1. POETIC DOCUMENTARY

--comes out of the 1920s

--Reassembles fragments of the world poetically

--lack of specificity

--abstract

--The films are fragmentary, impressionistic, and lyrical

--sacrifices the conventions of continuity editing

--explores associations and patterns that involve temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions

--people function on par with other objects as raw material

--music, diegetic and non-diegetic sounds usually play an important element in the film (See definitions below).

--Poetic dialogue can also be used over images

TERMINOLOGY:
A. Diegetic sound
Sound whose source is visible on the screen or whose source is implied to be present by the action of the film:

voices of characters
sounds made by objects in the story
music represented as coming from instruments in the story space ( = source music)

Diegetic sound is any sound presented as originated from source within the film's world
Digetic sound can be either on screen or off screen depending on whatever its source is within the frame or outside the frame.
Another term for diegetic sound is actual sound

B. Non-diegetic sound
Sound whose source is neither visible on the screen nor has been implied to be present in the action:

narrator's commentary
sound effects which is added for the dramatic effect
mood music

Non-diegetic sound is represented as coming from the a source outside story space.
The distinction between diegetic or non-diegetic sound depends on our understanding of the conventions of film viewing and listening. We know of that certain sounds are represented as coming from the story world, while others are represented as coming from outside the space of the story events. A play with diegetic and non-diegetic conventions can be used to create ambiguity (horror), or to surprise the audience (comedy).
Another term for non-diegetic sound is commentary sound.

Examples:

* Current video example of Poetic Documentary:

1. Poetic Documentary Central City Movement #1 PT #1

A poetic documentary in downtown LA in the early dawn hours...

(film by Oregel)

2. Poetic documentary - Water

(film by )

Poetic documentaries, which first appeared in the 1920’s, were a sort of reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film. The poetic mode moved away from continuity editing and instead organized images of the material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space. Well-rounded characters—’life-like people’—were absent; instead, people appeared in these films as entities, just like any other, that are found in the material world. The films were fragmentary, impressionistic, lyrical. Their disruption of the coherence of time and space—a coherence favored by the fiction films of the day—can also be seen as an element of the modernist counter-model of cinematic narrative. The ‘real world’—Nichols calls it the “historical world”—was broken up into fragments and aesthetically reconstituted using film form.

3. A few more examples: Joris Ivens’ Rain (1928), whose subject is a passing summer shower over Amsterdam

4. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Play of Light: Black, White, Grey (1930), in which he films one of his own kinetic sculptures, emphasizing not the sculpture itself but the play of light around it;