"Intro to Documentary" Response

Although it was a bit confusing at times, I really enjoyed reading this article about the different types of documentaries. Reading it really helped me kind of navigate my way through ideas for my documentary for our next assignment. Personally, I favored the poetic, participatory, and reflexive forms of documentary. I like the participatory mode because it goes along with what I have been learning in anthropology through immersing yourself in some setting or culture and capturing the practices while also participating in rituals or other practices. The only thing is that for our project, I'm not sure what I would be able to fully participate in and interview people about. The reflexive form was completely new to me and I liked how it draws references to historical context and also involved participatory mode. I like the combination because it gives more room to take something that is happening now and connect it to a problem or event in the past with a little less involvement than participatory. The only thing I was a little confused about was how we would go about doing this mode and engaging the audience to show realism as well. Poetic seemed interesting and I like the idea of focusing on images and a more stylistic approach so it seems more open to ideas than the other modes which require more participation. I ran across these two short documentaries about the history of title sequences and thought they went well with this reading. Both are conveying the same history but the first one is more artistic, along the lines of the poetic mode, while the second is more expository with a lot of vocal narration.

A History Of The Title Sequence from From Form on Vimeo.

THE FILM before THE FILM from ntsdpz on Vimeo.