It seems to me that we struggled as a class to define “documentary”. We mentioned how some documentaries suggest an opinion while others are strictly factual, how some are just talking heads while others are in the form of a movie (Charlie Wilson’s War, Game Change, etc.), or even how some are giving you new information about a common item or occurrence in our lives while others are introducing us to an issue totally foreign to us. There’s this diversity in “documentaries” that made it hard for us to decide what they were in only a few words. Hmm… maybe there are different forms of documentaries… so why do we have to do that?
Compare the documentary to literature or film. Some documentaries suggest or subtly imply an opinion. Can’t I say the same thing about movies? Does Supersize Me suggest an opinion any more than Doubt or Crimes and Misdemeanors? Some documentaries are in the form of a story and some are strictly factual. Okay. Books. We have non-fiction. We have historical novels.
If we asked the class “what makes a good book” instead, or to even define what that is, it wouldn’t at all be the same conversation. No one would disagree that documentaries and books have similarities, but when people think about just “books”, they think of that as broad, while a “documentary” is a very specific form of film. Well I disagree. Look, I love that we break “books” down into fiction, non-fiction, historical-fiction, sci-fi, romance, and all the rest. You can think of two books that would definitely be in two totally different sections because they’re so different. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau and Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling. But we could do the same for film, and we could even do the same for documentaries. America: The Story of Us is a re-enactment film with talking heads here and there, Iranian Taboo is a series of real, graphic scenes to desensitize Iranians about a domestic social issue, and Charlie Wilson’s War is a Hollywood movie starring Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman (but with no slight deviation from historical truth).
Though documentaries are a subform of film, they still come in different ways. Films and books are subforms of literature, so are you going to tell me they're the same? Can you summarize them both as one thing in only a few words?
