MLA Citations for Documentaries—Works Cited Page and In-Text

Works Cited

America's Least Wanted . Prod. Rebecca Haggerty, Susan Levine, Jamie McClelland, Adele Rice and Jaime

Yassin. Paper Tiger TV, 1995. Videocassette.

Fahrenheit 9/11. Dir. Michael Moore. Lions Gate Films, 2006.

Gore, Al, perf. An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Lawrence Bender Productions, 2006. DVD.

Spivey, Nigel, narr. How Art Made the World: How Humans made Art and Art Made Us Human. BBC

Video, 2006. DVD.

Story of Change. Prod. UNICEF. Filmed and edited by, Byron Blunt. Nairobi, Kenya: UNICEF, 1998.

Videocassette.

In-Text Citations (Example):

Think of a documentary as an essay (an article) in DVD form. A documentary has an author, and it is
often the narrator of the piece. The source signal, thus, needs to focus on the author/narrator, as in the
sample below.

The question of why humans started to draw art in the first place is studied by Nigel Spivey in
How Art Made the World: How Humans Made Art and Art Made Us Human. In this documentary
Spivey theorizes on a number of topics about art and culture, and he addresses the moment
that humans first started drawing and painting images by referring to cave paintings at Altimira,
Spain, and Pech Merle, France. He also refers to paintings on the Drakensberg cliffs in South
Africa as he asserts that humans first drew on cave and cliff walls to capture the visions they
“saw” on the walls during religious trances. Spivey’s theory is an interesting one, and he tries to
back it up with brain studies, but there is no way of actually testing his theory on the ancient
Paleolithic humans. After all, they have not been around for about 10,000 years.

Can you tell that most of the sample is a paraphrase of Spivey’s documentary? Yes, you can tell because
of the numerous references to Spivey. Also, notice that the shift into the writer’s commentary takes
place close to the end of the passage. The writer’s assertion of “but there is no way of actually testing
his theory” is carefully phrased to indicate the shift. There is no in-text citation because there are no
page or paragraph numbers.