Bowling For Columbine (Pardeep)

The text is a successful documentary- 'Bowling For Columbine' produced by Michael Moore (USA,2002) and although it is about the 2 students who went on a killing spree, it also tackles with issues such as gun crime, the media and how it creates fear resulting in more consumerism, racism and much more. It’s target audience is anyone who is anti- Bush and it also targets people who are generally more left wing (liberal view). This can be seen as Moore promotes his left wing views and also criticise Bush. I think the documentary will be shown on a channel such as Channel 4, as Channel 4 is well known for its documentaries and often deals with controversial topics-compared to the BBC, as Britain supports America so therefore will not show a documentary which portrays it in a negative light. It will be shown at about 9:00 -after the watershed time, as it deals with controversial issues and does feature scenes which can be viewed as violent e.g. when showing American history. It’s about guns etc so its for a older audience. The sound is contrapuntal during this scene and is ironic as the images are brutal and the music is ‘What a Wonderful World’. Also, the fact that some of the clips in this scene are black and white emphasises that it is the history- which is effective. Overall, a variety of shots are used, many cuts are used to move on to the next scene. It uses all the typical conventions of documentaries to convey a point and some of these conventions are: voiceover montages parallel and contrapuntal music different modes: fly on the wall, expository, personal etc cuts, close up’s to show emotion etc. From this documentary, we will borrow the compression technique as we think its used very effectively when showing how easy it is to obtain a gun. Similarly, we will like to use it when showing a bank scene- instead we’ll show how easy it is to get your hands on a credit card. Moreover, we want to show how people were without the credit card, and when it was introduced how people went crazy. For this we’ll use compression as our documentary is only about 10 minutes long. We will also like to use contrapuntal music to shock our audience and to create irony.