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Documentary may never be wholly objective. Even if not attempting to create a direct or explicit argument, a documentary film’s structure is used to persuade the audience towards a particular viewpoint. An example of this may be seen in Brian Bolster’s 2014 film, One Year Lease, which presents a series of answering machine messages from an insistent landlady. Whilst providing no direct commentary on the subject, the film’s structuring ensures that the viewer is left with the film maker’s intended impression. Here, phone messages and excerpts from phone messages, are played in quick succession. This editing, in combination with the naturally fast pace of the landlady’s speech, portray the the subject as incessant, overly-invested and absurd. If edited in a different way, the landlady might have been portrayed in a different light. The film’s use of imagery further aids in the creation of the subject, as Bolster employs simple, clean, aesthetics with predominantly still or locked off shots, that contrast with the fast-paced audio in order to create a juxtaposition that highlights and ultimately heightens the near manic nature of the subject’s phone messages. All of this furthers the characterisation of the subject and the director’s intention in convincing the audience the strangeness of the situation that he was placed in.

One Year Lease is furthermore an example of the way in which of
documentary films are often created through a blend of documentary genres, as it falls in between the categories of compilation film, direct cinema and portrait, lending itself to synthetic documentary, which combines aspects of these to create the film. This is the case for many documentary films, such as Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man, which pieces together documentary footage from the film’s late subject, original interviews with his friends and family, as well as aspects of nature and portrait documentary to create a synthetic film which is a blend of all of many different genres into one cohesive whole.