walk the picket lines, and hold their families and
communities together. While direct cinema can
help reveal a subject in profound and unexpected
ways, this technique may not remove the narrative
voice and perspective as much as hide it or transfer
its function to the more “invisible” power of other
filmmaking systems. The editing process, for
example, can include and exclude materials, ironi-
cally juxtapose people, events, and ideas, and
arrange and order reality to suit the filmmaker’s
perspective.
Documentary filmmakers continue to employ
conventional formal elements such as interviews,
voice-over narration, and archival footage in inno-
vative ways to create new and compelling nonfic-
tion forms. Director Ken Burns seeks to bring
history alive by presenting historical documents,
archival photographs, painterly location shots, and
posed artifacts to public-television audiences in a
formalized style very different from the handheld
“fly on the wall” perspective offered by direct-
cinema documentaries. He has been known to film
thousands of historical photographs in his signa-
ture manner, where the camera glides and the
framing tightens; such “dramatic” camera move-
ments emphasize details and link them to the nar-
ration and historical observations. Burns’s use of
the effect became so ubiquitous that Apple com-
puters incorporated it into their home-movie-74 CHAPTER 3TYPES OF MOVIES
123Documentary storytellingMany documentary
filmmakers select subjects that offer potential narrative
development. The resulting movie may be considered
factual, or even persuasive in some ways. But the content
need not be “important.” Rather, the movie’s primary intent
is to entertain and involve audiences with the struggles of
goal-driven protagonists. The efforts of a hapless but
relentless Wisconsin filmmaker to marshal the resources and
support necessary to complete a low-budget horror film is
the subject of Chris Smith’s American Movie(1999) [1]. S. R.
Bindler’s Hands on a Hard Body(1997) follows twenty-four
desperate contestants through a grueling and often
dehumanizing endurance contest to win a new pickup truck
[2]. Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
(2007) explores the strange, obsessive world of classic-
arcade-game enthusiasts by chronicling the efforts of high-
school math teacher Steve Wiebe’s attempts to achieve the
official world-record score in Donkey Kong, despite the
efforts of the competitive gaming establishment to preserve
that distinction for their hero, Billy Mitchell [3].