Representation: REALITY!!!!

Documentary modes : Participatory

The engagement between film maker and the subject is recorded with the film maker having being actively engaged with the subject. The film maker asking questions of their subjects, sharing an experience, so the information is coming directly from the subject and is heavily reliant on the honesty of the witness.


‘participatory documentary gives us a sense of what it is like for the film maker to be given situation and how the situation alters as a result. The types and degrees of alteration help define variations within the participatory mode of documentary’ (2001: 116)


This is evident in Kurt & Courtney by Nicholas Broomfield, where he interviews people who know Kurt and Courtney (even interviewing Courtney’s dad) yet from the start of this documentary you get a sense of Broomfield’s opinion on Kurt & Courtney due to the way he asks questions and his interaction with the people he’s interviewing.


http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ewyVuYfp_yo


‘Another is the work of Nicholas Broomfield, who adopts a brasher, more confrontational - if not arrogant - style in his Kurt & Courtney (1998) : his exasperation with Courtney loves exclusiveness despite unsubstantiated suspicions of her complicity in Kurt Cobain’s death compels Broomfield to film his own, apparently spontaneous denunciation of her at a ceremonial dinner sponsored by the American civil liberties union’ (2001: 119)

Nichols, B. (2001) introduction to documentary, Bloomington: Indiana university press.