EXPOSITORY MODE

EXPOSITORY MODE

* This mode assembles fragments of the historical world into a more rhetorical or argumentative frame than an aesthetic or poetic one.

*  The Expository mode addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that propose a perspective, adnvaces an argument or recount history.

* Expository films adopt the "voice of God commentary.

Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view. These films are rhetorical, and try to persuade the viewer. (They may use a rich and sonorous male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds ‘objective’ and omniscient. Images are often not paramount; they exist to advance the argument. The rhetoric insistently presses upon us to read the images in a certain fashion. Historical documentaries in this mode deliver an unproblematic and ‘objective’ account and interpretation of past events.

Examples: TV shows and films like A&E Biography;

Charlie Chaplin Biography: 

 America’s Most Wanted; many science and nature documentaries; Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990); Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New (1980); John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing (1974). Also, Frank Capra’s wartime Why We Fight series; Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936).

Ken Burns' "The History of Jazz"