Analytical Purpose of Documentary - is there one?

At age twenty-eight I have photos and videos archived, digital and analog, dating back twenty years. I have had some form of visual capture device in my hands since I was eight. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic. It took 126 cartridge film, and produced little square images. I have documented my life for a very long time. I rarely look back at my images however. I track my life through the changes and relationships that come in and out life. Like intersections of streams my life is a sedimented history; one bit of river bed is deposited here, another carried there. But in the end I love that twenty years of my life can be seen through images if someone were interested. This documenting of my own life has given me the interest that I now have in documentary films. Watching other people documenting their lives and the lives of others is a fascinating undertaking.

Now, after a bachelors degree, and nearly a masters degree I am in search of doctoral programs. It has been revealing to me to undertake such a step in my life, not so much because I am marking mile-posts, but more so to realize what the world finds worthy of research on an intellectual level. American studies, religious studies, history of art, history of architecture, screen cultures, visual culture, material culture. Academes can make nearly any thing into a study.

One that stuck out to me, not so much as something I am interested in pursuing academically, but would like to maintain as a fact that it is a field is documentary film analysis. What is particularly interesting about this is that there are courses which look at the role of documentary film as an analysis of modern life, or even as a mode of understanding modern life. The role of visual culture as analyzing the way we live inevitably defines the way that we understand ourselves in the future. If documentary film looks at us now, how will that show us how to be in the future? Film as a language takes on the traditions and rhetoric of the public. How is it that the public rhetoric of film is formulated by explosions, undercover missions, and romantic comedy. However the rhetoric of documentary film is an analytical look into lives that we never realized were important. Does documentary film explain who we are, if so it would seem that it has the reflexive necessity of defining who we will become. If fictional narrative analyzes what we imagine and dream, does that in fact reflect what we want to become? How do we narrate the future through images on a Michael Bay scale? More importantly are we defining the future within the realm of what is possible and conceivable now, or are we utilizing the creativity needed to achieve a future that none of us have even thought of. Can documentary film work to expand imagination in the same way that a narrative fiction story can? I would like to think so. Often normal daily activities breed the most creativity. Analysis of who we are as humans gives the philosophical framework to provide a jumping off point for the next big step. Is the world at that jumping off point?