This tuesday, Kim discussed the different modes of documentary and showed us examples of each modes.

In this week’s reading by Broderick Fox, documentary is categorised into 9 modes including: reflexive, poetic, expository, observational, participatory, performative, autobiographical, essayistic, and lastly, interactive.

For a food related topic, I think it’d be interesting to discuss about animal welfare as it is a topic that I think is getting more and more awareness. If i were to create a documentary on animal welfare, there would probably be a few modes I’d be able interested to try, which would be observational, participatory and lastly essayistic.

Fox explained how a filmmaker’s own background would result in choosing a certain mode. It would be almost impossible for me to do an autobiographical, as I am in no means an animal activist, the same foes for expository because I have no set views or argument, while poetic and interactive are modes I’m not comfortable with, and lastly I think reflexive mode on its own wouldn’t work.

“In the observational mode, no questions are asked in interviews
and no voice-over track adds context” (Fox, 2017). In other words, this mode shows everything in frame the way it is, without any influence from narration, thus it tends to be neutral. I think this is a great mode to be applied if i were to create a documentary about animal welfare. Firstly because i don’t have a strong point to get across to the audience and also simply because this mode is less aggressive than said, expository. Audience will have a choice to make their own meaning out of it, and whatever that may be is never right nor wrong.

I would make the duration pretty short, maybe less than 20 minutes long, because I personally think it can get boring if it has no narration and relies only on visuals. It would document animals in all conditions, those in farm houses to those who has loving owners. There might also be background music at certain timing.

Participatory mode on the other hand recruits subjects as active participants. This is personally a documentary mode which I watch the most, those being the ones on youtube where people do street interviews about a certain topic (shoutout to Asian Boss). I think it would actually be really great to have so many different opinions on a certain topic, or in this case, animal welfare and just display them as they are to be evaluated by the audience. Similar to observational, I think with this mode, audience has their own freedom in evaluating a topic.

For this mode, it’s possible to do a longer video if there are a lot of participants and questions, especially on animal welfare, although I’d prefer to keep them under 20 minutes. I would go out to the streets and interview random people and basically just mash all those responses together to create one documentary.

Lastly, the essayistic mode is supposed to be a combination of different modes that was mentioned. I think this would be the best approach, because it would be like taking the best of each modes and combining them to one engaging documentary. I would definitely include some observational, participatory, reflexive, possibly poetic and performative.

In the end, I think what matters would be actually trying them all out and experiment with the different types of modes before I can decide which works the best and how to achieve it.

 

Reference List:

Fox, B 2017, Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice, Routledge, ProQuest Ebook Central database.