Witness to an execution, View to a bridge

For this week’s diary entry, I listened to two radio documentaries: Witness to an Execution and View from a Bridge. Witness tells the story of the execution process, through various accounts of people involved the voices we hear range from those of prison guards to doctors. The documentary brilliantly captures the emotions and trauma involved with performing and witnessing an execution, and this makes one question the humane feasibility of it.

The Soweto Uprisings

This week, I listened to the documentaries of the Mandela Diaries and ABC Ulwazi’s 1976 June 16. As I mentioned last week, there are various documentary modes. I believe these documentaries to be situated in the participatory mode. According to Nichols (2001), this is primarily revolved around the encounter between film-maker and subject, as the film-maker actively engages with the situation they are documenting whilst being heavily reliant on the honesty of witnesses.

Ghetto Life 101 and Remorse

This is the first entry of my listening diary, one of a few that I will be working on this term. With each entry, I explore Nichols’ different modes of documentary, and evaluate them in terms of how successful I believe they are within their respective modes, and how I believe they have been successful or unsuccessful in entertaining and gripping the audience. I hope that through this process I can draw from these evaluations to guide me in my own practice as a documentarian. This week I listened to Ghetto Life 101, an interesting perspective from a couple of boys, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, who reside in Brooklyn, and go around the streets interviewing people on their various family situations and consequences of living in a city dogged with crime and poverty. I also listened to Remorse, and both are situated in the observatory documentary mode. According to Nichols (2001) within this mode, the documentarians are able to document life in a less intrusive manner, leaving the social actors free to act and the documentarians free to record without interacting with each other.