Contemporary documentaries habitually make image and narration mutually redundant rather than complementary

Evidence

One of the most gratifying aspects of Content, in fact, is that by contrast with so many contemporary television documentaries, which neurotically hector the audience by incessantly reiterating their core thesis, Petit trusts in the intelligence and speculative power of the viewer. Where so much television now involves a mutual redundancy of image and voice – the image is slaved into illustrating the text; the voice merely glosses the image – Content is in large part about the spaces between image and text, what is unsaid in (and about) the images. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 500

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay on why mainstream documentaries over-explain and how the essay-film tradition refuses that — grounded in Fisher’s ‘spaces between image and text’ formulation.
• XREF: Speaks to the general craft question of showing versus telling that has recurred across the reader’s curation of film and media criticism.