Expository Mode (Jen, Katie, Nathan, Jennifer) (rev. 4.14.2004)

• Voice-of-God commentary; the filmmaker is voice of authority
• Addresses the viewers directly, telling them what to think
• Offered as "Truth," the documentary presents "the facts," emphasizing the impression of objectivity and well-substantiated judgment
• Raises ethical issues
• Builds a sense of dramatic involvement around the need for a solution
• Uses a poetic perspective, romanticizing the subject, to encourage the empathy from the viewer
• The voice of authority resides with the text itself; witnesses, testimony, etc. serve to contribute evidence and support to the filmmaker's argument
• Nonsynchronous sound
• Viewers expect logical cause-effect linkage between events and sequences
• Viewer expects text to take shape around the solution to a problem
• Transparency; masks the work of production

Observational Mode (Chuck, Dawn, Lyndsay, Erin ) (rev. 4.15.2004)

• Stresses the nonintervention of the filmmaker
• Films rely on editing and repetitive images to enhance the impression of real or lived time
• Do not have commentary, direct addressing of subjects, or outside interventions
• Centered around the everyday, the personal, the intimate
• Used as an ethnographic tool - captures more of what is happening
• Conveys the sense of unmediated access to the world, what an observer would really experience
• Emphasizes the ethical questions of how much the filmmaker canintrude and how well he/she can stay hidden
• Uses more mobile, synchronous equipment, and has a fixed camera position

Interactive Mode (Lindy, Ben, Jamie L., Chasity)

• Interactive documentary stresses images of testimony or verbal exchange and images of demonstration (images that demonstrate the validity, or possibility, the doubtfulness, of what the witness state.)
• Interaction often revolves around the form known as the interview.
• The interactive text takes many forms but all draw their social actors into direct encounter with the filmmaker.
• The interactive mode helped establish the genre of historical reconstruction based on oral history or witness testimony and archival rather than on a voice-over commentary.
• A characteristic of the interactive mode is an assembly of discreet pieces creating a film routed in individual perspective or personal recollection.
• A feature of the interactive mode is the masked interview is when the filmmaker is both off screen and unheard.
• The scenes in an interactive mode tend to focus not only on the "talking head" but also the surrounding set.

Reflexive Mode (Ray, Jamie G., Kathy, Mike)

• Example: Documentary about making a documentary
• Reflexive texts are self-conscious not only about form and style but also about strategy structure, conventions, expectations and effects.
• Gives emphasis to the encounter between filmmaker and viewer rather than filmmaker and subject.
• Focus of text goes from the realism of historical reference to the properties of the text itself.
• Reflexivity focuses on problems, that is what draws attention
• It is an ethical dilemma of how to represent people in two distinct ways.
• Posed as an issue the text itself may address specifically
• Also poses text as an issue for the viewer by emphasizing the degree to which people, or social actors, appear before us as signifiers, as functions of the text itself
• Rarely reflects on ethical issues as a primary concern.
• Remove excursions of habit
• Stylistic Reflexivity, Deconstructive Reflexivity, Interactivity, Irony, Parody and Satire.