Analysis Reflection #4 Question 4

Question 4.

Select from one of the readings and briefly describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that interest you, something you could apply to your own documentary.

1. Observational film makers- When making a documentary I always assumed I must ask questions and have people respond to said questions and have a sort of story line for my documentary. However, I never put much thought into observational documentary. You can still have a story line and something to follow but the idea of being a fly on the wall and just documenting what you see really interests me as it seems more real. “The Canadian filmmakers were directly influenced by the street photography of Henri Cartier- Bresson, which mixed formal composition and spontaneity” (pg.25) I like the idea of spontaneous documenting and would very much like to include some spontaneous footage in my documentary.

2. Mise-en-scene of Speech in documentary- I never took accents into consideration to much when it comes to fiction films. Films usually stick to similar accents to keep consitency and avoid confusion and when they include a different accent it’s because they want it to be obvious that this character is from a certain place. However with documentary characters can demonstrate a wider variety of accents, dialects and speech. Another part concerning speech that really interested me is the difference in spoken language and written language. There is a lot more natural conversation in documentaries with people cutting each other off, speaking over one another all natural parts of real conversation, whereas, in fiction film, conversation is very controlled.