Journal Article Reading Response
Bibliographic: Moon, Won-Leep. “Documentary and its realism.” Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 12, no1, 2018, pp. 43-55. doi: 10.1080/17503280.2017.1420413.
The article aimed to show the inconsistency in the current conception of documentary, which creates confusions of the concept and thus it focused mainly on finding the source of the problem and addressed the inconsistency.
It argued that the documentary realism is the culprit and pointed out the misunderstanding of documentary realism in section 2 that documentary realism, the sense of seeing the object itself, is not a perception of accuracy or reliability.
After, in section 3, the author explained that observational documentaries require documentary realism and proposed OBS, which involves the shot is a photographic image of the subject S, whose appearance of behaviour is not seriously controlled by the maker of the film.
Furthermore, Moon used Gregory Currie’s theory of documentary as a misunderstanding evidence and compared it with his own to strengthen his claims in section 4. For instance, he cited that “a photograph is a ‘trace’ of its subject, like a footprint, while a painting is a ‘testimony’ of it” and then he commented on the idea that a photograph is a trace of its subject is nocuous. In order to prove his comments, he provided another citat...
