Fakes of reality. Do we really need the paradigm of the documentary? From the ontology to the epistemology of movie images, i.e. there and back again

Abstract

The starting point for this paper is the statement that we are witnessing a “mock-documentary boom” in contemporary cinema. Viewers today can be surprised and confused by the variety of “intercrossings” that are used in documentary and fictional strategies. The fact that there has been a growing number of films that do not respect the traditional division between fictional and non-functional cinema deserves deeper consideration. The introduction of the paper is focused on historical sources and classifications of this complex phenomenon (for example: the brothers Lumière tradition contrasts with that of Méliès). The main body of the paper is concentrated on the question of what cinema can offer in lieu of a documentary paradigm. It also tries to explore ontological and epistemological perspectives which can clarify some of the reasons for the popularity of mock-documentary and docufiction productions. It ends with a suggestion that the cinema is a domain of fakes of reality regardless of whether fictional or non-fictional narration is used to tell their stories.