Documentary Modes (By Zoe Woodstock)

Modes
In his 2001 book, Introduction to Documentary, Bill Nichols defines the six modes of documentary.
They developed in this order:


•The Poetic Mode
It reassembles fragments of the world, transforming historical material into a more abstract, lyrical form, usually associated with the 1920s and modernist ideas, especially those of Grierson.


•The Expository Mode
It directly addresses to the audience, social issues are assembled into an argumentative frame, mediated by a voice-of-God narration, associated with 1920s-1930s, and some of the rhetoric and polemic surrounding WW2.


•The Observational Mode
As technology advanced by the 1960s and cameras became smaller and lighter, life could be documented in a less intrusive manner, less control was required over lighting, leaving the social actors free to act and the documentarists free to record without interacting with each other, sometimes this is called 'direct cinema', this mode aspires to invisibility.


•The Participatory Mode
In this mode the encounter between film-maker and subject is recorded, as the film-maker actively engages with the situation they are documenting, asking questions of their subjects, sharing experiences with them, in this mode the documentary film maker is clearly visible.


•The Reflexive Mode
This mode demonstrates consciousness of the process of reading documentary, and engages actively with the issues of realism and representation, acknowledging the presence of the viewer and the judgements they arrive at, this was popular in the 1980s.


•The Performative Mode
Documentaries of this type acknowledge the emotional and subjective aspects of documentary, and presents ideas as part of a context, having different meanings for different people, often autobiographical in nature, a contemporary mode that could be associated with post-modernism.


Our documentary 'Fashion Tribes' is mostly associated with the expository mode. We aim to produce an objective piece of film that highlights a debatable topic of stereotypes in the fashion industry. We have a developed idea and by following the guidelines of this specific mode, this concept will be defined. We will present the audience with organised information based on our documentary topic. By exploring our chosen subject matter with interviews and statistics we aim to fulfill the requirements of the expository mode. We also hope to engage with the issue of representation thus highlight the audience and the possible judgments they may conclude.


Adapted from http://www.mediaknowall.com/Documentary/definitions.html