AMITY SCHOOL OF FILM AND DRAMA, AUUP

DIRECTING DOCUMENTARY

Assignment

Submitted to Submitted by
Associate Professor Sonia Sharma
Ma’am Chana Batya Anzi Zalis A2011619004
M.A(F&TP), 3rd Semester
 ‘The imposter, 2012’

How is this film different from other types of films?

‘The imposter’ is a documentary film made by Bart Layton. The film is made
on Frédéric Bourdin, a French con man who impersonated multiple people
and faked hundreds of identities. Unlike fiction or docu-dramas, the story
and events represented in the film are real-life incidents without exaggeration
and the interviewees are the actual people who were involved in the story.
Docu-dramas are the films which represent a real-life story in a very
dramatic and over exaggerative way. Fiction films are the films which do not
have real-life stories and characters.

The imposter is a combination of expository mode and participatory mode of

documentary filmmaking. The film contains verbal commentary, interviews,
points of view of all the people involved in those events and archival news
footage. The film does not cater to only one but multiple argumentative
logics and is not biased with one. Expository mode is the most common
mode of documentary filmmaking which people identity with as a
documentary film. The story does not provide any misinformation about the
real story which can be cross-checked by the news and official information
provided by the government.

He uses re-enactments of real incidents not in a dramatized way but as

remarkable illustrations. For example- He managed to represent the historical
events absolutely remarkably without any real footages of the houses, police
station, Frédéric calling from phone-booth, etc.

The sound design used by him is extremely powerful. His use of sound
editing as transitions between re-enactments and interviews as they speak is
absolutely fascinating and gives the feel of events as they happened in
reality. He used exact words as told by the interviewees and gives a sense
of realism to the viewers. It is a perfect example of ethical artistic treatment
of historical events.

Without those re-enactments and the sound design, the film would just have
been a talking-head interview of people. They brought the original kind of
mystery and suspense in the film without tampering with the truth of the
story.

The archival footages of news broadcasts bring out the seriousness of the
story and the fact how he could fool the whole world including the family of
the lost child Nicholas Barclay with just some tattoos and coloured hair into
believing that he is their actual son went missing 4 years ago.

There was little to no camera movements during the interviews and just
some occasional close-up shots of Frédéric which give an intense and
creepy feel to the viewers because he is the original con man, telling his
own story without any feeling of remorse or regret for about anything. He
drew attention to the minute details of the story though close-ups in re-
enactment scenes. For example- close-up on the hand of the character
playing Frédéric when he was searching for the contact numbers of families
to call-up in ‘The Centre for Missing and Exploited Children’.

It is surprising how Bart convinced Nicholas’ family and Frédéric for the film
that is not going to portray any biased perspective. Documentaries like these
are made when the filmmaker is highly successful in gaining the trust and
building a good relationship with his subjects.