Bill Nichols Documentary Styles

Poetic Documentary 

These documentaries were first seen in the 1920's. They focused on experiences, images, and showing the audience the world through different set of eyes. These are often seen with little narrative and are very experimental in content and form. These pose the purpose to create feeling rather than truth and often the documentary makers who make these come from an artistic background who have made the leap over to documentary making.

Expository Documentary

This type of documentary is one in which you have a commentator who talks over the images to explain a specific story or view that is being shown. Usually, it is an authoritative commentary and shows a particular viewpoint or argument to the audience.

Observational documentary

Observational documentary is a type of documentary filmmaking that aims to record realistic, everyday life without intrusion, that is the plan anyway although in practice whenever cameras are about this makes it a very hard task. Observational documentary mode exists on a spectrum between poetic documentary and expository documentary. 

Participatory Documentary

Participatory documentary is a subgenre of documentary filmmaking, in which the filmmaker includes the film's narrative and directly interacts with the film's subjects.

Reflexive Documentary

The reflexive documentary mode focuses on the relationship between the filmmaker and the audience, pushing viewers to reflect on their perceptions and re-analyze their notions of truth. Unlike the expository documentary, the reflexive mode does not examine outside subject matter—it exposes the documentary-making process.

Performative Documentary

The performative mode of documentary is the direct opposite of the observational mode. In Observational documentaries, unobtrusive observation of the subject is the director’s aim. A Performative documentary emphasizes the filmmaker’s own involvement with the subject.