What should a documentary be about?
A Creative Treatment of Actuality. Whatever we think a documentary should be, most of us can generally agree that a doc should contain some kind of truth or reality about the human condition, about the way the world works.
Are documentary films biased?
By definition, a documentary film is biased. Whereby the subject matter may be of actuality, the creative treatment of such actuality perpetuates a bias.
What is documentary teaching?
“Documentary is the creative treatment of actuality.” –John Grierson “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” –Philip K. Dick Rationale:This teaching sequence has been designed to support teachers and students in ATAR English.
Who invented the word documentary?
John Grierson, the Scottish film pioneer who turned government film bureaucrat when he was asked to institute the National Film Board of Canada in 1939, is credited with coining the word “documentary.” Grierson’s definition of the form still holds up today.
Where did Grierson say the creative treatment of actuality?
After watching Robert Flaherty's 1926 feature “Moana”, a coming-of-age story wherein a Samoan boy and his family play themselves and “re-enact” their own lives, Grierson declared documentary to be, “a creative treatment of actuality.”
What is meant by creative treatment of actuality?
Josh Grierson's definition of documentary filmmaking – 'the creative treatment of actuality' – summarises its overarching fallacy. The fallacy being that documentaries often purport to reveal truths, however by the very act of documenting actuality, the director inadvertently alters its 'truth'.
What is actuality in a documentary?
The actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that, like the documentary film, uses footage of real events, places, and things. Unlike the documentaries, actuality films are not structured into a larger argument, picture of the phenomenon or coherent whole.
Who coined the term documentary and when was it first used?
John Grierson, a Scottish educator who had studied mass communication in the United States, adapted the term in the mid-1920s from the French word documentaire. The documentary-style film, though, had been popular from the earliest days of filmmaking.
Who Filmed first ever documentary?
Documentary History Highlights So in essence, the first movies ever made were documentaries, also called newsreels. 1920's Russia - Perhaps the true spirit of the documentary starts with a young poet and film editor named Dziga Vertov.
Do documentaries represent reality?
Because the “real” includes that for which is possible to provide an equivalent representation, but a documentary is merely a representation of reality, it never truly captures the real.
Who invented the Latham Loop?
Woodville LathamWilliam Kennedy DicksonEugene Augustin LausteLatham loop/Inventors
Did the Lumiere brothers make actuality films?
The early Lumière brother movies became known as “actualités,” or “actuality films,” and are still regarded as the earliest form of documentary filmmaking in history.
What do you call the person who speaks in a documentary?
Documentarian - definition of documentarian by The Free Dictionary.
When was the word documentary first used?
1926The word "documentary" was coined by Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson in his review of Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926), published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926, written by "The Moviegoer" (a pen name for Grierson).
Where did the word documentary originate?
documentary (adj.) 1788, "pertaining to or derived from documents," from document (n.) + -ary. Meaning "factual, meant to provide a record of something" is by 1921, originally in reference to film, from French film documentaire (by 1919).
What was the first official documentary?
The first official documentary or non-fiction narrative film was Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), an ethnographic look at the harsh life of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic, although some of the film's scenes of obsolete customs were staged.
What is the purpose of documentary film?
Its aim is to document the events of the outside world and present the truth even if it’s right in front of our eyes or obscured from view and covered up. Each documentary presents reality to the audience with real people, places and events that exist in the audiences’ world. Each film however presents its subjects in varied creative ways.
What is a re-enactment in a documentary?
In some documentaries re-enactments are also used to show past events to give the audience an idea of the aspects of the subject the documentary is presenting. Most documentaries about modern events and people also use real people in it. Supersize me is a documentary by Morgan Spurlock, about the effects and influence of fast food on the people of the USA. It has an excessive usage of specialists and uses other common conventions such as jiggly cameras, archival
Why is Spurlock's camera jiggly?
The satirical images are used by Spurlock to show us the darker side of McDonalds and prompt negative feelings in the audience.The less obvious conventions used are technical, in which he uses the jiggly camera and also written codes on screen. Of these the most prominent is jiggly camera; an important convention as it makes the audience feel more involved in some kind of unplanned, unadulterated adventure alongside Spurlock at an almost personal level. The written codes are used mainly to add atmosphere and set the tone of the documentary.
Kristin Bluemel
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Laura Marcus
This chapter discusses documentary cinema and film journalism, taking a look at the films produced by John Grierson, such as Night Mail and Coal Face. It studies the idea of an intermodern sense of the complexity of ‘actuality’ and also presents the possible interdisciplinary future for intermodernism studies.
What is documentary art?
Grierson defined documentary as the creative treatment of actuality. The aim of this article is to add to existing discussions of this phrase. Attention will be given to documentary as art, and the Griersonian notion of artist. An examination of the relationship between art, creativity and documentary production and consumption will rationalize and reconceptualize creativity for documentary practice. This reconceptualization of documentary creativity will result from three theoretical perspectives. First, the systems model of creativity presents a holistic view of the creative documentary system at work. Next, the staged creative process theories will be paralleled to the documentary production process. The final theory presents group creativity which accounts for collaborative documentary work. In concluding, a brief discussion on the appropriateness of creativity theories for documentary practice will be presented.
What is the creative practice of Paul McCartney?
This chapter in Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice: The Beatles and Beyond, emphasises a multifactorial and confluence-based view of creativity that demonstrates how both Paul McCartney and John Lennon contributed individually and significantly to the songwriting output of The Beatles and, importantly, that the overall success of the songs they were credited with was attributable to a largely collaborative system at work. In the beginning both McCartney and Lennon acquired the skills and knowledge of the symbol system and this extensive knowledge of songs of all types provided, in Bourdieu’s terms, the possibilities of action for them but while they both shared a major context for the acquisition of this musical material, each absorbed it within his own idiosyncratic way. Both had an evident set of interactions between the standards and traditions of a structured domain of musical knowledge and they also had significant interactions with the many operatives who exist in the arena of social contestation, that is, the field of popular music, which includes publishers, managers, record producers, engineers and fellow musicians, and the individual songwriters who formed the collaborative partnership of this creative system. This partnership was both enabled and constrained by the structural factors of the domain and the arena of social contestation that is the field of popular music, which afforded this creative pair to produce some of their best work.
What is the focus of the collection of papers?
Second, its focus is on the eastern Mediterranean, taking the ‘Near East’ in a relatively broad sense, including both Anatolia and Egypt. Th ird, while not exploring Hellenism in the sense of the period between Alexander and Actium, it takes as its starting point the dominant Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean under the Roman Empire. Fourth, its essential focus is on language – or co-existing or competing languages. That is to say both, on the one hand, that it explores the potential of original documents to represent for us the realities of the societies by and from which they were generated, and that, at the same time, it accepts always that a ‘document’ is, just like a literary text, a construct following rules and conventions – or obeying a ‘rhetoric’ of genre – and is not, and cannot be, a simple mirror of ‘how it really was’. But the focus on language also means something more complex still, namely the situations which evolve when more than one language is (in some sense) current within a particular society. © Cambridge University Press 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
What is the creative process?
The creative process, one of the key topics discussed in Guilford's (1950) address to the American Psychological Association and his subsequent work, refers to the sequence of thoughts and actions that leads to novel, adaptive productions. This article examines conceptions of the creative process that have been advocated during the past century. In particular, stage-based models of the creative process are discussed and the evolution of these models is traced. Empirical research suggests that the basic 4-stage model of the creative process may need to be revised or replaced. Several key questions about the creative process are raised, such as how the creative process differs from the noncreative process and how process-related differences may lead to different levels of creative performance. New directions for future research are identified.
How does media affect the attention economy?
The rapid development of media in the world promote the prosperity of the economy to a certain degree. Advertisement, as one of communication form of mass media , gradually becoming one of an important part in the attention economy. In view of these, the research chooses M&M’s advertisements as examples to discover what factors attract audiences’ attention and then lead to consumption, and how they play their role during the process. Three methods are employed in this research: in-depth interview, observation and textual analysis. Five Chinese postgraduate students are selected as objects, and they answer the questions by the researcher after they watched two types of M&M’s advertisements (celebrity-based advertisement and content-based advertisement). Through the combination of interview, it can be found that both celebrities, memory and social media platform can exert their role in the attention economy. This article also expects to offer a reference for advertisers and product manufacturers, helping them adjust their marketing strategies rationally by using celebrities and other elements.
What does Keith Sawyer argue about art?
Romantic sense. As Keith Sawyer (2006) argues Art, like the activities of science
How do metaphors play a role in the narrative of a documentary?
Metaphors play a significant role to construct a complex narrative of documentary subjects through semiotic language broadening the scope of the visual narrative strategy of animated documentary concern ing its relevance with embedded subjectivity and emotions. Looking through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), the current paper explores the practice of creative metaphors representing complex human emotions through subjectivity perspective in the animated documentary as conjecturally weaved animation of embroidered artworks by Kutch artists in Nina Sabnani's The Stitches Speak (2010) and as an abstract illustration of emotive experiences of alcohol-addict Canadian artist, Ryan Larkin, in Chris Landreth's Ryan (2004). Employing the metaphoric analysis approach (Moser, 2000), both the films are examined to understand comprehensive metaphorical stance portraying discrete subjective phenomena of human history. In this paper, I argue that the creative visual metaphors endorse diverse interpretations of psycho-social ecology of the 'subjectivity' under consideration corresponding to a broader understanding of the embedded emotions of the subject/s. The introduction of the metaphors also conceptualizes amplified creative narrative for enhanced visualizations and perception.