Documentary Reading Response - Ekin Erkan

The Modernism movement, born out of the senselessness and decay following World War I, bore the transpiration of a poetic relation of representational coherence and loose associational values in the documentary style of film. Thus, surrealist art works digging deeply into the subconscious manifested, with less value on concrete imagery's definitional meaning and more emphasis on aesthetic conception. Nichols, in speaking of the poetic mode of documentary, mentions Bunuel's and Dali's surrealist works such as L'age D'or surrounding post-war repression flourishing in the human psyche, containing documentary qualities and impressions. These are early examples of the power of impressionable aesthetics, which have evolved to contain the poetry of documentary, thus distinguishing the medium from other means of informational dissemination.
Contemporary avant-garde photographer Roger Ballen's recent film Roger Ballen's Asylum of the Birds contains the "documentary fiction" notion of conceptualizing a fact in the romance of darkly poetic aesthetics. The eerie imagery, ambient noise, and ink-like shadows of Roger Ballen's work render corporeal information via emotion in a post-modernist fashion that a conventionally information-based work accentuates to a lesser degree. This is entirely relevant to the post-modern wave of art in deconstructional style where information is conveyed emotionally via aesthetics in a neo-romantic style, emphasizing harmony in the self-nature relationship devoid of societal constructions (all of which Walter Truett Anderson elaborately describes in The Future of the Self: Inventing the Post-Modern Person). The streaks of insanity in decrepit shambles besmirched by variegated lunacy corrupt an audience member's mind more so than any informational relay possibly could. In this way, Ballen's piece most beautifully and effectively conveys fragments of permeant and fluid space-time's history in informational packaging.
As Nichols mentions in his passage, John Ivens's film The Spanish Earth uses Ernest Hemingway (as opposed to the initial narrator Orson Welles, whose voice was too refined) to recount the documentary in attempt of visceral engagement. Hemingway's voice  portrays a certain natural and soft quality essential in Ivens's vision of poetry in his documentation. Aesthetics are entirely powerful (most powerful of all, arguably) for they are the sole looking-glass of humanity's perception(s). Consider patriotic, pro-war documentary films such as Frank Capra's Why We Fight or Warner Bros.'s infamous Winning Your Wings, which galvanized a generation to enter the Second World War. Thus, by manipulating aesthetics into the realm of poetry the documentary (and all art facets of all art forms) communicates particular information.