What Makes a Documentary a Documentary

One of the many questions that arise is what makes a documentary appeal to the general audience. While watching Central Park Five, one rhetoric definition that is addressed is enumeratio. For those of you that don’t know, enumeratio is the figures of argument. Now I know some may agree with what I say and some may disagree. Sarah Burns in my opinion does an excellent job of using the statements from the Central Park Fives themselves recalling how the night went in their eyes. This idea reinforcers the whole concept of argumentation in the sense that, it raises the question of what really happened that night? In the documentary Sarah Burns uses a strong sense of the film to get the point of view of that night through the 5, however the accounts of Korey, Kevin and Raymond are what can stick out to most that watch the film. As the three recall that night in their own perspective, certain images were projected on the screen in a close up view such as a cigarette tray with a lit cigarette, a closed door, and pictures of the deceives that interrogated these three. This is important because as I watched the film, I could picture that night in my head, from the smoke being blown in their face from the detectives smoking, the three of them just looking at the door thinking about what it is that they can do to get the hell out of there, and the detectives getting in their face, yelling and cursing in their face. It is no wonder why they made up stories of what happened that night, they simply wanted to get out of that situation. Now those stories that were made up, each story was different, and the only reason why the stories were made is because as Raymond recalled, the detectives would come in and say how they were getting confessions from the other guys saying he did it when in fact that wasn’t true at all. This ties back into what I was talking about in my first blog about the artistic and inartistic reasoning. The inartistic evidence or the implausible evidence that the detectives said they had wasn’t there at all. The accounts of what happened that night from each of the Central Park Five was plausible or inartistic and no one questioned it because in the film as one recalled, the detectives believed that had an open and shut case. In the documentary, what made this so interesting and eye opening was the use of sound and imaging that Sarah Burns used. During certain times, the sound would get a darker ton, followed by dark imaging. This is done so brilliantly because it really does call to attention of how serious the whole situation is. When I create my documentary, this comes in handy. This is due to that if you want to have an audience pay attention and care about what the documentary is about, you need to have things to complement the message such as sound, imaging and even color.