When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception

Abstract

Documentaries-or whatever their directors care to call them-are just not my favorite kind of movie watching. The is I don't trust little bastards. I don't trust motives of those who think they are superior to films. I don't trust their claim to have cornered market on truth. I don't trust their inordinately high, and entirely undeserved, status of bourgeois respectability.' -Marcel Ophuls Ophuls's ongoing career as maker of serious documentaries belies his claim to mistrust form. Nonetheless, Ophuls's declaration gets to heart of what defines documentaries (or whatever their directors care to call them). All documentaries-whether they are deemed, in end, to be reliable or notrevolve around questions of trust. A is any motion picture that is susceptible to question Might it be lying? It has been nearly seven decades since John Grierson first applied term documentary to movies. Still, definition of term remains vexed and controversial issue, not just among theorists but also among people who make and watch documentaries. Definitions of genres like western and noir are in last analysis fairly academic-of more concern to scholars than to nonprofessional viewers. In contrast, as is apparent from storms of controversy that rage around fact-based films like JFK (1991) and Malcolm X (1992), distinction between fact and fiction is vital and important one to popular movie audiences. It is also probably indispensable in making sense of many kinds of everyday discourse, from dinner-table conversation to TV commercials. It is certainly crucial in reception of discourses that are commonly regarded to be forms of nonfiction, including documentary. The question I wish to address in this article is, What difference does it make? How does it matter to recipients of discourse, in practical terms, whether discourse is considered to be or nonfiction? Although I will focus chiefly on here-that is, on movies that are supposed to be nonfiction2-this question pertains to other forms of nonfiction as well, such as history and journalism. Documentary has been variously defined through years as a dramatized presentation of man's relation to his institutional life, as film with message, as the communication, not of imagined things, but of real things only, and as films