Documentary films and fiction films each make their respective truth
claims, but what distinguishes them is their different references to
the world. Nonfiction typically refers to and asserts this, the one
world we all share in historical time, while fiction, through its
fantasy scenarios, refers to possible worlds (which may or may not be
more or less similar to the one we're sharing, while being nonetheless
distinct). Fiction, to paraphrase narratologist Käte Hamburger, is the
only place where the subjectivity of a third person can be represented
as such, i.e. it is only fiction and its imaginary which allows us to
look inside other people's (character's) heads. Nonfiction, strictly
speaking, cannot do that. Might we think of this as reality versus the
real, outer versus inner truth? Although the newer modes of
documentary, especially the performative mode (in Bill Nichol's
terminology) increasingly mix fact and fiction, becoming more
fictionalised, thereby eroding the previously clear distinction
between fiction and nonfiction.
Henry
> Hello all,
> I am still a little bemused that people insist on talking about
> documentary as truth telling. While sometimes documentaries might
> represent some facts it is usually only in fiction that we encounter
> the truth. I have just spent a day with Ophuls' 'Le Plaisir',
> it seems to me that the sequence where we see the first communion of
> the madam's niece is about as close as we might hope to
> grasping the truth of a certain kind of sense of community. I am a
> born again athiest and yet this five minutes of film: lighting,
> the grain of the voice, the balletic camera movement, the
> articulation of a sense of personal history, the shifting of interior
> and exterior, the extimate, and yes, a dappled nostalgia, achieves
> the intimacy of humanity's striving toward the sublime.
> peace
> alan
>
> A. Fair
> IDS
>
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