The Difficulty with Documentary: A Filmmaker’s View

Abstract

A book on documentary published several years ago by a prestigious British university press began thus: ‘The nature of non-fiction and the non-fiction film has proven to be utterly baffling to generations of filmmakers and scholars’ (Plantinga, 1997, p. 2). Hardly an encouraging beginning. It is highly unlikely that a book on culinary arts or mammal physiology would begin like this. There must not be many pedagogical books whose opening lines announce that they have an ‘utterly baffling’ object ahead of them. In our case, however (and unfortunately), similar descriptions can be found by anyone who is willing to search the genre’s literature. Such statements almost always appear in the opening pages, but more recently they have started to appear at the end, as if we were fated not to know who we are.