Film Analysis Of Lauren Greenfield's 'The Queen Of Versailles'

Through time, educational information has been passed on using films otherwise known as documentaries, which are illustrated through pictures, interviews and recordings of real life events to provide a factual record or report.

Documentaries aim to explore events or ideas that are true. However the truth is often lost when we consider other influencing factors, which include the filmmaker’s inherent bias, the need for a film to tell a single coherent story, and common documentary conventions which shape the viewer’s understanding. Held back by these issues, documentary makers cannot help but communicate their version of the truth to the viewer through both intentional and unintentional manipulation.

We may want to judge these characters for reaching for an unattainable goal, but it is important to consider what other choices the had. In American society, the wealth inequality is massive, and it has drastic effects on the lifestyles of people in the different classes. This text isn’t meant to criticize those who want to be in a higher class, but it is meant to call out the corruption in American society and the impossibility of the American Dream. I believe that this text should be able to help people of the upper classes see people of lower classes in a different light. Many people of the upper class are prejudiced against people in a lower class. They may write them off as undeserving or lazy, but this text can help gain a personal insight into the lives of some of those people. This text shows how unfair the system of wealth is in America, and it should help members of the upper class develop sympathy for those without the same privileges as

In the documentary "Queen of Versailles," Jackie and David Siegal show the hardships of being one of the most wealthy people in the country. In the beginning of the documentary, everything in their life is close to perfect. They are a wealthy couple, have children and are building their dream house also the largest house in America. Everything was going well for them until the 2008 financial crisis occurred in which the real estate market collapsed. Although the weeks reading were hard to interpret, some of the things in them were clearly seen in the documentary.

One of the most widely used documentary techniques is interviews. Interviews reflect opinions from different viewpoints creating an almost 3 dimensional story. Its helps the audience feel more engaged as it is coming from a person 's point of view who was involved in the events making it feel more realistic. The audience can be assured that the story is not made up. Interviews give a sense of realism. Man on wire is a good example of the interview style being used to reflect feelings of the time Petit was on his way to making his dream come a reality. The emotions at some point were exaggerating maybe because he is a performer. But this made us as viewers feel apart of the film being able to sympathize with the characters and storyline. Marsh uses a technique where we see the subject talking on screen but we do not hear the interviewer talking or asking questions.

There are various ways to deal with making documentaries, to telling the story and making the point, and subsequently the a wide range of components such camerawork, music, lighting, music, enhancements and altering differ from piece to piece.

1. I was surprised that it took thirty years after the emergence of silent film for non-fiction films to be made with deliberately imposed thematic meanings. Intentional themes are so engrained in modern documentaries that it is hard for me to even imagine how one would go about filming a documentary without establishing a unifying theme.

As independent documentary film in developing ethical question is, "why are you doing, after finish can bring which change" questions will also bring documentary theatre creators of the play. Although we recognize that theater to documentary material processing, present it is the charm of theatre art forms of diversity, but for those audience who do not to participate

Butchart explains that the key point of the analysis is “the visually-mediated telling of a story (its communication), and in particular, an analysis of how the expression and perception (communication) are related and reversible. The definition of both real and truth embedded within a documentary. There are three terms of Bradiou’s philosophy that Butchart is included in the analysis. The first is “truth”, and how it affects the perception of the audience. Pain and suffering is truth. The next term is “situation”, which creates the arrangement of fundamental situations in a particular time and space. Lastly, the use of “ethics” is transforming the situation, developing the truth, while concealing the knowledge systems that structure the experience of it (Butchart, 2014). Viewers expect documentaries to embed truth, but what defines truth if filmmaking is filtered with a “need to know” process. Butchart discusses the three modes of reversibility of communication. The first is doubling, where the point of view

Primary and Chronicle of a Summer are two examples of early observational movements in documentary films that started in the 1960's. Cinéma vérité was founded in France, while at the same time, direct cinema was founded in the United States. Both have the same intention of “being there” and placing the viewer in the location among the subjects. They each use at least one of the Griersonian's themes, such as male narrator voice-over, re-enactment shots, and scripts. However, there are a few differences in these movements with their choice and style in their approach.

First, I will to fully explain what a documentary is. A documentary film does not have a statement of the exact meaning. It is continuous, meaning it’s constantly changing over time. Nichol’s believes that a documentary is not a ‘reproduction of reality, it is a representation of the world’ (20). Non-fiction documentaries qualify as documentaries because they represent either ‘the audience’, ‘the filmmaker’ and ‘the subject’ by giving us new views of the world to think about. Documentaries are hard to make. To be a true documentary, it has to make the viewers believe what it is trying to portray. To believe the film, you have to evaluate the meanings and values behind it and then decide if you are going to accept it as true. A successful

This essay attempts to discuss on two documentaries, Awaiting for Men (2007) and Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997), on their reconstruction of truth and reality with particular emphasis on cinematic language and representation. With documentary becoming more diverse and diffused due to advanced technology such as the Internet, the realism of first-hand experience and facts may be exaggerated and even fictional. This is achieved through a bombast proximity and truth which has caused a blurred definition to term documentary. With the understanding that documentary is a form of factual representation, the aim for ‘truth’ in the presentation of ‘reality’ may be impossible (Chapman, 2009). Hence by comparing with reference to Awaiting for Men (2007) and Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997), it would provide a deeper analysis in distinguishing whether the two documentaries were able to represent the ‘truth’ of the reality.

The wedding banquet is a film which is based around the life of a Chinese born man Wai-Tung Gao, a very successful property developer in New York. Wai-Tung hides the fact that he is a homosexual from his parents who live in China because it is seen as a dishonourable characteristic to have. He must find himself a fake wife to trick his parents into believing that he is a straight man who they can be proud of, he eventually chooses one of his tenants called Wei Wei after trying to find the perfect wife through applications and changes who she is in order to impress his parents, Wai-Tung must do this whilst at the same time trying to maintain his relationship with his boyfriend, Simon. The father of Wai-Tung knows about the relationship between his son and Simon, this scene can be found at 1:35:28 to 1:36:58 of the wedding banquet. The wedding banquet aims to show how perception of sexual orientation can effect different people of different nationalities and how society looks at people of a different sexual orientation.

As documentary by its very nature introduces itself as factual, concerns exist as to where the boundary between the truth of subject and the fiction produced by its creator emerges. As anything that has been edited has by definition removed certain aspects and enhanced others, there must be at best an innocent naturally occurring bias formed from individual perception, and at worst purposefully manipulated misinformation. Through researching various sources, I intend to discover the difference (if any) between these two methods making factually based programmes, to determine any variables that lie in the ‘grey area’ between the two extremes, and to ascertain the diverse forms of conduct in which truth (and in turn documentary) can be

One aspect very clear in Salaam Cinema is how the filmmaking process is not hidden. We see the cameras, lightings and how people are working with them. We also see the director, Makhmalbaf on screen, instructing his staff to set up the equipment, interviewing and provoking people who came for the audition, whom I would refer to as ‘subjects’ in this review. Even though showing the filmmaking process might give viewers a sense of the reality of what happens behind the camera, it also tells us that the whole process was constructed. Similarly, in the opening scene, we were in the viewpoint of being driven through a throng but when the scene cuts away to show the cameraman seated on a car, filming the process, it raises the