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Ken Burns on Colbert Report
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- from The Colbert Report (2005)
- Created by Stephen Colbert
- Distributed by Comedy Channel
- Posted byCritical Commons Manager
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns appears on the Colbert Report
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Reflexive documentary on the Colbert Report
by Critical Commons ManagerAn example of reflexive documentary from the Colbert Report
The Reflexive mode is both the most difficult to define and the least common of the four documentary modes described by Bill Nichols in his venerable taxonomy first articulated in Representing Reality (1991). In essence, Reflexive documentaries undertake a structural critique of the documentary form itself, emphasizing the constructed nature of both film and reality. The goal of a Reflexive documentary is to get audiences to think about the ways that documentaries construct their vision of reality; it exposes the various “rhetorics of authenticity” by which the documentary mode asserts its truth claim. An example of the Reflexive mode may be found in the parodic documentary created during an interview with Ken Burns on the television talk show, The Colbert Report (2005).