Creative Juices

The expository mode of documentary "assembles fragments of the historical world into a more rhetorical or narrative frame than an aesthetic or poetic one," (Nichols). It employs indexical images, poetic and affective associations, storytelling qualities, and rhetorical persuasiveness. These types of documentaries rely heavily on spoken dialogue to inform the audience. Editing focuses on the gathering of evidence or creating the greatest impact, therefore often spatial or temporal continuity is altered. On the other hand, observational mode seeks to have as limited involvement in the events as possible. The idea is that the filmmaker sets up the camera and lets fate tell the story. Both modes were enabled by advances in camera and sound technologies in the 1960’s. Equipment became lighter, less obtrusive and easier to transport. It allowed more freedom of movement therefore leading to less strict control over staging, arrangement, or composition, and in the expository documen...

Night and Fog  (1956) documents the horrors of the Holocaust in brutally honest way. One of the most infamous atrocities in history, the director, Alain Resnais, shows it in full detail. The somber narrator immediately sets a reflective tone as the camera glides of the now grass covered yards of Nazi concentration camps. The almost peaceful images betray the nauseating depictions to come. Mounds of emaciated corpses, severed heads in a row next to a pile of their body counterparts, smoldering bones, and skeletal survivors. During this war, humans went farther into the realms of the unspeakable and damnable than they possibly ever had before. The cruelest thoughts were acted upon; the unthinkable became the reality of millions.   The Act of Killing  (2012) directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, is a chilling and rather sickening investigation of the genocide in Indonesia during the 1960s. The documentary features several of the perpetrators of the heinous acts, ...