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Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me  and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning  come from different cultural spaces, but they share a strikingly similar project: documenting what it means to inhabit a body that society has marked as vulnerable. Coates writes about Black embodiment in the United States as something constantly shaped by fear, surveillance, and the historical weight of racism. In Paris Is Burning , queer and trans performers of color make their own worlds

Comparing Mysterious Object at Noon  to Night and Fog  highlights how hybrid documentary forms can approach reality from very different angles while still relying on a mix of modes to produce meaning. Both films combine documentary material with elements that push beyond a single mode, but they do so for different purposes. Thinking about them together helps clarify what hybridity actually accomplishes and how it relates to Nichols’s framework. Mysterious Object at Noon is o

Clifford Geertz’s idea that culture is made up of “webs of significance” people create for themselves is actually a useful way to think about Minding the Gap. Geertz argues that culture is not just behavior or tradition but a whole system of meaning people use to interpret their lives. When I look at the film through that lens, it feels a lot like an ethnographic study of a Midwestern skate community. Liu is not just filming Zack, Keire, and himself as individuals. He is show

For this project, I chose to work in a combination of the poetic and performative documentary modes as described by Bill Nichols. I had already explored expository, participatory, and reflexive approaches in earlier assignments, so I wanted this film to move firmly into a space driven by mood, rhythm, and emotional interpretation. My goal was to use archival footage from Sir Alec Guinness’s body of work in a way that could recontextualize his performances and generate new emo

Representing voices from underrepresented communities is essential in documentary because the form itself shapes how audiences understand lived experience. Nichols points out that documentary modes structure the qualities of the relationship between filmmaker and subject, meaning the choice of mode determines whose perspective organizes the film’s meaning. When dealing with communities that have long been ignored or stereotyped, that structure matters. Different modes create

For this project, I set out to make a fully reflexive documentary about my twin brother and me. The original concept was simple: have James tell the story of how, after getting permission to serve the last several weeks of his mission to Texas with me and my companion in Denmark, he claims I slept in late instead of keeping to the mandated schedule for missionaries. I planned for this disagreement to play out on camera, almost like a controlled reenactment. Following Nichols,

Two modes of documentary filmmaking that spotlight the filmmaker, camera, and audience are the reflexive and participatory modes. Though each make the filmmaker’s presence visible, the way in which they do so varies. The participatory mode focuses on the filmmaker’s engagement with subjects and the world around them, while the reflexive mode emphasizes the constructed nature of the medium itself. Surname Viet Given Name Nam  and Sherman’s March illustrate the difference betw

Through my employment at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU, I had the opportunity to direct a documentary focused on a developing field of legal study: the application of what’s called corpus linguistics, which means using a large body of texts to determine how words were used when documents like the Constitution were written. That way, lawyers and judges can interpret the law more accurately instead of assuming meanings that don’t apply. Initially, I was disappointed bec

While The Act of Killing (2012) and Night and Fog  (1956) both address the topics of war and genocide and agree they are morally reprehensible, they differ vastly in their efforts to lead the audience to the same emotional conclusion. In Act of Killing , Oppenheimer takes a much more observational approach, allowing the audience to watch the unadulterated behavior of these killers and draw conclusions based on how each social actor presents themselves (Barnouw, 231). An exam

Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera poetically suggests cinema's effect on a nation's perception of its activity and mobilization....