Blog 5 - Reflection

In the last five weeks we have learned a multitude of things about New Documentary and I know I have taken a lot from this class as a whole. For the most part it has really opened my eyes up to all the facets of documentary filmmaking that before I had been pretty ignorant about. For one thing, I had no idea there were so many different styles of documentaries. It seems that I had always seen a particular type of documentary, notably the styles of David Attenborough and Michael Moore, and I hadn’t noticed that you can really put art into these films in a way that is both engaging to the audience and effective in its delivery of the point it is trying to get across.

This course so far has showed me that the word Documentary has a much more complicated definition than I previously thought. Just like the age old debate of “what is art?” the idea that documentary can be nailed down to one clear cut definition is not very accurate to the bigger picture. Documentaries incorporate many different aspects of filmmaking that sometimes are reserved mostly for feature films, effects, camera tricks, dramatization, recreation, and while some of these things are frowned upon in the trade, it can be used to make a more powerful and enriching point.

I’ve learned that one of the basic tenants of documentary filmmaking is to have a point. It really isn’t a documentary without expressing a point of view. Even the most simple nature docs or Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera are saying something about the point of nature they explore. It is important and necessary not to only document, which is something simple that a security camera could do, but to also show a greater meaning to the images and words you capture.

Also the nature of documentary can be that of an activist. We saw in Lovely Andrea that the work had strong feminist overtones throughout, starting with a simple narrative but quickly branching out into all sorts of different forms of storytelling.

Also I learned that the line between fact and fiction is often very muddy. This is best exemplified in Close Up, which really clearly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and in doing so, makes the audience question the very notion of truth and artifice.