Chapter 8

Alternatives to Narrative Fiction Film:

Documentary and Avant-garde Films

I.    Comparison of the three modes of filmmaking

        A.    Difference from commercial filmmaking

                1.    Purpose

                        a.       Profitability primary purpose of commercial film

                        b.        Documentaries focus on contemporary or historical events

                        c.        Purpose may be education, reform, capturing humor or pathos of everyday life

                        d.        Not always to make profit; just to survive

                        e.        Avant-garde seeks to explore artistic and technological aspects of film; not storytelling

                        f.        A-G films often challenge conventional thinking about politics, culture, gender, race and sexuality

                        g.        Not produced in Hollywood using traditional Hollywood structures

                        h.        A-G films should not be confused with independent films; indy films are not necessarily non-commercial

                2.    Mode

                3.    Exhibition Venues

                4.    Formal Organization

                5.    Visual Style

II.    Documentary Film "The Creative Treatment of Actuality"

        A.   Most films made before 1907 were not narrative fiction, but documentary

        B.    Term "documentary:" coined in 1920s by John Grierson who called them the creative treatment of actuality

                 1.    Narrative Documentaries

III.    Documentary Form

        A.    Simplest argument a documentary film can make is that the images in the film are real and the film has captures some    aspect of existence that is worthy of contemplation

        B.    Use rhetorical devices such as ethos pathos logos

        C.    Arguments often made through images (winged migration)

        1.    Voice of Authority

                a.    Propoganda Films

                b.    Incovenient Truth (Gore)

        2.    Talking Heads and Director-Participant

                a.    Verbal testimony by participants

        3.    Direct Cinema

        4.    Self-Reflexive Documentary

        5.    The Mockumentary

IV.    Ethics and Ethnography

V.    Avant-garde Film

        A.    Surrealist Cinema

        B.    Abstract Film

        C.    The City Symphony

        D.    Structuralist Film

        E.    The Compilation Film

VI.    Conducting Research on Documentary and Avant-garde Films