A2 Film Expository Documentary

Expository documentary

Voice-of-God commentary and poetic perspectives sought to disclose information about the historical world itself and to see that world afresh, even if these views came to seem romantic and didactic.

Bill Nichols' definition of expository documentary emphasises its typical characteristics:

·       a disembodied (separate or free) and authoritative voiceover commentary

·       combined with a series of images that aim to be descriptive and informative.

The aim of the expository documentary is to be descriptive and informative, or to provide a particular argument.

For example, it may celebrate a set of common values, or a particular lifestyle. Coalface celebrates a day in the life of the miner.

Expository documentary is the 'classic' mode of documentary, which is now more commonly used in TV documentaries, where abstract information is conveyed via the voiceover commentary.

The British documentary film movement (1927-39), founded by John Grierson, made expository documentaries that were also poetic and aesthetic, rather than simply descriptive and informative.

The most prestigious films of the movement include Alberto Cavalcanti's Coalface (1935), John Grierson's Drifters (1929), Humphrey Jennings' Spare Time (1939), Harry Watt's North Sea (1938), Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon (1939) and Watt and Wright's Night Mail (1936).

The aim of all these documentaries was to function as a public service.

The middle-class bias is particularly evident in the way the movement represented the working classes, the film makers are glorifying the working classes, exalting them by presenting them as heroic labourers, rather than exploited, degraded and poorly paid workers, living with extreme social hardships.

Why are they considered poetic.

But others go far beyond the aim of being descriptive and informative. In a sequence depicting the miners underground, a montage of shots contrasts the half-naked bodies of the miners with the coal and the machinery. The close-ups of the miners' bodies in particular aim to represent their work as a heroic struggle against nature.

This reading is strongly reinforced by the soundtrack, which consists of singing (the 'Colliers' chant' by W.H. Auden) and orchestral sound effects (the musical score was written by Benjamin Britten).