Documentary

Dan P gave a lecture on documentaries. We spoke about how the viewer immediately takes anything of the genre as fact without questioning it’s authority to inform, and the power they possess to make the viewer accept all ‘facts’.

So, for example audience seem to take documentary as fact when actually they can be biased and politically steered. For example we were shown an 11 minute documentary with mainly audio. The point was that it made you focus on exactly what they wanted you too. So because there was just audio of people chatting you could not make out anything apart from the stress in peoples voices. There was only around 40 seconds of visuals.

It did not seem like a documentary because it didn’t inform, it’s purpose seemed to be to just evoke emotion. Because of the massive media attention to 9/11, Dan said that we as an audience are almost desensitized to the event.

I think that the event of 9/11 was blown up in comparison to Hiroshima. When the devastation occurred in Japan it seemed a lot less composure than that of 9/11. Probably because the Americans didn’t want any attention towards their killing of over 150,000 innocent people.

I believe in Attenborough. I don’t watch many documentaries but have made one about video games. Ultimately I think that if you can back up your footage/claims with facts, then you can take it as fact. However, it’s all in the edit and to a certain extent documentary is manipulated to be whatever the filmmaker wants it to be!