A Documentary Film -Define, Meaning ,

 

Define

A documentary film tells a story about real life.  A movie that does its best to represent real life and that doesn’t manipulate it..

Robert Flaherty built his story from his own experience of years living with the Inuit, who happily participated in his project and gave him plenty of ideas for the plot. Flaherty asked them to do things they no longer did, such as hunt for walrus with a spear, and he showed them as ignorant about things they understood.

In early days  people called the films as  ‘‘educationals,’’ ‘‘actualities,’’ ‘‘interest films,’’ or perhaps referred to their subject matter—‘‘travel films,’’ for example the work of the great American filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926), which chronicled daily life on a South Seas island.

 Robert Flaherty defined documentary as the ‘‘artistic representation of actuality’’.

 In the 1990s, documentaries began to be big business worldwide, and by 2004 the worldwide business in television documentary alone added up to $4.5 billion revenues annually. Reality TV and ‘‘docusoaps’’—real-life miniseries set in potentially high-drama situations such as driving schools, restaurants, hospitals, and airports—also flourished. Soon documentaries were being made for cell phones, and collaborative documentaries were being produced online. Marketers who had discreetly hidden the fact that their films were documentaries were now proudly calling such works ‘‘docs.’’

 The truthfulness, accuracy, and trustworthiness of documentaries are important to us all because we value them precisely and uniquely for these qualities. 

Meaning of Documentary Film Making

Documentary is an important reality-shaping communication, because of its claims to truth. Documentaries are always grounded in real life, and make a claim to tell us something worth knowing about it.

 Theatrical wildlife films such as March of the Penguins (2005) are classic examples of consumer entertainment that use all of these techniques to charm and alarm viewers, even though the sensationalism, sex, and violence occur among animals.

   ‘‘A ‘‘regular documentary’’ often means a film that features sonorous ( imposingly deep and full.), ‘‘voice-of-God’’ narration, an analytical argument rather than a story with characters, head shots of experts, number of cuts, script or storytelling structure.

A documentary film is a non-fictional motion picture that seeks to document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. It often presents factual information about a particular subject, event, or issue using real-life footage, interviews, archival materials, and narration.

Documentary films through their multi-sensory nature have found to be more impactful of portraying reality as well as a means for social persuasion (Nichols, 2010). In recent years, documentary films are increasingly being used in academia as well for disseminating knowledge. An evolving belief is that documentaries can be valuable in the field of research to illuminate issues of social justice and existing inequities in public education as well as democratize research (Friend & Caruthers, 2016). The ability of film to capture authentic voices and lived experiences is a powerful tool for democracy in education that can be utilized to bring to light existing inequities.

Filmmakers choose the way they want to structure a story which characters to develop for viewers, whose stories to focus on, how to resolve the storytelling.

 Filmmakers have many choices to make about each of the elements. For instance, a single shot may be framed differently and carry a different meaning depending on the frame: a close-up of a father grieving may say something quite different from a wide shot of the same scene showing the entire room; a decision to let the ambient sound of the funeral dominate the soundtrack will mean something different than a swelling soundtrack.