Documentary Style: 4 Little Girls Vs. Bowling for Columbine

Documentary Style: 4 Little Girls vs. Bowling for Columbine

Two documentaries that use two different styles of portraying bombings are 4 Little Girls and Bowling for Columbine.4 Little Girls by Spike Lee is a documentary on the 1963 Birmingham bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. This bombing is infamous for the killing of 4 innocent little black girls. Spike Lee uses his style to portray the feelings of the families of these girls as well as influential leaders during this time. Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore is also a documentary about the killing of innocent people, but Moore uses a different style. Moore describes reasons for violence in America rather than getting personal with people in which the bombing affected. These two different styles are both documentaries, yet they are just presented to an audience in two different ways. A documentary is a source of information for citizens about certain events that are portrayed through film. These views of the events are bias towards one side of the issue. Even though the events are bias they use true footage, not necessarily fact, in order to make sure that the viewers have a reason to believe their

point. Louis Menand explains that an essential documentary’s purpose “Is the impulse to catch life off camera, to film what was not planned to happen, or what would have happened whether someone was there to film it or not” (1). Most authors have their own style when it comes to relaying the information in the documentary. The style of the documentary is important in making the film a good one or a bad one. The elements that make the film a good or bad documentary are things such as conventions which include things like setting, camera angling, music, etc., facts, and the author’s influence on the audience.

Alan Rosenthal writes “Most films need a key, or handle, an angle from which to tell the story in the most interesting, riveting, and entertaining fashion” (46). Both authors, Lee and Moore, use very interesting ways of producing information for their audiences. Lee’s approach is more laid back and not as upbeat as Moore’s. Lee’s style is more of the interview type with the camera on only the person answering the questions. More than about 98% of the time you never hear anyone asking questions or trying to force information out of the person being interviewed. Another effective convention that was used was the setting of the people being interviewed. The parents of the girls were interviewed in their own house in separate rooms so that each person could tell their own story and have their own emotions and feelings without the influence of someone else who had their own emotions about the events (4 Little Girls). Moore on the other hand gets out and seemingly harasses people in order to get information out to the audience. This way of information is effective also because it relays back to Menand’s thought about putting people on the spot. If you put them on the spot they don’t have much time to prepare or be fake about their answers therefore they reveal true colors about the addressed situation. An example of this in Moore’s film was when he interviewed the first vice president of the NRA, Charlton Heston, he seemed a little unprepared for the questions that Moore was asking him (Bowling for Columbine). Both films used music during effective times, but Moore seemed to use them at the right time and music that effectively explained what was going on. The most effective time in which Lee used music though was at the end when the song about that Sunday morning that the bombing took place. These conventions used help to make the documentary as effective as possible.

“Documentary film doesn’t mean avoiding fiction, for no film can avoid fiction: it means establishing a certain relationship, a certain interplay, between the documentary and the fictional aspects of film so that the documentary aspect may come forward in some significant way” (Girgus