Short Answer Questions

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1. What effect did the introduction of optical sound recording in 1927 have on documentary filmmaking?
Optical sound recording made it possible to add educational or social commentary to newsreels, documentaries, and propaganda films. With enhanced educational and social uses for documentary film, public institutions such as the General Post Office in England, President Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration, and the National Film Board of Canada, as well as private groups such as New York City’s Film and Photo League, were more willing to support documentary filmmaking in the 1930s and 1940s.

Question

2. Describe the impact that Robert Flaherty had on documentary filmmaking. How would you describe the kind of documentaries that Flaherty made? What primary qualities do they exhibit?
Robert Flaherty, often referred to as “the father of documentary cinema,” significantly expanded the powers and popularity of nonfiction film in the 1920s, most famously with his early works Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926). Flaherty’s films blended a romantic fascination with nature with an anthropological desire to record and document other cultures. Flaherty also identified new funding sources for documentary films (such as corporations) and proved to audiences that nonfiction, realistic films could be exciting, even without movie stars and Hollywood special effects.

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3. Documentary films tend to use different expositional strategies than narrative films to depict or describe experience. What are the three documentary organizations outlined in the textbook? Briefly describe the primary strategy of each.
Documentary organizations tend to differ from fictional film narratives in two primary ways: they do not use the same temporal logic, and they do not present a presiding focus on how a central character motivates and moves events forward. The three organizational structures of documentaries, as outlined in The Film Experience, are cumulative, contrastive, and developmental. Cumulative organizations present a catalog of images or sounds throughout the course of the film that may not have a recognizable logic connecting the images. Contrastive organizations presents a series of contrasts or oppositions meant to indicate the different points of view on its subject. With developmental organizations, places, objects, individuals, or experiences are presented through a pattern that has a non-narrative logic or structure but still follows a pattern of change or progression.

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4. Describe the functions of a persuasive rhetorical position and give an example of a film that employs this rhetorical position.
Persuasive positions articulate personal or social perspectives using emotions or beliefs to persuade viewers to feel and see in a certain way. Some films do so through voiceovers and interviews that attempt to convince viewers of a particular cause. For example, in An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore positions himself like a professor before charts, graphs, and images in a sustained argument about the dangers of global warming.

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5. What is cinéma vérité? Where did it originate and what are its main features or goals?
Cinéma vérité, French for “cinema truth” and influenced by the Russian Kino-Pravda (“cinema truth”) of the 1920s, is a documentary style that films objects, people, and events in a confrontational way, dispelling the rules of continuity and character development to give viewers a taste of the true essence of the subject. This film movement arose in the late 1950s and 1960s in Canada and France, and then quickly spread to film cultures in the United States and other parts of the world. Aided by the development of lightweight cameras and portable sound equipment, filmmakers were able to film their subjects with a jerky immediacy to achieve a “raw” effect, which suggested the filmmakers’ participation and absorption in the events they were recording.