SHORT INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARY STYLES

SHORT INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARY STYLES

Over the years, several documentary styles evolved that came and went from fashion. These styles ranged from newsreel to realist to romantic to propaganda and many more. However, three emerged as the most popular and encompassed most of the documentary films made well up to the 1990’s.
Classical Cinema

This is the most structured and traditional form of documentary. It gives great importance to clarity of narrative and images. Characters drive the plots, and continuity editing ensures the seamless progression of events. These kinds of documentaries often made extensive use of didactic narration, as was seen in the most famous documentary in this style, Night Mail by John Grierson, which showed, in dramatised detail, how mail was transported by train overnight. The sequences were tightly controlled and the ‘feel’ was quite formal. The element of ‘realism’ was often interfered with by the filmmaker, who interspersed on-location shots with studio shots and sound dubbing to show real events and make them more ‘filmable’.

Cinéma Vérité / Direct Cinema

This style of documentary originated in the late 1950’s and reached new heights of popularity in the 1960’s. It was, much like the generation that pioneered it, a rebel with a cause. This style was spurred on with the advancement of film technology, including portable cameras with mobile sound. Cinéma Vérité, meaning ‘True Cinema’ in French, aimed for an extreme naturalism, using non-professional actors, non-intrusive filming techniques, a hand-held camera, genuine locations rather than sound stages, and naturalistic sound without post-production or voiceovers. The camera was a ‘fly on the wall’ and took in everything that went on before it. This broke all the rules put into practice by the classical tradition. Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité are often used interchangeably, although there are opinions that make distinctions by the degree of camera involvement. The fundamentals of style, however, are very similar between the two. Famous cinéma vérité/direct cinema films include Showman, Salesman, The Children Were Watching, Primary, Behind a Presidential Crisis, and Grey Gardens.

Documentary Drama
This style mixes the techniques of drama and the factual elements of documentary. Real events are acted out by professional actors in controlled settings in an obviously constructed style. This theatrical retelling of facts began in the early days of broadcasting when practical concerns and unwieldy equipment made it difficult to shoot live events. However, it is used even today. Most modern documentaries include some form of event recreation. The popular UK television show, Coronation Street, was originally thought of as a drama documentary.

The docu-drama style has been one of the most controversial ones till date and many have questioned whether it is a documentary style at all. Contention arose because, while documentaries are thought to be "real", docu-dramas were thought to cheat by obviously reconstructing reality. This opinion has been more or less discarded now as most people not only accept the diminishing lines of distinction between different styles of film, but also the overall artificiality of the subsequent editing process for all styles.

These days, with the advent of documentary films into the worldwide commercial film arena as well as their ever-expanding production in most countries of the world, most generic classifications of style have been put to rest. New stylistic elements are experimented with every year and the lines between genres have been crossed so many times that specific categories are impossible to define. Reality TV, for example, has stormed the world of television, taking direct cinema to new levels of voyeurism. Whether they are wobbly, out-of-focus home video diaries or the ‘making-of-a-feature’ promotional films included in DVD packs, they have all served to broaden our definition of the traditional documentary.

So how does all this concern the scriptwriter of a documentary film? This evolution, leading to the overlap of styles and genres, has placed far more overt, interpretive control in the hands of the filmmaker and, consequently, in the hands of the scriptwriter. Before embarking on the writing process, it is important to know the various stylistic options available to you as a scriptwriter. It is also important to recognize the contribution of various traditional styles to modern ones, even if their only use is as a guide to finding a style and ‘voice’ of your own.