Raymond Sentz COM 3930: Documentary History April 23rd, 2015 Dr. Andy Opel Performance or Participating: The Michael Moore Spectrum In Nichol’s theory of documentary, there are six clear and distinct modes of production; expository, observational, participatory, poetic, reflexive, and performative. But can we really assign one label to each piece of work and even try to categorize an entire director’s catalogue as only one mode of production? Is it fair to the artists or their work to do this to them? In this paper, I will focus on the potential misclassification of director’s works into a potentially wrong mode of production. There will be an emphasis on the debate between whether the works of Michael Moore are performative, participatory, …show more content…
The trouble with trying to distinguish these two modes is that they are so similar, so first things first, I need to break down each mode, starting with participatory. Nichols describes the participatory mode of documentary as essentially an interview between the documentarian and the subject. This allows the filmmaker to address the people who appear in the film rather than having to address the audience through some sort of voice over or narration work. This mode also requires some participation from the filmmaker as well as social actors. This gives the audience a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation is altered by their presence as a …show more content…
But mingling with that idea is an unease that, in the end, some of the impact of the film is dissipated precisely because the audience cannot rely on the history of Flint as Mr. Moore presents it. The basic question -what was the responsibility of Mr. Smith and General Motors for Flint's decline? - is obscured by the very mode of comic exaggeration that Mr. Moore