Effectiveness Of Contemporary American Documentary as The Media to Promote Female Empowerment

Abstract

Nowadays, with the development of the women's rights movement and raised awareness of the importance of gender equality, feminist documentaries have more diversified forms of expression and more inclusive themes, focusing more on the living conditions and spiritual world of women groups. It is of great research value and significance to see how contemporary documentaries portray the image of women and reflect the current state of women's spirits and social status. The main objective of this research is to analyze how contemporary feminist documentaries convey their messages of empowering women and dissect some social issues that women are confronting. Examples of documentary types analyzed in this study include expository, observational, and biographical documentaries, and the analysis involves three aspects of documentary which are persona construction, narrative style, and audiovisual language. By comparing and contrasting the different techniques and perspectives used in different documentaries based on existing theories and case studies, it is concluded that showing the female speaker as authoritative and unbiased, as well as presenting the story from the first-person perspective, paired with an omniscient narrative style, can effectively represent the modern documentary's advocacy of women's independence and empowerment.