The Fiction in Non-Fiction Film

Abstract

Over the past few decades film theory, major scholars and acclaimed filmmakers have established that documentary just like fiction must resort to ambiguous and subjective rhetorical figures in order to represent the world. This has led some scholars to conclude that documentary as a term referring to itself as being non-fictional might be disregarding its inevitable fictional elements. This may imply that both documentary and fiction use the same strategies and obtain the same results when representing the world: ficitionalize reality.
 If we accept this claim as true we need to ask whether terms such as fiction and non-fiction or documentary make sense when discussing representing reality. Does this mean that cinema can only fictionalize reality and therefore we should erradicate from this discussion tems such as non-fiction or documentary due to their associated “truth” claim?
 Can we understand or discuss representing reality without referring to those terms? Can the term fiction exists in fact without refferring to the term non-fiction or documentary?
 The questions that this paper intends to answer are:
 What roles do documentary and fiction play in representing the historical world?
 Are these terms necessary to comunicate and understand representing reality?
 This paper has established that fiction and documentary are necessary terms that emerge in cinema narration as means to mirror human experience’s needs to organize, communicate and understand reality.