A documentary, like animation or experiential films, is more of a category for film type rather than any specific genre. While a documentary can cover virtually any subject, when a film is labeled as documentary, viewers have an expectation that they will see factual information from the real world. It’s up to the documentary filmmaker to provide how that information will be presented. While events may be filmed in real time, visual aids or staged recreations of actual events can convey factual information all the same. Recreations of events rely on viewers’ trust in the filmmaker to accurately depict reality, when the documentary fails to do so the film’s deemed inaccurate but remains a documentary. Further, films like biopics might represent reality to a tee, but it takes a self aware declaration to codify a film as a documentary.

Documentaries can further be classified as compilation documentary, direct-cinema documentary, nature documentary, or portrait documentary. These categories are not mutually exclusive, and those documentaries that employ multiple approaches are called synthetic documentaries, popular in television journalism. A famous synthetic documentary Grizzly Man employs features of both portrait and nature documentary following Timothy Treadwell and his death defying relationship with wild Alaskan Grizzlies.

While many documentaries employ a narrative based form, there are also those that are structured by category or around a specific argument; these are called categorical form and rhetorical form documentaries respectively. Categorical form relies on filmmakers choosing enticing categories to effectively convey referential meaning, explicit meaning, implicit meaning, and symptomatic meaning through their film. There is a dynamic relationship in categorical form between what the filmmaker presents and how the viewer interprets it to extract different types of meaning. Rhetorical form goes beyond the categorical as it attempts to build an argument on a subject. It is defined by addressing its stance to the viewer, focusing on a non-scientifically defined fact, and driving home an opinion that it wants the viewer to choose to believe. Approaches to rhetorical form rely on guiding a viewer with feelings, enthymemes, or general observations rather than cold hard facts. Having taken the anthropology course Ancient Aliens at Emory, I noticed conspiracy documentaries of the sort rely heavily on rhetorical form. Documentaries like Ancient Aliens use observations and feelings of wonder to guide viewer speculation rather than explicitly stating alternative ideas about archaeological mysteries as fact.

Alternatively, films like Jennie Livingston’s 1990 Paris is Burning employ a journalistic direct cinema approach to provide insight into the marginalized LGBTQ communities of  New York in the 1980s. This powerful film displays scenes of both participant observation in ballrooms as well as interviews with subjects whom Livingston built a candid relationship with to speak on social issues of the time. The massively successful project achieved its goal of social transparency but gave rise to debate on the responsibilities of documentary filmmakers. While not designed to purely generate profit, documentaries do amass revenue which is generally not to be shared with participants in order to avoid bias. Documentaries toe the boundaries of entertainment and education retaining key elements of blockbuster production while wholly omitting others, like actor compensation. It’s important to remember that a documentary is a film like any other, but with the express value of conveying some type of concrete meaning. Their value is not in the money they generate, but rather the impact they effect presenting factual information from the real world.