What is the problem behind documentaries?

The main issue surrounding documentary ‘truth’ is that they’re inherently bias, created in order to manipulate the viewer and pursuade them about a specific subject. This means that events and problems are often overexaggerated or only one side of the argument is presented to the audience, in order to convince the viewer. All stages of production work to convey the directors main intentions, from cinematography and lighting to sound and editing. However this often goes against the main intentions of the director, to provide the truth in order to properly inform audiences, as these production stages work to create an overall atmosphere, in order to truly convince the audience. This often inadvertantly results in an alteration of the truth, creating bias.

Example:

Here is an example of a documentarty short which has a manipulated truth, as the director uses a combination of poetic cinematography alongside the expository style of interview in order to make the audience feel sorry for the interviewee’s. This causes them to side with the directors argument, despite only hearing one side of it. As the audience, we don’t know why the town was being demolished, or what was being offered to them as a result of giving up their house. Which perfectly explains how the opinions of the audience have been manipulated in order to convey the argument and create an overall emotional atmosphere.

“John Grierson’s definition of documentary filmmaking – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ – summarises its overarching fallacy. The fallacy being that documentaries often purport to reveal truths, however by the very act of documenting actuality, the director inadvertently alters its ‘truth’.”

Harvard Referencing

www.mediafactory.org.au. (n.d.). – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ |. [online] Available at: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/arielle-richards/2018/03/05/18-1-the-creative-treatment-of-actuality/.