A-Level Film Studies - Daniel Kallin

 To what extent can it be said that your chosen documentary is shaped by the filmmaker's approach?  Refer to at least one filmmaker's theory you have studied. Kapadia’s documentary Amy demonstrates that the filmmaker’s approach is instrumental in crafting audience perceptions to the events of the film, allowing Kapadia to create a narrative around Amy, whilst only using footage already made to give Amy the space to, as it were, tell her own story. Through this, Kapadia’s style of filmmaking is slightly removed from the more conventional extremities of documentary, seen through Longinotto’s observational style of letting events play out organically without any involvement from her, and Broomfield’s participatory style of putting himself onscreen to become a part of the story. Kapadia still uses elements of those theories in his editing of the footage, but his complete non-presence visibly in the documentary, in any form, hints at a level of separation between the content of ...

Amy (Kapadia, 2015) Observational Kapadia is hidden/not visible - Spectator can observe events and arrive at their own understanding of the events, or the 'truth' - No interfering voice or authorial presence DEBATE: Who is to blame for her tragic death? Scene observations Flashing cameras from paparazzi - makes spectator feel as uncomfortable as Amy, serves as a transition: she never catches a break and nor do we, questions whether the viewer is also complicit in how the world saw her - Spectator always expecting her death, mistrustful of everyone - Amy's music is heightened by lyrics on screen drawing connections between her life and her songs, and creating a poetic element to the documentary

  Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Herzog's 16th Century Documentary As if Herzog and his crew had travelled back in time to the 16th Century to make a documentary, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is a shakily-shot and unreliably-told tale of the delusions of power, the mania of religion, and the pointlessness of hasty warfare and colonialism. Power-crazed Aguirre, played by the brilliantly creepy Klaus Kinski, is willing to destroy everything and anyone, including himself, in order to achieve fame and glory and riches and, in a landscape rooted into the reality of actual Spanish colonialism at the time, fails to reach the supposed grandeur of his Cortés-like predecessors.  Comically absurd and increasingly insane, Aguirre, is a film which makes you feel like you are actually there in the jungle, slowly losing faith in reality and God as the old hierarchies and laws don't make any sense once any semblance of a power structure fails to work. The faux-documentary style leads to a greater c...