This paper explores how the documentary tradition, rooted in humanity's universal need for stories and connection, serves as a crucial tool for fostering empathy and breaking down social polarization. Drawing upon the ancient Greek concept of understanding "all things" (panta) through exposure to diverse cultures, the paper argues that documentaries make the inaccessible accessible, transforming mysteries into knowledge and creating tangible, shared experiences. Specifically, the performative and participatory modes of documentary are examined as powerful methods for achieving this. The performative mode, exemplified by Faces Places, uses the filmmaker as a guiding character to reveal universal truths rooted in personal experience. In contrast, the participatory mode, as seen in Minding the Gap, centers the subject's voice and perspective, allowing the audience to learn directly from their experiences. By enabling viewers to escape their own echo chambers and engage with different lives, both modes ultimately promote greater social understanding, critical thinking, and collective well-being, despite facing potential ethical challenges of exploitation or voyeurism.

This article explores how the participatory and reflexive modes of documentary filmmaking challenge the traditional assumption that documentaries primarily serve to inform. Though distinct in their primary focus—participatory emphasizing the interactions and relationships between the filmmaker and subjects (e.g., Sherman's March), and reflexive focusing on the film's self-awareness and critique of the medium itself (e.g., Surname: Viet)—both modes heighten audience consciousness.

The participatory mode draws viewers in through authenticity and relatability, making them feel actively involved in the experience. Conversely, the reflexive mode intentionally draws attention to the filmmaking process, often using techniques like intertitles or revealing actors to critique the medium's conventions, challenge audience expectations, and expose underlying social systems. Ultimately, both participatory and reflexive documentaries operate as powerful tools, using dialogical or self-aware techniques to inform audiences and raise awareness of systems and artifice.

by Jared Howard

The documentary form operates on a central paradox: its dedication to truth and reality is achieved through the "creative treatment of reality."

Filmmakers engage in an expressive synthesis—a controlled manipulation of actual events—to fulfill a higher thematic or poetic goal, often described as "fakery in allegiance to truth."

This is evidenced by two opposing methods: Staging Reality (e.g., Flaherty's Nanook): Fabricating details to preserve the spirit of a bygone truth (salvage ethnography). Editing Reality (e.g., Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera): Using masterful montage to reconstruct raw, un-staged shots, arguing that the true reality lies in its cinematic presentation.

Ultimately, the documentary's power rests in this very process: using artifice to capture and preserve history not just as it factually was, but as it was felt, implied, and experienced.