Light on rhetoric, documentaries in the poetic mode forsake traditional narrative content: individual characters and events remain undeveloped, in favor of creating a particular mood or tone.
(Nichols 2001) Joris Ivens’ Regen (1929) is paradigmatic of the poetic mode, consisting of unrelated shots linked together to illustrate a rain shower in Amsterdam.
Initially manifesting as an omnipresent, omniscient, and objective voice intoned over footage, narration holds the weight of explaining and arguing a film’s rhetorical content.
This shift in visual tactics gives rise to what Nichols refers to as "evidentiary editing," a practice in which expositional images "...illustrate, illuminate, evoke, or act in counterpoint to what is said…[we] take our cue from the commentary and understand the images as evidence or demonstration…" (Nichols 2001: 107) The engagement of rhetoric with supporting visual information founded in the expositional mode continues today and, indeed, makes up the bulk of documentary product.
Film features, news stories, and various television programs lean heavily on its utility as a device for transferring information.
The observational mode of documentary developed in the wake of documentarians returning to Vertovian ideals of truth, along with the innovation and evolution of cinematic hardware in the 1960s.
(Michelson, O’Brien, & Vertov 1984) The move to lighter 16mm equipment and shoulder mounted cameras allowed documentarians to leave the anchored point of the tripod.
A two-person film crew could now realize Vertov’s vision and sought to bring real truth to the documentary milieu.
Resultant footage appears as though the viewer is witnessing first-hand the experiences of the subject: they travel with Bob Dylan to England in D.A.
Pennebaker's Dont Look Back [sic] (1967,) suffer the stark treatment of patients at the Bridgewater State Hospital in Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies (1967,) and hit the campaign trail with John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Robert Drew’s Primary (1960.)
The goal in including these images was, "to aid the audience in their understanding of the process of construction in film so that they could develop a sophisticated and critical attitude."
Because there was no actual footage of the events that took place, Morris felt it was best to incorporate visual aids to help the audience have a better understanding of the situation.
Deeply personal, the performative mode is particularly well-suited to telling the stories of filmmakers from marginalized social groups, offering the chance to air unique perspectives without having to argue the validity of their experiences, as in Marlon Riggs’ 1990 documentary Tongues Untied about his experiences as a gay black dancer in New York City.
The departure from a rhetoric of persuasion allows the performative film a great deal more room for creative freedom in terms of visual abstraction, narrative, etc.
The performative mode is also manifested in ethnographic film, such as "Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza" by Jeff Himpele and Quetzil Castaneda.
In this visual ethnography of cultural event of the spring equinox involving new age tourism at a sacred Maya site in Mexico, the ethnographers both document the event and provide an ethnographic questioning of the meanings that are projected on the physical heritage objects that attract 50,000 tourists to the equinox at Chichen.
In her book Looking Two Ways (1996), Toni de Bromhead criticises Nichols for his focus on documentary as a rational discourse.
On the other hand the journalistic, rational approach is founded upon checkable facts, has recourse to experts and eye witness testimony, the validity of filmmakers opinion is questioned and creative treatment rejected.
In doing so De Bromhead makes a case for a kind of documentary storytelling that cannot be constructed through words alone but weaves together image, sound, action and structure to produce meaning.
While it is generally accepted that Aston & Gaudenzi's (2012) formulation is still contested, its usefulness lies in that the discussion emerges as a response to Nichols (1992) and de Bromhead's (2009) debate on the subject of documentary modes of representation.
Such a trajectory offers a clear historical relationship to the notion of a documentary tradition and provides a basis for describing a boundary around these new formations of practice.