Documentary Forms and Genres

Documentaries can be categorised into 7 areas. These categories are:

The Poetic Mode, The Expository Mode, The Reflexive Mode, The Observational Mode, The Participatory Mode, The Performative Mode and the Political Reflexivity Mode. 

These categories describe the way in which the documentary is presented to the audience by the filmmaker. For example, Michael Moore's Sicko would fit into the participatory mode as Moore himself engages with the subjects and is seen by the audience to be taking an active role in finding out the information.

Documentaries also have genres that they fit in to:

Docufiction: This is the combination of documentary and fiction. The use of fiction brings around the issue of whether the subject can be relied on as a source of information. Robert Flaherty is considered to have made the first docufiction documentary.

Ethnofiction: The idea of these types of documentary is to explore different cultures. This is a combination of documentary and fictional film to create visual anthropology where characters play their own roles in ethnic or social groups. Jean Rouch is regarded as the father of ethnofiction, many of his documentaries from the 60's were made studying Africa and the people living there.

Docudrama: A fictional recreation of real historical events. Sometimes the docudrama filmmakers use the location where the event happened as a stage for the recreation. The use of narrative in docudramas is to build upon the bare facts of the event.

Mondo film: This type of documentary exploits taboo subjects and sensationalises topics, scenes and situations. Mondo films usually use staged sequences as documentary footage, it has been also been described as 'shockumentary' due to the graphic nature of the images shown.

Mockumentary: A film that presents fictional events in a documentary form to give the films events a factual feel or to parody an event. Examples of this are: Borat (2007), The Office (2001), Orson Welles' War Of The Worlds (1938) and This Is Spinal Tap (1984). 

'Reality Bites: Documentary In The 21st Century' Review

This reading explores the difference between early documentaries and practitioners to the modern day, contrasting Griersonian documentaries to ones which are presented by Danny Dyer. From this reading I have gained the idea that the development of documentary has taken along the path of entertainment being more of a prominent feature than it being purely about fact. Using publicly recognised people that relate to the subject matter of the documentary or relatable people that are ignorant to the topic of it seems to increase audience desire to watch the documentary. Carly Sandy implies that the issues of the documentary get glazed over by the participatory mode nature of documentaries where the issue is personalised to an individual rather than the wider truth being exposed to gain maximum response. This is why critics say that documentaries are becoming tabloidised, as it becomes more emphasised of what the mass audience want to see over the topical nature that documentaries were originally about.