Abstract
We are witnessing a dominant trend in contemporary documentary practice, whereby films abandon the longstanding ideal of objectivity in favor of more diverse and subjective perspectives on reality. Blurring the boundaries between subject and filmmaker, “first-person documentaries” invite us to critically reflect on the processes by which viewers distinguish nonfiction from fiction. This chapter posits that such assessments depend on the cognitive principle of framing, with viewers drawing on a wide array of textual, contextual and real-world cues to construe a film as documentary or otherwise. First-person films could be understood as a sub-frame of documentary, with its own set of expectations and unique emotional affects. This is demonstrated through a case study of Kirsten Johnson’s 2016 film, Cameraperson.
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Notes
- 1.
For a similar claim, presented from a phenomenological perspective, see Vivian Sobchack’s (1999) article, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience.”
- 2.
It is worth keeping in mind how much of our knowledge of history is mediated and may be subject to various degrees of manipulation, so that “historical reality” in this context must be taken to mean a commonly agreed-upon understanding of historical events rather than a literal record of them.
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Ros, V., O’Connell, J.M.J., Kiss, M., van Noortwijk, A. (2018). Toward a Cognitive Definition of First-Person Documentary. In: Brylla, C., Kramer, M. (eds) Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90332-3_13
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