One of the major components of educational technology is the genre of documentary. This class focuses on that important domain for at least three reasons:
1. It is a genre that has re-surfaced in recent years. However, like the third element of McLuhan's tetrad, the documentary genre has been retrieved from its past usage, but retrieved with a difference. That is, the contemporary documentary, represented by the films of Al Gore and Michael Moore, are significantly different from the historic approaches. This class will examine several documentaries in order to gain an understanding of what the documentary is all about.
2. The concept documentary has at least an implicit, if not explicit tie to education and instruction.
3. The documentary today is subject to much misunderstanding.
4. There is a significant Canadian documentary tradition and contribution.
This class spent some time exploring the issue of documentary as a film form particularly relevant to educational technology.
Some of the key points were:
1. What is a documentary? This NFB film explored documentary as the "creative treatment of actuality" from John Grierson.
2. Several documentaries were viewed, exploring the breadth of the concept as well as the development of the concept:
Example: City of Gold. NFB 1961. Pierre Berton. Music: Eldon Rathburn. Producer/director Roman Kroiter (Winnipeger who also created I-Max. as well as "direct cinema" style." Three basic components: visual, voice, music. Visual is the photography; Every frame is a work of art. Voice is either narrator or actors voices. Music melds it together.
The Spaghetti Story was a 1961 April Fools joke which used all the techniques of documentary to illustrate how the documentary conveys a feeling of truth and accuracy.
Contemporary documentaries were excerpted including :
Michael Moore. Bowling for Columbine. Style: in-your-face beligerent humour. One non-fiction film: Canadian Bacon with Alan Alda and John Candy.
Al Gore. An inconvenient truth.
TV reality shows demonstrate the latest post-documentary style.
Documentary modes may be grouped into four categories (Nichols 1991)
Expository (voice of authority) City of Gold, nature documentaries,etc.
Observational (fly on the wall) eg. Lonely Boy; most single camera student documentaries
Interactive (includes the presence of the documentarist) eg. Michael Moore
Reflexive (invents subject matter). Talks about itself. eg. Al Gore shows the making of Inconvenient Truth
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