Just as Bill Nichols claims “what happens in front of the camera becomes an index of the nature of interaction between filmmaker and subject”. One of the documentary modes that excites me is the participatory mode. As it’s name suggests, the participatory mode often means that the director or the filmmaker becomes part of the documentary. With further research, I found this mode has more hallmarks which need to be discussed.
Documentaries are an art of visual communication, they should be easily understood by the audience. Due to different subjects and knowledge fields, sometimes the audience may find it hard to understand the topic or details about a documentary. At this time, no one is more aware of the subject of a documentary than the director himself. A detailed explanation by a filmmaker helps audiences understand some interesting parts of the documentary. For example, in the TV documentary “Man vs. Wild”, a major feature is the filmmaker Bear Grylls’s commentary.
Man vs. Wild (Discovery Channel, 2006)
The second point that I want to claim is the participatory mode’s artistry. As we know, the purpose of the documentary is recording facts. However, no documentary can avoid the individual angle of the director. Sometimes the individual angle decreases the reliability of a documentary, but on the contrary, a charismatic individual perspective may be the biggest characteristic of the documentary. Filmmakers have different ways of achieving this goal. For example, in the documentary “Living with Michael Jackson“(Martin Bashir, 2003), the filmmaker Martin Bashir uses his professional interviewing skills to ask Michael Jackson many controversial questions on behalf of the audience. Furthermore, in the documentary “The Cove“, the two major filmmakers Louie Psihoyos and Richard O’Barry engaged in many dangerous activities involved in disclosing the dolphin slaughter which happened in the TaiJI area of Japan.
The Cove (Louie Psihoyos& Richard O’Barry, 2009)
I like the participatory mode because it is a good way of balancing the two goals of the documentary, recording facts and showing the filmmaker’s perspective. However, filmmakers should use multiple modes to build the documentary rather than just one mode. In the documentary “The Cove” not only the participatory mode was used, but also some realistic and poetic scenes proved that the expository mode and the poetic mode play important roles in this documentary.
The two different style scene about the dolphin slaughter (The Cove, 2009)
Alex of Ithaca 