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Analysing Documentaries
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Introduction

Welcome to the Analysing Documentaries research guide. This guide has been created to support Year 12 ATAR English students analysing the conventions of documentaries and how they operate in the text studied. Elements presented in this guide include terms, modes and film techniques.

"Documentary concerns itself with representing the observable world, and to this end works with what [John] Grierson called the raw material of reality. The documentarian draws on past and present actuality — the world of social and historical experience — to construct an account of lives and events. Embedded within the account of physical reality is a claim or assertion at the centre of all non-fictional representation, namely, that a documentary depiction of the socio-historical world is factual and truthful."

Keith Beattie, Documentary Screens:  Nonfiction Film and Television, p. 10.

What is a Documentary?

BBC Fresh. (2013, October 10). BBC Fresh: What is a Documentary? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An-VACvhbfM

Documentary film is a motion picture that shapes and interprets factual material for purposes of education or entertainment. Documentaries have been made in one form or another in nearly every country and have contributed significantly to the development of realism in films. 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. In Russia, events of the Bolshevik ascent to power in 1917–18 were filmed, and the pictures were used as propaganda. In 1922 the American director Robert Flaherty presented Nanook of the North, a record of Eskimo life based on personal observation, which was the prototype of many documentary films. At about the same time, the British director H. Bruce Woolfe reconstructed battles of World War I in a series of compilation films, a type of documentary that bases an interpretation of history on factual news material. (Britannica, 2022)

Common WACE Analysis Questions and Key Glossary Terms

Q. Outline ANY 2 attitudes revealed in the film that contrast each other.

ATTITUDES

An outlook or a specific feeling about something. Our values underlie our attitudes. Attitudes can be expressed by what we say, do and wear.
Q. How has your context (personal or social) impacted your reading of this film?

CONTEXT

The environment in which a text is responded to or created. Context can include the general social, historical and cultural conditions in which a text is responded to and created (the context of culture) or the specific features of its immediate environment (context of situation). The term is also used to refer to the wording surrounding an unfamiliar word that a reader or listener uses to understand its meaning.
Q. To what extent does this film meet the expectations of genre?

GENRE

The categories into which texts are grouped. The term has a complex history within literary theory and is often used to distinguish texts on the basis of their subject matter (for example, detective fiction, romance, science fiction, fantasy fiction), form and structure (for example, poetry, novels, biography, short stories).
Q. What is the advantage of a text delivering multiple forms of communication at once?

MODE

The various processes of communication: listening, speaking, reading/viewing and writing/creating. Modes are also used to refer to the semiotic

(meaning-making) resources associated with these communicative processes, such as sound, print, image and gesture.
Q. Suggest a scene whereby a combination of modes work together effectively.

MULTIMODAL TEXT

Combination of two or more communication modes (for example, print, image and spoken text, as in film or computer presentations).
Q. Suggest a contextual feature of Maher which contributes to his overall perspective on religion.

PERSPECTIVE(S)

A position from which things may be viewed or considered. People may have different perspectives on events or issues due to (for example) their age, gender, social position and beliefs and values. A perspective is more than an opinion; it is a viewpoint informed by one or more contexts. Texts through an embedded ideology can also present a particular perspective or be read from an ideological perspective.
Q. Define the representation of a particular social group in this film, as constructed by Maher.

REPRESENTATION

Representation refers to the way people, events, issues or subjects are presented in a text. The term implies that texts are not mirrors of the real world; they are constructions of ‘reality’. These constructions are partially shaped through the writer’s use of conventions and techniques.
Q. Describe one stylistic feature of the film repeatedly employed for effect.

STYLISTIC FEATURES

The ways in which aspects of texts are arranged and how they affect meaning. Examples of stylistic features are lexical choice, syntax, narrative point of view, voice, structure, language patterns and language features, both written and visual. Style can distinguish the work of individuals, for example, Winton’s stories, Wright’s poems and Luhrmann’s films as well as the works of a particular period.

 

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