The Five Types of Documentaries

People have pondered over what makes a documentary a documentary for years. Obviously it is supposed to be unstaged, non-fiction, and an objective account of real life events, but the counterpoint is raised that it is impossible to be truly objective in film because every angle, cut, editing choice, etc. in essence makes the material subjective. Bill Nichols, American film critic and theoretician, came up with the explanation that there are different types of documentaries that use different techniques and serve differing purposes. One type is expository documentaries which have an incorporeal voiceover that either discloses information that the images don’t display or explains things the pictures do show but that are not common knowledge. Observational documentaries, on the contrary, have no voiceovers, interviews, or intertitles. Rather it aims to observe real life events in real time with the filmmaker being as uninvolved (in the events themselves) as possible. In this way, observational documentaries might be closest to what we normally think of for documentaries: a relatively unbiased documentation of real life events as they unfold. This completely juxtaposes with interactive documentaries, which purposely make the presence of the filmmaker known. It focuses around interviews (with the filmmaker as the interviewer) and people’s interactions with him or her on camera. The filmmaker can also coax certain topics and comments from the interviewees by purposely bringing it up in the interviews. Reflexive documentaries focus less on the people or events filmed and more on the filming process/way they are filmed. It is respectable, though, that they are openly showing how manipulated everything that is filmed is; they embrace the subjectivity. The final type of documentary is performative. Performative goes even further in stressing subjectivity by stressing style and appearing similar to a fiction film. Overall, it is clear that documentaries are not ‘one thing’ or ‘one way.’ Though they have common characteristics that make them all documentaries, they can be divided into five categories that each have their own approach and style.