Battlefields and Big Macs Documentaries a Comparative

Battlefields and Big Macs

Documentaries

A Comparative Analysis of Documentary Styles

The role of documentary film in helping to shape and inform American culture has become increasingly apparent, especially in the last decade. The ability of nearly anyone to create and distribute documentaries cheaply and effectively using home computer software and video sharing sites like YouTube has created a diverse body of documentaries available with the click of a button. They are not all good, not all accurate, and some may not even be ethically or legally sound, but if they are powerful enough and relevant enough, they can move people and even governments to act. We have seen this recently with the independently produced documentary "Kony 2012," a 29-minute film that portrays the atrocities committed by Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony. Posted on YouTube in early March, the film got over 100 million hits in one week, and prompted renewed focus by the U.S. Congress to find and capture Kony.

Part of what makes documentaries so powerful is their unique mix of cold fact and human drama. A filmmaker's talent at balancing these two forces is often the secret behind a successful documentary. This balance can be difficult to achieve, however, in expository documentaries, where the focus is on offering accurate and thorough information in a way that still resonates emotionally with the viewer. One beautiful example of a successful expository documentary is Ken Burn's series The Civil War, which first aired on PBS in the fall of 1990. There is no question that the film is expository in nature -- Burn was aiming to present as much detail about the war as accurately as possible, with no apparent agenda but to enlighten the viewer. However, it was important to Burns that he also present what he called the "emotional archaeology" of the war as well as the facts and figures (Burns 2002).

In order to portray this emotional landscape while still staying true to the expository format, Burns relied heavily on images, music, and dramatic readings to enliven and enrich the historical facts. Voiceovers of actors reading first person accounts and letters from the war provide a poignant emotional landscape behind the major battles and casualty statistics. Images constantly accompany the information -- for the most part still photographs from the period. The end product is a rich sensory tapestry that conveys both the information and the humanity behind the information at the same time.

Another documentary that manages to balance information and human engagement well but in a style far removed from Ken Burns' is the 2004 film Supersize Me, directed by Morgan Spurlock and still ranked as one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time (Bernard 2011). In this investigative documentary, Spurlock subjected himself to one month of eating nothing but McDonald's in order to see what effect such a diet would have on a healthy body. In the area of emotional drama, Spurlock had an edge on Burns because of the nature of investigative documentaries. The search for information has an element of drama built into it that the simple presentation of information does not.