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Amy Ebersole
USC Critical Studies
MA Exam Part B
Day 2 Question 5
8 January 2014

Deconstructing the Dichotomous Line Between Fiction/Nonfiction

Once one has distinguished, as one does the entire philosophical tradition, between truth and
reality, it immediately follows that the truth “declares itself in a structure of fiction. — Jacques
Derrida

Some documentaries make strong use of practices such as scripting, staging, reenactment,
rehearsal, and performance that we associate with fiction. Some adopt familiar conventions such
as the individual hero who undergoes a challenge or embarks on a quest, building suspense,
emotional crescendos, and climactic resolutions. Some fiction makes strong use of conventions
that we typically associate with nonfiction or documentary such as location shooting, nonactors,
hand-held cameras, improvisation, found footage, voice-over commentary, and natural lighting.
The boundary between the two realms is highly fluid but, in most cases, still perceptible. — Bill
Nichols

Michel Renov in Theorizing Documentary suggests that the growing attention of

reality-driven representations shows that perhaps the “marginalization of the

documentary film as subject of serious inquiry is at an end” (1). Renov deconstructs the

hierarchy of fiction/nonfiction as “fictional and nonfictional forms are enmeshed in one

another — particularly regarding semiotics, narrativity, and questions of performance”

(Theorizing Documentary 2). The ontological status of the image and the epistemological

stakes of representation are key issues of nonfiction film. Unlike traditional narrative

cinema, there is an epistaphilici drive to see and to therefore have witnessed the Truth (or

at least a truth)ii in documentary spectators. While fiction is assumed to explore the realm

of the imaginary, nonfiction is limited to documenting reality. Yet semioticians note how

an image is just a relative combination of the signifier and signified and are just a form of

substitution or simulacra for an image already past. This alludes to the subjectivity of

how images are seen and decoded. So the glittering flashes of light edited together and

combined with sound in a documentary are inherently representational. According to

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Renov, John Grierson’s definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of

actuality,” “appears to be a kind of oxymoron, the site of an irreconcilable union between

invention on the one hand and mechanical reproduction on the other” (Theorizing

Documentary 33). This definition offers insight when thinking about the very messy lines

between fiction and nonfiction.

According to Bill Nichols, “creative treatment suggests the license of fiction,

whereas actuality reminds us of the responsibility of the journalist and historian”

(Nichols 6). While the dichotomous division between fiction/nonfiction has increasingly

blurred across media the past few decades, illustrated by the popular use of

documentary’s format in hybrid, mock, and pseudo-documentaries, theoretical

explorations of the indexicalityiii of the image and its truth claims have been long debated

since the Lumière brothers first made the documentary film a reality. I will discuss key

debates about the fictional backbone of all cinematic productions and of the photographic

image itself and use historical case studies to illustrate how — although fact/fiction lines

have become more difficult to distinguish while simultaneously these nonfiction “mixed-

breeds” have become increasingly visible across multiple media platforms, especially in

popular mass media because of its many appropriations of documentary techniques for

consumerist purposes — the debates about the image being able to represent reality have

long been contested.

French film critic Andre Bazin in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”

takes a realist perspective, championing the power of the camera apparatus to objectively

record truth. Comparing the photograph to the mummy, Bazin argues that it is meant to

preserve life. This impulse to preserve life or an experience is illustrated in one of the
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earliest documentaries, Louis Lumière’s Arrival of a Train (Le’arrivée d’un Train en

Gare de La Ciotat, 1895). The camera, placed on the platform near the edge of the track,

witness’s a train approach from the long-shot to a close-up with a surprising depth of

field, making early nonfiction film spectators run from the theater screaming in fear the

image was real (Barnouw 8). The reaction of the audience being that of fear of the

realness of the image illuminates the early expectations (delusions) of audiences

associating moving images with reality.

Bazin elevates Italian Neorealists, specifically Robert Rossellini, and their

postwar prerogative to document reality by using the long take, on-location shooting, and

non-actors to enhance the cinema’s realistic elements and preserve history. Realism’s

perspective is that there is an objective truth that can be transmutable through the moving

image. Barnouw affirms the formalist nature of documentaries, arguing that the

association of documentaries as objective is:

A nonsensical injunction. Documentarians make endless choices: of topic, people, vistas, angles,
lenses, juxtapositions, sounds, words. Each selection is an expression of a point of view, whether
conscious or not, acknowledged or not. Any documentary group that claims to be objective is
merely asserting a conviction that its choices have a special validity and deserve everyone’s
acceptance and admiration. (344)

While the observational method does offer the possibility for sporadic moments of

authenticity to occur in front of the camera, many theorists have argued it is impossible to

completely maintain a hands-off approach and not alter the environment or the way

social actorsiv operate around the documentarian. The mere presence of the camera

impacts behavior.v

As Michel Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the

Panopticon and the relationship between sight, power, and knowledge operate to cause

subjects to self-regulate their behavior. Judith Butler adds to this discussion by pointing
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out the inherent performativity of gender, enlivening discourse about the question of

whether a camera can capture objective “truth” when one’s identity is publically

performed. On the other side of realism, formalists/constructivists offer a contrasting

perspective on the cinematic apparatus’ ability to capture truth. Sergei Eisenstein notes

how, through the editing process, films become like an intellectual montage created by its

author. The montage creates inference through the juxtaposition of images, allowing the

visual text to be left open to subjective interpretation, inviting the viewer in to become a

meaning-maker in the decoding of the visual text.

Cinema has come a long way technologically since those initial realist versus

formalist debates, as editing software, special effects, and other filmic tools for image

manipulation are commonly used for both fiction and nonfiction filmmakers. Yet fakery

and reconstitutions were not historically uncommon in nonfiction film. Barnouw recounts

the use of fakery to captivate the public eye:

Memorable genuine footage came back from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but other footage
of the event, contrived in table-top miniature, was equally applauded. Several volcanic eruptions
were triumphantly faked … film companies did not want to ignore catastrophes or other headline
events merely because their cameramen could not get there; enterprise filled the gap. (25)

Even in the early 1900s, contrived moving image spectacles were paraded as fact to

achieve a sensationalist response; very much in the same way the producers of The Blair

Witch Project (1999) densely fabricated the existence of a witch and perpetuated its

history across multiple media channels to generate public attention. Nichols discusses

how The Blair Witch Project should remind us that:

Our own idea of whether a film is or isn’t a documentary is highly susceptible to suggestion. …
The gritty realism of camcorder technology to impart historical credibility to a fictional situation
… and a website with background information about the Blair witch, expert testimony, and
references to ‘actual’ people and events, all designed to market the film not as fiction, and not
even simply as documentary, but as the raw footage of three filmmakers who tragically
disappeared. (xii)
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But arguments about nonfiction’s fictional ontology in early documentary didn’t

only center on the counterfeiting of images; some filmmakers manipulated the

environment to make a desired action happen, omitting actions from the scene to evoke a

certain response. An example of this is from Nanook of the North where Robert Flaherty,

before recording, encourages the Eskimos to go on a walrus hunt in a similar way as to

how they traditionally hunted. He makes sure that the scene doesn’t hint at the rifle’s

presence (Barnouw 36). Flaherty omits the rifle from the scene to make the hunt and the

Eskimos seem more traditional and exotic to audiences in other countries. Barnouw

describes Flaherty’s appropriation of cinematic techniques in the documentary form:

Flaherty had apparently mastered — unlike previous documentarians — the ‘grammar’ of film as
it had evolved in the fiction film. The ability to witness an episode from many angles and
distances, seen in quick succession — a totally surrealistic privilege, unmatched in human
experience — had become so much a part of film-viewing that it was unconsciously accepted as
‘natural.’ (39)

Flaherty used cinematic techniques and paired them with “real-people being themselves”

to heighten emotional impact. Renov points out that among Nanook’s nonfiction elements

he utilizes many fictive elements, such as “the construction of character … emerging

through recourse to ideal and imagined categories of hero or genius, the use of poetic

language, narration, or musical accompaniment to heighten emotional impact or the

creation of suspense via the agency of embedded narratives … or various dramatic carts”

(Theorizing Documentary 2). Flaherty’s Nanook narrativizes the real. Renov argues that

the two domains of fiction and nonfiction inhabit each other.

The inhabitation of fiction with nonfiction is not much unlike contemporary

reality television. Nichols points out that “television can exploit a sense of documentary

authenticity and melodramatic spectacle simultaneously” (Nichols xii). MTV’s Real

World places people in artificial settings to act out reality and the footage is edited
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together to narrativize the events to create an emotional impact. Renov shows how “the

value of the image depends on its ability to inspire belief in its ‘real’ provenance”

(Theorizing Documentary 8). The Hills “reality” TV series exploited nonfiction

techniques to invest audiences in the lives of the actors. The unveiling in the last episode

of the scripted nature of the series as the camera in the very last scene zooms out from

two characters to an aerial shot of them situated on a studio lot caused uproar with

audiences as it confirmed the fictional nature of the “reality-based” show.

Socialist cinema and the Dziga Vertov doctrine also employed the tactic of editing

together footage to develop a narrative in order to document soviet “reality.” Vertov

created the term kino pravda, which became Cinéma vérité. According to Barnouw,

Vertov believed that “proletarian cinema must be based on truth — ‘fragments of

actuality’ — assembled for meaningful impact” (55). Lenin emphasized to Vertov the

importance of film over all other arts and built a doctrine “that every film program must

have a balance between fiction and actuality material” (Barnouw 55). 1920’s Soviet

realism was soon to be accompanied by a different type of blurring between fiction and

non-fiction filmmakers. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and other formalists, all used

the look of the documentary and combined it with dramatic action. Eisenstein used

montage and film editing in The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin,1925) to

evoke a strong political response. While it “functioned like a drama, it ‘look(ed) like a

newsreel of an event.’ This quality led some to associate it with documentary” (Barnouw,

61). Pseudo-documentaries use this strategy by using documentary techniques like shaky

camera, grainy texture, or talking head interviews to produce the same realistic effect on

fictional material.
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Others used Eisensteinian montage and cut together real and staged events for the

purpose of political satire. Jean Vigo’s day-in-the-life city symphony, A Propos de Nice

(1930), critiqued Nice using montage. This surrealistic and anarchistic piece opened

using stop-motion animation and figurines to portray Nice as a French tourist culture. He

catches the people in embarrassing situations by using hidden cameras. By juxtaposing

images of poverty-stricken areas, factory workers, and stray animals with the wealthy and

seemingly bored people on the boulevard Vigo constructs a narrative that highlights the

social and economic inequality between the rich and poor. His documentary alludes to

this without subtitling or the typically used Voice of God narration. This is an example of

how editing narrativizes and can fictionalize nonfiction material. This leads to a different

example of the blurring between fiction and nonfiction from another surrealist who

employs sound to critique travelogues and documentary narrators.

In Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes, 1933) Luis Buñuel captures an isolated

poverty-stricken village on the outskirts of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The

morbid living situations supposedly document inbreeding, disease, famine, and poor

agriculture. Buñuel combines the images with voiceover that has an objective yet “over-

the-top” intonation that self-reflexively critiques typical ethnographies and documentary

conventions. Nichols discusses how “the double-edged voice-over commentary on a

seemingly doomed culture” (21) with “outrageously judgmental if not ethnocentric,

voice-over commentary” hints to a level of calculated self-awareness that caricaturizes

typical travelogues (48). For example, the narrator says, “Here is another type of idiot”

pairing the verbal description with a picture of a villager. In another scene a mountain

goal falls off the side of a cliff to its death, according to the narration, but yet we can hear
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a gunshot in the frame, suggesting it didn’t fall but was rather shot. These are examples

show how Buñuel wanted the audience to question the authorial voice of narrators and

critique documentary film’s plea of objectivity.

While sound was argued as being another indexical sign, it could also be used to

construct a fictional narrative around real events, as in the case of Land Without Bread, or

in the case of L’Hippcoampe, narration is used to fictionally humanize nature. This 1934

documentary by Jean Painlevé scientifically examines a sea horse with a microscope. In

the 20s and 30s cinema was a means for bringing to the audience an understanding about

the truth and reality of animal life in a unique way that is impossible to the human eye.

Yet, the humanizing narration added a fictional element to the sober discourse of the

scientific documentary through Painlevé anthropomorphism of the sea horse. Many

contemporary films or nonfiction television shown on Animal Planet or the Discovery

Channel continue to use this humanizing technique when pairing narration with images of

animals or nature, such as in the BBC series Planet Earth (2006-Present).

While these historical examples and past theoretical discourse on the ability for

documentary to represent truth shows that there has always been a blurring of fiction and

nonfiction, there has been a relative increase in that blurring in popular media the past

few decades. There are many factors that go into this increase. The proliferation of cable

channels in the 80s and 90s and the continued proliferation of sites for distributing

content on the Internet in the 2000s to present day create an increase in demands for

content to fill space. Renov argues, “In a moment of escalating production costs,

independents and major networks alike have begun to subscribe to the belief that ‘truth’

is not only stranger but also more profitable than fiction” (The Subject of Documentary
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22). In the 80s and 90s, “many new channels (such as Discovery) started as relatively

small operations that depended on economical means of acquiring or producing

programming to fill their schedules, frequently turn(ed) to nonfiction genres that typically

cost a fraction of dramatic and comedy series” (Chris 137). As nonfiction was

repositioned on television, there were multiple shifts in the genre and the audiences who

watched nonfiction programming broadened. “As (channels) moved away from

proclaimed early commitments to a documentary form that would educate as it

entertained, they moved towards less didactic nonfiction genres such as game shows,

talent shows, and ‘reality-based’ programs” (Chris 138). Costs and shifting audience

profiles gave documentary programming an advantage on television since nonfiction

programming can be reproduced at a fraction of the cost of fictional television genres and

was often relatively recyclable.

According to Thomas A. Mascaro, President of HBO’s documentary

programming Sheila Nevins sought to encourage documentary expression. Because it

lacked the Federal Communications Commission oversight of broadcast and basic cable,

its content was less restricted and approached more sensational topics. HBO

documentaries purpose was to attract viewers to subscribe and/or win awards versus

generate the largest number of audience eyeballs like broadcast and basic cable

nonfiction content. HBO promoted some of its series as docutainment, and Nevins said

she preferred “storytellers” to “journalists” (Mascaro 248). HBO’s documentaries,

according to Mascaro, evoke a more cinematic feel and “the network sustains a

production environment for documentaries more like the Hollywood independent model

than the broadcast television model” (257). Perhaps it was the combination of the
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proliferation of channels on basic cable that led to the need for cheap, reusable nonfiction

content to fill time slots as well as premium cable’s simultaneous increase use of

cinematic techniques to enhance the quality of the documentary that encouraged

nonfiction genre blurring and an increase in mock, hybrid, and pseudo-documentaries.

“The documentary impulse has rippled outward to the Internet and to sites like YouTube

and Facebook, where mock-, quasi-, semi-, pseudo- and bona fide documentaries,

embracing new forms and tackling fresh topics, proliferate” (Nichols 2). Yet despite the

explosion of nonfiction content across multiple media platforms, there continues to be a

critical marginalization of the documentary in the academy and the marketplace.

Postmodern theorists emphasize the blurring of genres as well as art’s

reproducibility as featured by Walter Benjamin in “Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction.” The push for documentary to define itself as a distinct genre from fiction

emerges from not only from the Oscarsvi and the need to rank films from specific genres,

a construction of hierarchy and competition illustrative of capitalistic tendencies, but also

because of the ethical considerations of the relationship between the audience, spectators,

and subjects. According to Brian Winston, “the early and public claims for photography’s

status as scientific evidence were based on the sense that the photochemically produced

image was a fully indexical sign, one that bore the indelible imprint of the real …

Photography’s social utility followed from its ability to take the measure of things with

verifiable fidelity” (Renov Theorizing Documentary 4). This is a claim asserted too by

Bazin. As Nichols points out, “When we believe that what we see bears witness to the

way the world is, it can form the basis for our orientation to or our action within the

world” (xv). But there is a “‘tangled reciprocity’ between documentary practice and the
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Hollywood narrative” as discussed by Paul Arthur in “Jargons of Authenticity (Three

American Moments).

In Theorizing Documentary Renov argues that all discursive forms, if not

fictional, are at least fictive (7). Documentary film and the exploitation of “lure of

authenticity” illuminate nonfictions commodification in contemporary commercial

culture. According to Renov, “No longer are we as a culture to assume that the

preservation and subsequent re-presentation of historical events on film or tape can serve

to stabilize or ensure meaning” (Theorizing Documentary 8). The dichotomization and

hierarchy of fiction/nonfiction should be interrogated. “It is not that the documentary

consists of the structures of filmic fiction (and is, thus, parasitic of its cinematic ‘other’)

as it is that ‘fictive’ elements insist in documentary as in all film forms” (Renov

Theorizing Documentary 10). The historical theoretic impulse to associate the

movements of the photographic image with objective truth claims versus the reality that

has played out in the industrial practice of documentary filmmaking illuminates the very

slippery lines between fiction/nonfiction that have been contested since the birth of the

cinematic apparatus.

Industrially, as nonfiction filmmakers increasingly adopt more narrative film

cinematic techniques, documentaries may well sell better to wider audience

demographics. Historically, audiences in general have become more sophisticated over

time so perhaps they can better appreciate the ambiguity of the line between fact and

fiction. Theoretically, I suggest present audiences can see the world as more complex

than past audiences. The postmodern movement demonstrates how people are able to

grasp a greater complexity of the concept of truth. Truth is not as clear as it used to be.
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Mass media’s appropriation of nonfiction as a means to fill the proliferating space

in the cable and digital universe with content led to an increased presence of mock,

hybrid, and pseudo-documentaries and changing discourses and expectations of

audiences. There are ethical considerations of documentary as being seen as a sober and

objective discourse, as these moving documents are used as visible evidence or as a form

of historical, cultural memory. With the wave of docudramas and biopics that claim they

are “based on a true story” flooding the market in 2012, such as Zero Dark Thirty or

Lincoln, one must continue to see the inherent subjectivity of filmmaking in order to

analyze or interrogate its use as historical documents that record, reveal, or preserve. We

must continue to investigate and critically deconstruct the borderline fiction/nonfiction

borderline to see each cinematic representational domain as intricately enmeshed.

Unlike the fiction artist, (documentarians) are dedicated to not inventing. It is in selecting and
arranging their findings that they express themselves; these choices are, in effect, their main
comments. And whether they adopt the stance of observer, or chronicler, or painter, or whatever,
they can not escape their subjectivity. They present their version of the world. In eschewing
invented action, documentarians adopt a difficult limitation. Some artists turn from documentary
to fiction because they feel it lets them come closer to the truth, their truth. Some it would appear,
turn to documentary because it can make deception more plausible. Its plausibility, its authority,
is the special quality for the documentary — its attractions to those who use it, regardless of
motive — the source of its power to enlighten or deceive. — Eric Barnouw

Only rarely has nonfiction been the subject of psychoanalytic criticism, due, perhaps, to
assumptions of a baseline of rationality and conscious inquiry which govern the making and
reception of documentary film in contradistinction to the unconscious (imaginary) substrate which
cuts across and enlivens fictions … It is important to note, nonetheless, that the pleasures of
nonfiction are every bit as complex as those which have been attributed to fictional forms and far
less understood. — Michael Renov
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Works Cited

Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1993.

Bazin, Andre, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” In What is Cinema? Vol. 1,

translated by Hugh Gray, 9-16. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” In Film

Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 791-811. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Cynthia Chris. “Discovery’s Wild Discovery: The Growth and Globalization of TV’s

Animal Genres” In Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting. New York:

New York University Press, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage,

1995.

Mascaro, Thomas. “Overview: Form and Function” In The Essential HBO Reader.

Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

2010.

Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2004.

Renov, Michael. Theorizing Documentary. London: Routledge, 1993.

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i
“While Brecht’s call for “pleasurable learning” would seem to resonate with documentary’s etymological
roots (the Latin docere meaning ‘to teach’), for many, Brecht’s concept remains an oxymoron. In
psychoanalytic terms, one component of the spectator’s cinematic pleasure involves the play of projection
and identification with idealized others who inhabit the filmed world. The notion of an explicit
‘documentary desire,’ a desire-to-know aligned with the drive for an enabling mastery of the lived
environs, is one which is explored in (Renov’s) essay, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary” (Renov, 5).
ii
Nichols redefines nonfiction as a view of the world.
iii
Charles Sanders Peirce’s early 20th-centry work on the Indexical Sign says that there are three different
signs that dynamically conjoin in multiple ways: the symbol, the icon, and the index. The documentary is
the indexical sign, as it is a physical trace of something that once existed.
iv
Social actors are “people not performing for the camera and not playing a role in a fiction film” (Nichols,
xiii).
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vi
Renov in Theorizing Documentary says “controversy has surrounded the documentary nominations from
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in recent years, the claim being that most popular or
ground-breaking documentary films … have failed to receive Academy recognition” (5).