Critical Reading Reviews
Definitions of a Documentary.
- How do we categorise a document?
- The Poetic Mode
('reassembling fragments of the world', a transformation of historical material into a more abstract, lyrical form, usually associated with 1920s and modernist ideas)
- The Expository Mode
('direct address', "voice of god syndrome" social issues assembled into an argumentative frame, mediated by a voice-of-God narration, associated with 1920s-1930s, and some of the rhetoric and polemic surrounding WW2)
- The Observational Mode
(as technology advanced by the 1960s and cameras became smaller and lighter, able to document life in a less intrusive manner, there is less control required over lighting etc, leaving the social actors free to act and the documentarists free to record without interacting with each other)
- The Participatory Mode
(the encounter between film-maker and subject is recorded, as the film-maker actively engages with the situation they are documenting, asking questions of their subjects, sharing experiences with them. Heavily reliant on the honesty of witnesses)
- The Reflexive Mode
(demonstrates consciousness of the process of reading documentary, and engages actively with the issues of realism and representation, acknowledging the presence of the viewer and the modality judgements they arrive at. Corresponds to critical theory of the 1980s)
- The Performative Mode
(acknowledges the emotional and subjective aspects of documentary, and presents ideas as part of a context, having different meanings for different people, often autobiographical in nature)
- Political reflexivity
"develops the audience’s awareness of the issue. (http://learn.winchester.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=38207)
This reading is important into the understanding of what a documentary is and how we define it. It gives a clear outline of what the different documentary modes are and how we as practitioners are able to define them and applied them to media texts.
What third world?
Changing photographic representation of international news
in Slovene elite press (1980-2006)
This reading discusses news reporting in the 3rd World countries and other developing countries in the world. It talks about how the images that are taken gives a representation to the viewer. The images that have been taken in the passed have been judged to be "negative news" because of the situation that these countries are in. But now, over the years this news has turned from netural to symbolic. Though the images have still remained to keep a representation of "us" and "them".
