ABSTRACT
Television documentaries can be looked at in two different ways. Both deal with the same primary building blocks from which films are put together-sounds, im ages, shots, sequences. The approaches differ in the way these materials are examined. If we think of film as a kind of language, we might see the distinction as similar to that between semantics-the study of the way words are used to create the meaning of a text-and syntax-the study of the rules governing the way the words are selected, adapted and connected together.
