a style and documentary structure to present and organize fictional themes. The concepts of non-fiction and non-stories are fundamental to documentaries. Non-fiction films contain suspected factual descriptions of actual events, people or places, rather than their fictional or invented recreation.
In essence, a docudrama is a fictional story that uses real historical events as a context. Some may rely on real events or people, but the director and screenwriter will add drama and impact with their creative license. The genres include comedy and musical, action and western, romance, crime, terror and science fiction. Real life vs. Fantasy: In general, documentaries are meant to somehow capture ‘real life’, while a feature film creates a whole new world that may or may not be based on real events or real people. After all, this seems to meet the criteria for representing reality, filming without the use of actors and recording in the most truthful way what really exists, and it is not fiction. Although the scenes are carefully chosen and organized, usually through post-film editing, they are not written and the people in the movie are usually not actors.
When it comes to collecting filmed content, the filmmaker faces a critical choice of what to keep and what to put aside. In such situations, the filmmaker is likely to collect content to do something meaningful. But critics argue that because some of the filmed content is omitted, which means that the documentary cannot be a complete representation of the truth and is therefore fiction in itself.
Filmmakers themselves are generally seen on camera and try to make the audience aware. It seems that the people who make the documentary can build reality themselves. While Puritans have described docudramas as corruption of the documentary genre, ดูหนังออนไลน์ชัด several other experts suggest that “the act of incorporating the” truth “is fictional in the cinema in itself.” . According to the latter, when a documentary maker records something from a certain angle, he actually uses his own prejudice.