Documentary Reading: Aisyah

     This reading touches upon documentary and six of its modes: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive and performative. Although this was something I learned last semester in the Intro to the Art of Film course, I still found the reading very interesting especially during the section titled, "Grouping the Many Voices of Documentary".

     After having read the first section of the reading, I now understand that the order presentation of the modes of documentaries corresponds roughly to their chronology of introduction, and not by  the "what's better than the other" concept. Generally, we invent/come up with new ways of doing things because the older ways have certain flaws or dissatisfaction in them that needed improving. However, this does not mean we completely disregard them. What the reading discussed was that a new mode carried a different set of emphases and implications that the previous mode did not ("What changes is the mode of representation, not the quality or ultimate status of the representation.") This is why a lot of documentary filmmakers nowadays choose to implement more than one type of mode into their videos, so that they could emphasise/tackle certain aspects of the topic that they are documenting.

     An example of a documentary that I can think of that uses more than one mode is Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. He uses some elements of expository mode, however the documentary is clearly constructed around his opinion which keeps the documentary mainly in the participatory mode.