Analysis of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling For columbine!

Fahrenheit 9/11, was directed and produced by Michael Moore in 2004.
It uses a number of documentary conventions that maybe helpful to us when we are producing our documentary on 'Islamophobia'. The reason why we decided to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 was because it was a very successful documentary in the box office and it covers some of the main ideas in our documentary 'Islamophobia'.

some of the points that we came across while watching Fahrenheit 9/11 included :

1. Archive Footage e.g. the beginning where there was the use of news montage.
2. The name of the documentary was seen a great time after the documentary began.
3. The Mise-en-scene was carefully selected e.g the former FBI had books in the background, which emphasises knowledge.
4. The hand held camera helps convey realism to the audience.
5. The blackout of the screen was seen in the beginning, this engaged the audience, as it made them question themselves, about what was going on.
6. Michael Moore also use experts such as Craig Unger, author of House of Bush and House of Saud.

7. While watching Fahrenheit 9/11 Moore, used a range of interviews in his documentary, and he mainly had women’s in his interview, for example mother of Carol Ashley and she was a victim of 9/11, we see her mainly crying and Moore done did deliberately as the audience can have sympathy for her, it makes them engage with her.
8. Moore uses a great range of shots to portray his views, an example would be the long shot of Muslims praying in Saudi Arabia. Another type of shot he uses is medium shot as well as Long shot, you will find this when Moore does the Vox Pop, the whole ideology behind this is that it shows the audience the clear facial expression on the person he is interviewing.
9. While watching Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore used a excellent range of montage from the news, and different programmes, an example of this would be Fox news and the whole idea of ‘fear tactic’ themes.
10. Moore also used subtitles in his documentary while getting the Afghanistan people’s view, this then helps the audience to understand their views to.
11. Rock music was used in his documentary to make it catchy.
12. Towards the end of the documentary Moore uses a range of Rhetorical question in order to gain the audiences attention and to make them think. For example ‘ who would want to give up their child? Would you?
13. Overall Moore concludes his documentary by dedicating the documentary to all those people that died by the 9/11 attacks.

Xx Tanya & Naziya Xx