“Kon-Tiki”. It is the name of the raft that took Thor Heyerdahl and his research team on an expedition across the pacific ocean. They sailed from the coast of South America all the way to a small system of polynesian islands. Not only was this expedition recorded in writing it was also recorded on videotape and subsequently turned into a documentary which went on to win an oscar. Thor Heyerdahl took on this expedition to try and prove that the native people of South America could have settled in Polynesia.
One could compare this work to that of “Nanook of the North”, by Robert Flaherty in 1922. Although that one was silent and seemed more theatrical than scholarly in style, it still was aimed to educate a mass audience about ‘Nanook’ and his people, what their
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It executes the core essence of the expository mode of documentary film. Since it focuses on portraying reality, or the reality of a subject matter. The point of “Kontiki” is just that. It focuses of showing the reality of an anthropologist, trying to prove a hypothesis. It doesn’t really stray from that mode at all.
The filmmaker, Heyerdahl, does a good job of having documented everything in a concise manner for the narrator. All the information flowed really well, and everything seemed to be in a very neat chronological order, which is one of the elements in the expository mode of documentary cinema.
While it’s obvious that the journey actually happened, it is uncertain as to whether the sound was captured on location as well. There are several shots during the course of the film where there is sound from the actions being taken rather than just the narrator and the background music. As an example right after the narrator explains about how they get fish. There is a scene where one of the crew clubs one of the fish that landed on the deck and you can hear the thumping