It took the makers 10 years to make this documentary series and they had it turned down by many different production companies including HBO Entertainment. The creators feel that the documentary is fair on both sides and get across the message really well.
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Difference between documentary and drama:
Documentary
- Unscripted (but often relies on classic narrative structure
- employs real people (but often requires a directed 'performance' element)
- typically shot handheld (but often employs classical fixed camera techniques)
- Does not use mise en scene (but still relies on classical precepts of framing composition and lighting)
Drama
- Narrative/dialogue script-driven (but can be improvised)
- Performance-led by professional actors (but can employ non-actors and improvisation)
- Typically employs classical Hollywood camera techniques (but can use documentary 'verité' style)
- Uses formal Hollywood mise en scene and often studio sets (but can opt for documentary style of 'real' locations and natural lighting)
- Documentary in purest sense is filmed observation. A recording or 'document' of reality. Primarily for informing rather than escapist entertainment
- Term first coined by Scottish filmmaker John Grierson (regarded as 'father of British documentary) in 1926
- Grierson described documentary as 'the creative treatment of actuality'
Documentary formats
Formal documentary:
- Observational (excluded)
- current affairs/factual (making a murderer, content driven)
- polemic (adam curtis)
uses documentary form, techniques and conventions to educate, debate and inform content
Hybrid documentary:
- Reality (benefits street)
- Scripted reality (TOWIE)
- Drama-documentary (man on wire, touching the void)
Narrative modes
- Expository - emphasises rhetoric and information, The classic 'voice of god/current affairs/BBC documentary
- Observational - classic 'fly on the wall'. Typically no voiceover, music or other interventions (maysles brothers)
- Participatory - Onscreen relationship between filmmaker and subject, usually via interview (louis theroux)
- Reflexive - makes viewer aware of filmmaking process. seeks to challenge our assumptions (Nick Broomfield)
- Poetic - artistic montage-based. rely on express editing of sound and image rather than classical continuity (adam curtis)
- Performative - filmmaker/subject conveys personal experience (michael moore)
Making a Murderer - content
- objective expository mode - retelling of historical story
- subject relies heavily on evidentiary support (graphic and visual archive, interview)
Subjective tension in aesthetic approach
- uses of 'reconstruction' beach POV sequence, crime re-enactment through graphic montage
- use of music - decried by 'pure documentary' advocates as emotional manipulation
Critical approaches to documentary
Realism/naturalism
- the presentation of art as simulacrum of world as exists: in documentary through unintrusive filming (handheld, natural lighting, no music, etc.) used to convey notions of authenticity, truth and representation
- key tenet of observational mode ('fly-on-the-wall', cinéma vérité, direct cinema): documentary is about capturing and showing 'real life' as it happens
- antithesis of 'reality television', which uses similar techniques and conventions but is for entertainment rather than polemic
Mediation and representation
- what we see is NOT objective reality or truth, but firstly the filmmakers version: what they have mediated
- the process of mediation - the editorial decision-making-process - directly affects Representation: through judgement and selection editorialises how gender, race and class are presented
- we as the audience are also complicit in mediation, through our understanding and reading of media texts (semiotics, ideology)
Reception theory
- how we as the audience mediate texts and factors that might influence us
- argues cultural text has no inherent meaning in and of itself. Instead, meaning is created as the viewer watches and processes the film
- factors include elements of the viewers personal identity, the exhibition environment and preconceived notions of programmes genre and production
Ideology
- a set of opinions, values, beliefs and assumptions that one uses to think about and relate to the world
- ideology influences both context in which the documentary is produced and how it is received
- ideology is commonly represented in documentary and factual television through political bias (liberal left-wing agenda, marxist and nazi propaganda)
Documentary and propaganda
- ideological filmmaking often creates tension between content and form
- vertov's 'man with a movie camera' (1929) - modernist marxist ideology, but playfully reflexive
- Leni Riefenstahl's 'Olympia' (1938) - Nazi ideology of aryan supremacy, but visually elegant and poetic
Making a Murderer - context
- formal realist approach to location filming (real people in real places) but mediates story through stylised montage sequences and music
- conventional representation of contributors in work or home environments
- filmmakers avoid polemic but accused of bias in not including some participants and facts/evidence. They assert series is "thorough, accurate and fair"
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