Issues in documentary and film

  Issues in Documentary

Accuracy- Accuracy is the explanation of a subject in a precise manner.  Accuracy is extremely important within a documentary as it mustn’t give the audience false factual information. A documentary that gives good precise information in its facts is Fahrenheit 911 whereby it explains the events correctly that happened within George Bushes presidency. It also gives accurate statistics within the film to give the viewer an idea of how big or small something could be.  

Balance- Balance within a documentary is to show equal sides to a story and or argument. This helps the documentary seem bias (one sided) Balanced documentaries make the viewers look at both sides of a story and let them choose what to believe in or not. Fahrenheit 911 is also very well balanced for both sides of the Iraq war, who it affects and why.

Impartiality- Impartiality is the documentary is neither for or against whatever the subject may be (quite similar to balance) Showing equal amounts for both sides for or against. Michael Moore (Director of Fahrenheit 911) has his own opinion on George Bush who he doesn’t like. However he does not portray this within the film, it shows equal sides of good and bad within the documentary. 

Objectivity- This is when a documentary places facts and information to point the subject into one corner for the audience to believe (To persuade the audience to look to one side)

Subjectivity- This is when facts, information and opinions are presented in order to let the audience decide for their own opinion. An example of this being shown within Fahrenheit 911 is when the all the information is presented of the Bush family and the Bin Laden family relationship. The information is powerful but it doesn’t stay persistent on just attacking the bush family to force peoples opinions to a bad side.

Opinion- This is the thoughts of the audience who are viewing the documentary and their opinions on what they are being shown.

Bias- This is where a documentary can be one sided towards the subject, or argument. This could possibly be to make someone or something look bad and another thing look good in comparison.  

Issues in film




Film can also be evident to using biased opinions as well as documentaries. Often with many of the true story based films, there will be a small element of a two sided argument on the subject that is being filmed. However in most cases within a film, it shall only show one side of a story. The reasons for this could be things such as the side of the story not talked about could have been to hard to adapt to screenplay. This means that what happened at a certain event could have been too challenging to portray in the correct way within the film.


Or it can simply be the director or producers who only want to portray a story in one specific way. This is the much more negative side of being biased in film due to some what of ignorance of the people creating the film. A good example of a film being biased is the new Zero Dark Thirty, this film is about the build up and finish of killing Bin Laden. The main reasons for it being relatively biased is because it seems to ignore the hard work of the CIA, FBI, Homeland security of America, George W.Bush and Obama and place it all on just one female CIA agent who was the only reason why Bin Laden was killed. It even, to some extent seems to only touch on the Navy Seals who carried out the operation to kill Bin Laden. You could also link this film with the idea of Objectivity, whereby a director points the subject into one corner for the viewers to believe, it seems to keep the audience ignorant towards the deeper side of the subject being the hard work done by the CIA, FBI etc.


Another example within this film is where nearly every Muslim women in the Pakistan scenes are wearing some sort of head covering. Which causes controversy seeing as the only time women wear head coverings within Pakistan are within the tribal areas. This film seems to portray Muslim women wearing head coverings as terrorists. As you can imagine this has caused much controversy and stress to many people across the globe.