A

description of a personal insight about the present situation and the future
development of creative documentary film


The moment we live in appears to be very favourable for the documentary film. The
eruption of documentary festivals, films, workshops and trainings seems unstoppable, while
the documentary film audience keeps growing from year to year.

The winning of Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11 at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004,
Gianfranco Rosi’s SACRO GRA in Venice in 2013, and FUOCOAMMARE by the same author in
Berlin 2016, are a proof of the erasing of boundaries between film genres, in the perception
of film criticism and public opinion.

Caution is required here in order not to fall into the trap of daily-political issues and current
needs of the greatest film festivals, which sometimes, by giving an award to a documentary
film or simply by selecting it for competition programmes reserved only for fiction films,
bring into focus a film that would otherwise not be recognized as significant and special.

Micheal Moore, who draws on the pure tradition of the cinéma vérité of Jean Rouch and
Edgar Morin, does not bring anything essentially new, apart from the topics he deals with,
which are mostly concerned with the contemporary North American society.

In contrast, Gianfranco Rosi, perhaps the most important documentary filmmaker in Europe
today, also uses the observational approach as a starting point, which he skillfully combines
with landscapes without people, in which space itself, or any other object, becomes part of
the film and plays an active role in it, sometimes more active that the main participants
themselves.

This means that what is essentially relevant and of vital importance for evaluating a film,
including the documentary film, is the consideration of the use of cinematic language and
cinematic means of expression.

If we take this year’s triumph of Adina Pintilie’s film TOUCH ME NOT in Berlin as an example,
we arrive at the conclusion that if fiction film borrows stylistic and visual characteristics
from the documentary in order to increase plausibility (which it lacks), documentary film
must not borrow dramatic models and artificial suspense from the fiction film structure in
order to score points with the audience or critics.

Certainly, the transposition of elements of fiction films to documentaries is also acceptable,
but only when it has valid reasons, when it arises from the nature of the cinematic story or
characters, i.e. the subject the film deals with, which can be so rich that it requires such
dramaturgical treatment.

Thus, Malik Bendjelloul, the Oscar-winning author of Searching for Sugar Man (following in
the footsteps of another Oscar-winning documentary, Man on Wire by James Marsh),
skillfully builds its whole story – by handling archive, reconstruction, animation and home
video, together with interviews – bringing the film to its dramatic climax, as in the best
Hollywood thrillers or dramas.

Joshua Oppenheimer combines reenactment in his work with real participants of mass
murders, initiating a sort of art happening, and building a fragmentary and patchwork
structure in his documentaries, similarly to his role model and mentor Dušan Makavejev
(who did the same in his feature films, skillfully interpolating archive materials and purely
documentary segments into feature film structure).

Speaking of reconstruction, perhaps the most important film of this kind is THE THIN BLUE
LINE by Errol Morris, who creates a repetitive visual symphony through skillful repetition of
details from multiple angles, leaving a deep imprint on the viewer’s subconscious.

There are many European and world authors who create in the border areas between
fiction and documentary film, pushing the boundaries between feature and documentary
cinematic forms in their works. For example, building upon the tradition of observational
documentary and direct cinema, Sergei Loznitsa in his films LANDSCAPE, TODAY WE ARE
GOING TO BUILD A HOUSE, and BLOCKADE uses effective visual turns; while Ulrich Zeidler
uses a mix of observational film and cinéma vérité as the starting point of his films, with
participants who speak directly into the camera at the moment when we least expect it,
thus shattering the illusion of pure observational documentary.

The erasing of the boundary between documentary and fiction film is certainly something
that marks the present moment in film history, in which documentary filmmakers, liberated
in terms of content and form, have the opportunity to become even more independent and
make the line between film genres even thinner.