Research in progress, March 24, 2024
Times have changed. For everyone, from snobbish cineastes to casual moviegoers, documentaries have gone from being a dirty word to the status of de rigueur.
For the past three decades (from Hoop Dreams on), documentaries, or non-fiction, have taken hold of the hearts and minds of the American public.
Functions:
Docus steer through the hottest issues of our times.
Docus probe the lives of complex individuals
Docus bring the past into focus and impact the present
Docus reveal the most profound and intricate dramas in actual lives, events and people’s lives.
Next to foreign films, its a category that alternates orphan and bastard status; its art is often ignored.
Docus can gather, articulate, preserve reality
Boggs, 462
Viewers go to docus with different expectations, demanding more from their genre
True docus have a passion for what they find in images and sounds–which always seems to them more meaningful than anything they can invent.
Docu filmmakers function as explorers, chroniclers, prophets, painters, catalysts.
But the methods used to utilize “discovered” images and sounds are different.
TG: The genre’s need to break free of the boundaries of didactics (the need to teach lessons).
At one level, the vision may be journalistic; at another, it may rise to poetry; its artistic quality may be in the mere lucidity of its exposition.”
Docus are both elemental and unique, underfinanced, underpublicized, underrated
Video revolution helped (manifest in Hoop Dreams)
