Modes Of Documentary

In this essay I intend to outline six modes of documentary as implied in Nichols text, giving each a definition and expanding on how each mode applies to an example of a documentary that is, as far as possible, mentioned in the text. Then focusing on one documentary film in particular detailing on how the film relates to the relevant mode of documentary. Firstly, the six modes implied in Nichols are as far as I can make out are as follows; after a brief introduction the text begins the first of these modes – the expository mode describing the documentary is an agreement between the filmmaker and the audience and referring the documentary as ‘a rhetorical form: a form based, however loosely, on the construction of an argument for or against something’.

In the section John Grierson is mentioned as founder of the British documentary film movement; a notable film of this pioneering filmmaker is ‘housing problems’ in which the problems of post-war British slum housing was to be replaced by modern flats.

This film very much epitomises the exploratory mode with an ‘old school’ narrator throughout interspersed with interviews (partly participative mode) from residents of the slums there is then the middle section showing scaled models of the new intended re-housing (it is in this section that the gas company is mentioned that designed heating and also commissioned the film); the same people are then interviewed in their new homes saying how much of an improvement their living conditions have become.

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The text then discusses the observational mode further expanding this style as ‘recording ‘real life’ as lived in front of the ‘candid’ camera or recalled by testimony’. In this mode varies little or no intervention between the filmmaker and the audience. An example of this would be the groundbreaking ‘Nanook of the North’ (Flaherty 1922) observing a family of Eskimos fighting against the extreme conditions of their en…

Documentary Modes