Documentary film

Captivating the hearts of those who watched, the Kony 2012 documentary was a viral phenomenon. Within 6 days the documentary reached 100 million views. Unfortunately, the director of the film and the leader of the movement Jason Russell was marked as a heretic by several media outlets. Thoroughly, the movement was geared to free children being enslaved as child soldiers. In actuality, Jason Russell’s efforts helped bring awareness to a person that was forcing children to do horrid acts of human…

Alzheimer’s patients in any stage of the disease can benefit from music stimulation from any form to help pull them out of the darkness of dementia and help them be more aware, essentially bring them back to life again. The sad pitfall that the documentary “Alive Again” did bring up is that this therapy is not readily available to most nursing homes and is not a commonly used approach due to technology constraints and costs for most facilities that is not reimbursed by most medical plans.…

makes something strictly a Direct Cinema film. Is it something that attempts to be unbiased by showing individual moments that aren’t affected by the camera, or is it something that encapsulates a specific emotion in a specific time and place with as little bias as possible? The technique of it all is very much up to the filmmaker’s style and I think that is good because it gives a certain freedom to the filmmaking…

truly enjoyed watching the documentary about Mary Pickford. Something that interested me was the fact that the public expected Mary to be like she was in the films. I believe this is something that still applies today, which is why some movie or TV stars are careful about their public image. However, I think they should not be the ones to change; spectators should understand and respect the fact that actors will behave differently in real life. Besides this, the documentary touched the subject…

Lesbians As the Taiwanese film critic Huang Jianye concludes, documentary in Taiwan has been developed into an ascendant genre after the success of the inaugural “International Documentary Biennial Exhibition” in 1998. With the shift from obsession with indigenization to excavation of individual life after the lifting of martial law in 1987, possibilities of focusing on minority groups and exploring urgent social issues have been opened up in the local documentary filmmaking. It is no…

Lasting Implications Films have been seen as windows for everyday people to experience and see new and different things. With ethnographic documentary films, people are able to see real parts of the world that are not always visible in their current, everyday lives. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) and Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, 1963) are both ethnographic documentaries, revered as revolutionary for their times and carry many similarities and differences. However, both films faced…

Dziga Vertov has been credited as the father of documentary film capturing reality and a world that otherwise escapes our preoccupied eyes. Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera reflects his championed concepts of “life caught unawares” and “film truth” but were these captured in actuality? His ‘fly on the wall’ approach inspired many documentary filmmakers throughout the 20th century resulting in the birth of direct cinema throughout the western world. D.A Pennebaker approaches his…

Deadly Deception, is a well-produced documentary on unethical behavior in government sponsored scientific research. The piece chronicles the forty year study of untreated syphilis in approximately 400 African-American men from Macon County, Alabama which began in 1932. The utilization of interviews with two survivors of the experiment, Herman Shaw and Charles Pollard, and experts in the fields of research, medicine, and civil rights, along with original film taken during the experiment, results…

This interactive narrative is an interactive documentary short that follows Marta Aviles, a longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Los Sures neighborhood in South Williamsburg, NY. Living there for nearly forty years, she now faces challenges with the rapid gentrification of her neighborhood. This piece documents her journey in deciding whether to stay or to leave her home. The narrative was broken down into the following structure: Introduction, The Street, The Stairs, The Apartment, The Listing, Part…

different aesthetics. They do this so that people watching the film will become more immersed into the movie, and people will be able to connect and feel with the characters. Cloverfield and The Thin Blue Line use multiple realist aesthetics of to convey truth such as direct address to camera, on-camera interview, handheld camera, limited editing, and diegetic sound only. Cloverfield’s use of a handheld camera helps convey truth by the film being able to easily interact with the camera.…