Intro to Documentary Yukun Liu

This reading made clear points of documentary. The author talked about the six modes of representation that function something like sub-genres of the documentary film genre itself: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, performative. Something interesting about this reading is that it’s kind of old. Now we have more different documentaries which may contain more than one genre that the author concluded. For example, Top Gear, a British television series about motor vehicles, primarily cars, and is the most widely watched factual television program in the world. It’s hard to conclude what kind of genre it is. What I prefer to say is that it’s a multiple genre documentary. It’s participatory, observational and performative. It’s participatory because it’s a film that people participate in the film a lot but not just find a spot and observe. It’s observational because the filmmaker gathered the necessary raw materials and then fashioned a meditation, perspective, or argument from them. And it’s performative because it raises question about what is knowledge, it shows things like what besides factual information goes into our understanding of the world. The evolution of films never stops. We may have more than six modes of representation now. I like the statement that the author made in the end; we can summarize this general sketch of the six modes of documentary representation in the following table. Documentary, like the avant-garde, begins in response to fiction. The table shows the documentary modes weren’t appear at the same time. Start with Hollywood fiction in 1910s, we have poetic documentary and expository documentary in 1920s, observational documentary and participatory documentary in 1960s, reflexive documentary and performative documentary in 1980s. This reflects the point I made earlier, the evolution of films never stops. And these days we definitely have developed new modes of documentary representation.

This is a video of modern documentary:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL_eIZjiLUk