An Introduction to Film

editing software iMovie and openly identified it as

the “Ken Burns Effect.”

Many documentaries investigate events that

happened in the past, but some of these cinematic

investigations are more personal than historical.

The approach of films like Andrew Jarecki’s Cap-

turing the Friedmans(2003) rejects presenting a

single “factual” interpretative stance in favor of

offering a more ambiguous range of often-conflicting

accounts. Capturing the Friedmansexplores accusa-

tions of child molestation leveled at Arnold Friedman

and his teenage son, Jesse, from multiple perspec-

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Direct cinemaDocumentaries made in the style known as

direct cinema attempt to immerse the viewer in an

experience as close as is cinematically possible to

witnessing events as an invisible observer. Direct-cinema

films like Albert and David Maysles’s Grey Gardens(1975;

with codirectors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer) seek to

avoid conventional documentary techniques such as

interviews and voice-over narration, and instead rely on very

small crews and lightweight, handheld camera and sound

equipment to capture the action as unobtrusively as

possible. As they filmed Grey Gardens, the Maysleses

observed that their extroverted subject “Little Edie” Beale

was becoming increasingly more interested in performing

for the filmmakers than in ignoring their presence. Some

direct-cinema purists may have discouraged or deleted her

behavior, but the Maysleses recognized Edie’s need for

recognition, and the delusions that fueled it, as a crucial

part of her reality. The filmmakers acknowledged their own

role in the situation by incorporating their own image (as

captured in a mirror) into the movie.

tives through a collage of home movies, archival

media coverage, and interviews with both family

members and alleged victims.

Director Errol Morris incorporates cinematic

techniques normally associated with highly stylized

narrative and experimental films into the typically

spartan documentary form. Fast, Cheap & Out of Con-

trol(1997) implies profound associations between

his seemingly diverse subjects—a topiary gardener,

a lion tamer, a robotics researcher, and a scientist

studying naked mole rats—by intercutting interviews

of all four men and lacing the movie with artfully

crafted extreme close-ups, beautiful slow-motion

effects, footage from old adventure films, abstracted

reenactments, and original music by Caleb Samp-

son. Morris is famous for conducting his interviews

using an Interrotron, a device of his own invention

that projects the director’s face onto a glass plate

placed over the camera lens. The apparatus allows

the subject to address responses directly into the

lens, which establishes direct eye contact with the

viewer.

Experimental Movies

Experimental is the most difficult of all types of

movies to define with any precision, in part

because experimental filmmakers actively seek to

TYPES OF MOVIES 75