Constructing Reality essays

Constructing Reality essays A documentary is a piece of work presenting political, social, or historical subjects in a factual and informative manner. I believe a proper documentary should present facts objectively without prejudices, should not combine fiction with factual information, and must be truthful. The truth presented in a documentary should be the whole truth, not just a bias presentation of selective information. Through our Constructing Reality unit we have learned this is not the case, and that documentaries can be bias and manipulated into the filmmakers creative vision of reality. A documentary should consist of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration. To preserve the truth of a story a documentary should not present factual evidence in the form of a re-creation like in Our Marilyn. Brenda Longfellow (the director) juxtaposed images of Marilyn Monroe with what I believed was genuine footage of Marilyn Bell swimming across Lake Ontario. The genuine footage was in actuality film of Brenda Longfellow which was then re-worked to appear antique and authentic. This re-creation may seem small and insignificant but it is still the filmmakers assumption of how factual events occurred. I feel re-creations would be more acceptable in docu-dramas then in a true documentary, because simply they dilute the truth and guess specific details. It is astonishingly simple how a good editor can create a fictional story by carefully arranging and manipulating reliable and factual information. This point is best illustrated in The Edit, a film showing how two different people can manipulate footage into different poles of the reality. The Edit was fascinating in that the simple removing of keys words and parts of a conversation can dramatically alter the perception we have of the man being interrogated. Editing especially in interviews should have guidelines to ensure fairness and pre...