Chapter Nine

Chapter 9: How Can We Write Effectively about Documentary?

            Within this chapter Nichols discusses how to effectively write about Documentaries. It gives a sharper focus to writing about documentary film, however, the basic principles pertain to almost any research topic in the humanities. Most important to successful writing is having a purpose. A specific purpose, such as defending a position, advancing a point of view, or exploring an issue, endows an essay with interest.

The first step to writing an essay is preparation. Watching the documentary is the most obvious preparation, however, watching it more than once is also important. With the second viewing the process of asking and thinking about what you see becomes more central. Some viewers like to make notes but others find it too distracting, however, on the repeat viewing note provide the raw material that would later support critical writing about the film. Notes can track things such as:

·      The chronology of scenes (what comes first, second, and so on).

·      The types of camera shots (wide angle, telephoto, tracking shots, zooms, composition within the frame, etc.).

·      Editing techniques (continuity editing, point-of-view shots, unusual juxtapositions or jumps in time and space). 

·      The role of speech (dialogue, commentary), written words (titles, subtitles, inter-titles), music or sound effect in a scene.

·      Character development: how the film makes choices to enhance our sense of individual characters or personalities (camera angle, editing, organization of scenes, selection of what is said, and, possibility hints as to what is left unsaid or omitted.)

·      Rhetorical technique (how the film makes itself seem credible, convincing, and compelling, or not).

·      Modes and models (what modes and models the film relies on to organize itself and how it inflects them in a distinct way).

·      Other unusual qualities such as the degree of acknowledged presence of the filmmaker in scenes and the political perspective, if any, that the film conveys.

·      Aesthetic or emotional response to specific qualities of the film and what seems to prompt them in terms of technique of subject matter. (Nichols 254-255)

Taking notes is selective because you can only pay attention to so many aspects of the film. You may choose to focus on the camera style or poetic editing, on the filmmaker’s own presence or the development of social actors as complex characters, however, we can’t concentrate on everything at once.  One important consequence: there is no need to summarize the plot, in film criticism.

When conducting research you should utilize two distinct sources of research material, the World Wide Web and the library. Each offers a great deal of information in three different forms, which are primary source, secondary source, and tertiary source materials.