Because we didn”t get to watch the film “Rats in the Ranks”, my presentation today will come from this weeks readings, but I will try and relate the readings back to previously watched films. This week the readings look firstly at the elements of the documentary, mainly focusing on the point of view and the documentaries development and structure. The later readings then delve into a more technical side of documentaries, looking at the steps taken in creating a documentary, such as the many problems that arise when trying to find funding. The first integral part of any documentary, like any film, is offcourse the picture.
The reader lists 9 different types of picture a documentary can include, which look at action footage, library footage, people talking, interviews, re-enactments, still photos, and documents and graphics. Many of these can be seen in the documentary “The Thin Blue Line”. From these categories, the main one depicted in “The Thin Blue Line” are interviews, all the characters seen in this documentary are seen through interviews conducted by the film maker. Apart from interviews, the next largest used element is re-enactments, showing the scene again and again as the policeman gets shot several times.
The other two main elements seen in this film are documents and other graphics, such as newspaper articles written at time the offence took place, and a few still photo’s, one of the accident scene, and photo’s of the back of a number of blue cars. When sound is used in a documentary, there are also a number of sections that it can fall under, these are quite straight forward however. The sections laid out in the reader categorise sound in the following fields, a voice over, narration, synchronous sound, sound effects, music, and silence.
