# Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary Film. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2010, pp.179-194
- The participatory mode has antecedents in other media and disciplines
- Doc filmmakers also go into the field, they, too, live among others and speak about or represent what they experience
- The participatory mode as Nichols describes it is where the “filmmaker interacts with his or her social actors and participates in shaping what happens before the camera” (Nichols 151). This mode became popular around 1960 when new technology allowed for sync sound recording.
- Nichols describes the reflexive documentary mode as it “calls attention to the conventions of documentary filmmaking and sometimes of methodologies such as fieldwork or interview”
# Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary Film. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2010, pp 194-199 https://login.ezproxy.lib. rmit.edu.au/login?url=http:// www.rmit.eblib.com.au.ezproxy. lib.rmit.edu.au/patron/Read. aspx?p=624329
- Reflexive mode – the process of negotiation between filmmaker and viewer become the focus of attention for the reflexive mode – we attend to the filmmakers engagement with us, speaking not only about the historical world but about the problems and issues of representing it as well
- Reflexive documentaries ask us to see documentary for what it is: a construct of representation
- Depends on the viewers neglect of his or her actual situation, in front of a movie screen, interpreting a film, in favour of imaginary access to the events shown on the screen if it is only these events that require interpretation, not the film
- Reflexive documentaries tackle issues posed by realism as a style – realism seems to provide unproblematic access to the world; it takes form as physical, psychological and emotional realism
- Reflexive: challenged these techniques and conventions
- Reflexive prods the viewer to a heightened form of consciousness about his or her relation to a documentary and what it represents
N.A. “The Lies Stripped Bare.” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 24, 2004, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/23/1090464851887.html accessed 17/2/12
- narrates her friendship with “Dalia”, a spirited and ambitious girl whose eyes “betrayed a hint of conspiratorial glee”. According to the book, Khouri and Dalia opened a unisex hair salon, N & D’s, in the Jordanian capital of Amman in 1990. They worked under the eye of male relatives, but secretly Dalia, a Muslim, fell in love and pursued a relationship with “Michael”, a Christian client.
- When the men of her family discovered this chaste but taboo affair across religious lines, Dalia’s father stabbed her to death. A terrified but determined Khouri was smuggled out of the country with Michael’s help. She wrote her book in internet cafes in Athens, moved to Australia with the help of her publisher Random House, and now lives in a secret location in Queensland because she fears for her life.
