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What Makes Documentaries Engaging and Persuasive?

Deneisha Donalds

Karimah Noble

The Challenge of Persuasion

Common Issues, Recurring Topics

The Triangle of Communication

Three Classic Divisions of Rhetoric that Documentaries Address

  • It is debated concepts and contested issues that documentaries routinely address (Nichols 101).

  • Concepts and issues over which there is appreciable social concern or debate or experiences to which the filmmaker can contribute a distinct perspective (Nichols 101).

Ex: Trouble the Water (2008) is an

inclusive look at what it took for Kim

and Scott Roberts to survive

Hurricane Katrina before any external

assistance arrived.

  • Documentary films mount an effort to convince, persuade, or predispose us to a particular view of the world we have in common...may entertain or please, but does so in relation to rhetoric or persuasive effort aimed at the existing social world (Nichols 104).

  • Documentary not only activates our aesthetic awareness, it also activates our social consciousness (104).

  • If an issue has not yet been definitively decided, or if agreement cannot be definitively achieved, documentary film is one important means for disposing us to see that issue from a specific perspective (105).

Divisions of Rhetoric (cont.)

Concrete Events and Abstract Concepts

For every documentary there are at least three stories that intertwine:

  • The Filmmaker's- We often want to consider a filmmaker's previous work and continuing preoccupations, how he/she might understand and explain his/her intentions or motives, and how these considerations relate to the general social context in which the work was made (Nichols 95).
  • The Film's- What the film reveals about the relationship between filmmaker and subject and what, for documentary, the film reveals about the world we occupy (Nichols 96).
  • The Audience's- Every viewer comes to a film with perspective and motives based on previous experience...as the audience we find what we want, or need, to find in films. Documentaries often seek to tap into the assumptions and expectations we bring to them as a way of establishing rapport rather than revulsion or projection (Nichols 96-97).

1. Deliberative: What to Do?

  • Domain of encouraging or discouraging, exhorting or dissuading others on a course of public action. Political issues of social policy such as war, welfare, conservation, abortion, artificial reproduction,

national identity, and international relations belong

to this domain (Nichols105).

Ex: An Inconvenient Truth (2006) calls for a halt to

global warming.

2. Judicial or Historical: What Really Happened?

  • Domain of accusing or defending, justifying or criticizing previous actions (Nichols 105).
  • Questions of fact and interpretation, where

guilt or innocence is at stake in relation to the

law and truth or falsehood is at stake in

relation to history (105).

Ex: Eyes on the Prize (1987, 1990) about the

civil rights movement in the U.S.

  • The concepts and issues documentaries are about are almost always abstract and invisible. Ex: We cannot film "fear", "obedience", or "pain" directly, but we can film specific situations that give visible embodiment to these concepts (Nichols 99).

  • The documentary value of nonfiction films lies in how they give visual, and audible, representation to topics for which our written

or spoken language gives us concepts (99).

Ex: S21:The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), reexamines

what happen a notorious prison in which thousands of

Cambodians perished. The film gives evidence of what

pain, suffering, and dignity look and feel like at the level

of personal experience (99).

The Power of Metaphor

  • Metaphors involves our own physical or experiential encounter with a situation rather than our own knowledge of the standard definition. (Nichols 109)
  • Metaphors draws on physical orientation to assign values to social concepts (Nichols 109).
  • Many metaphors have direct, tangible experience but link abstract and intangible together (Nichols 109).

Divisions of Rhetoric (Cont.)

The Power of Metaphor (cont.d)

Metaphorical representationd help us understand what values to attach to social practices (Nichols, 110)

Documentaries help the audience understand how others experience situations and events that fall into catergories that they can relate to, or the practices the audience can share as well.

Examples such as biography, autobiography, gender and sexuality, family, war, economics, nationality, class, power, etc.

3. Commemorative or Critical: What Is He or She Really Like?

  • Assigns praise or blame to others (or a mix of both) and evokes qualities and established attitudes toward individuals and their accomplishments...relies on the impression of fairness and accuracy rather than scrupulous adherence to fact (Nichols107).
  • Seeks to render people, places, and things

in pleasing or off-putting tonalities so that

we may deem them worthy of emulation

and respect or demonization and rejection

(107).

Ex: Paris is Burning (1990), a sympathetic and

respectful description of the Black and Latino

urban gay subculture of masquerade and performance.

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