Online Response 3: The Expository Mode and The Fog of War

When Robert McNamara is shown in The Fog of War, his footage is used to interesting effect: he is shown generally at the time of his tenure as the Secretary of Defense and then later as a narrator for his own life, a clarifying force to impose some kind of order on a past that was anything but coherent, ordinary.

Fog of War doesn’t utilize much of what Barnouw describes as the voice of the “promoter,” that is, if we are to consider the promoter as the sponsor of the film. In this case, McNamara seems to be pleading a case for human decency and allowance for human folly, claiming his mistakes were the only ways for him to learn. To further his argument, he lays out the “eleven rules of war” as if he were the discoverer of each of these principles.

Inherent in Fog of War, though, is the use of the voice of the “Promoter,” as Barnouw puts it, where the director of the documentary’s voice is evident in the expository tone of the film. The director of the film is seldom heard in interview sessions, but his influence is undeniable in the way the film cuts between explanations of the past from McNamara’s perspective juxtaposed with, say, archival B-roll footage of a converted howitzer firing a nuclear shell.

The director in this film may not say much directly, but through the process of interviewing, then editing and re-cutting this footage his quiet voice is the one that shapes the entire film, and to a large degree how we perceive it.

I don’t really know if the expository mode is less “objective” than the observational mode. It seems to me while observational films might seem more objective, the camera is more concealed—not from the subjects in a film, but from the audience.  The effect on a situation being filmed might be the same, but audiences might perceive the expository being less “honest” because the camera and director are simply more evident.