Modes Of Documentary- Bill Nicholss

Bill Nicholls - Introduction to Documentary
Expository Mode

• "Some expository films adopt a voice-of-god commentary"
• "The mode assembles fragments of the historical world into a more rhetorical frame than aesthetic or poetic one."
• "The expository mode addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that propose a perspective or advance an argument"

Poetic Mode

• "The filmmaker's engagement is with film form as much as or more than social actors"
• "opening up the possibility of alternate forms of knowledge"
• "sacrifices the conventions of continuity editing" 
• "The mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays of factual knowledge or acts of rhetorical persuasion"
• "We learn in this case by affect or feeling, by gaining a sense of what it feels like to see and experience the world in a particular,  poetic way"

Participatory Mode

• "The participatory mode has come to embrace the spectator as participant as well."
• "Participatory mode can stress the actual, lived encounter between filmmaker and subject"  
• "Participatory documentary can stress the actual, lived encounter between the filmmaker and subject"

Reflexive mode

• "From a formal perspective, reflexivity draws our attention to our assumptions and expectations about documentary form itself."
• "From a political perspective, reflexivity points towards our own assumptions and expectations about the historical world more than about film form."
• "Both perspectives rely on techniques that jar us"
• "Reflexive documentaries ask us to see documentary for what it is: a construction or representation"
• "The reflexive mode is the most self-conscious and self-questioning mode of representation"
• "Reflexive documentary sets out to readjust the assumptions and expectations of its audience, more than to add new knowledge to existing categories" 

Observational mode

• "Many filmmakers now chose to abandon all of the forms of control"
• "observe lived experience spontaneously"
• "resulted in films with no voice-over commentary, no supplementary music or sound effects, no inter-titles, no historical reenactments, no behavior repeated for the camera, and not even any interviews."

Performative mode

• "raises questions on what knowledge actually amounts to"
• "The nature of reality changes" 
• "Performative documentaries bring the emotional intensities of embodied experience and knowledge to the fore rather than attempt to do something tangible"
• "If they set out to do something, it is to help us sense what a certain situation or experience feels like"
• "They want us to feel on a visceral level more than understand on a conceptual level"
• "Performative documentaries intensify the rhetorical desire to be compelling and tie it less to a persuasive goal than a affective one- to have us feel or experience the world in a particular way as vividly as possible"
• "Performative documentaries primarily address us emotionally and expressively rather than factually"
• "It does not however counter error with fact, misinformation with information. Instead, performative documentaries adopt a distinct mode of representation in which gaining knowledge and understanding require an entirely different form of engagement."
• "freely mixes expressive techniques that gives texture and density to fiction"
• "approaches the poetic domain of experimental or avant-garde cinema but gives, finally, less emphasis to the self-contained formal rhythms and tones of the film or video"