"Dark Days" Analysis

After watching the documentary “Dark Days” the one thing that captured me the most was how there was no narration throughout the whole video. No narrating made the whole documentary come off as one very long recording of these people’s lives. I think I liked it so much because it was the absolute bare minimum of what a documentary could be. There was no (noticeable) outside opinion shaping what the documentary was supposed to mean. What you got from it was what you got from it not what someone else wanted you to. One of the other things that captured my attention was the choice for black and white. I thought at first it was to show how bad their lives were living in the tunnels, but it did not make sense because at the end when they got the section 8 housing it was still black and white. I think the choice to have black and white was to strip the video again of anything but the story. It gave no specific directions on where your thoughts were supposed to go, just a direction towards the point of the whole thing. So if you look at the entire video the bareness of it actually drew you towards a very broad topic which is different from every documentary we have watched so far. Though the topic was broad it was not vague and actually very powerful. The bareness actually helped to make every person look exactly like one of us, except not living in a subway, it made them human which in turn made the graveness of their situation slap me in the face.