Hybrid Documentary and Beyond
Rachel Landers
First published 2024 by Routledge
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Names: Landers, Rachel, author.
Title: Hybrid documentary and beyond / by Rachel Landers.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge advances in film studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023027421 (print) | LCCN 2023027422 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367861391 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032613277 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003017141 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—Production and direction.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 L36535 2024 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8—dc23/eng/20230821
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027421
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027422
ISBN: 978-0-367-86139-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-61327-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01714-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003017141
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For D & D (again!)
1 What are hybrid documentaries?: re-contextualising the hybrid documentary in theoretical contexts, challenging the non-fiction–fiction definition 5
2 Documentary and the obsession with definitions: identifying the traits of hybrid documentary through classic 20th-century antecedents 31
3 What is the truth?: beyond the non-fiction–fiction blur, using philosophical, ethical frameworks to communicate the truth in hybrid documentary and beyond 75
5 Collaboration: exercises, problem-solving, script development, design as metaphor, form as content. The impact of workshops on graduate careers
6 Subjects in hybrid documentaries: casting, collaboration and co-creation. Whose story is it? What happens when hybrid documentaries behave badly and compromise the veracity of the content and integrity of the subjects? Are there checks and balances? Should there be? What are the experiences of participants/ subjects of hybrid documentary? 134 PART III
Beyond: contemporary hybrid filmmakers; interviews with contemporary documentary makers working in hybrid documentary forms 153
7 Explorers: Late 20th-century innovators in form – Errol Morris, Brian Hill 155
8 Adventurers: 21st-century hybrid documentary makers – Lynette Wallworth, Anna Broinowski, Robert Greene 171
9 New visions: Acclaimed debut hybrid documentary makers – Payal Kapadia, Kirsten Johnston 201
Acknowledgements
There are many people to thank. First, Suzanne Richardson who commissioned this book on the cusp of the pandemic and was generous and patient throughout, given all that was hurled at us all.
My gratitude to my former postgraduate students now not only all grown up but blooming as professional filmmakers and creators. It was a deep pleasure to reconnect through interviews about the experience, and legacy of, the hybrid workshops they participated in a decade ago. My regards to Larissa Behrendt, Cassie Charlton, Hollie Fifer, Lucas Li, Joshua Marks, Liz Mc Carthy, Logan Mucha, Rowena Potts, Adam Rosenberg, Jacob Schiotz and Ella Rubeli. I want to particularly thank Margaret McHugh on whose original film school application I wrote ‘fascinating/passionate art/doco nexus’. Margaret has gone from student to professional filmmaker, collaborator and fellow hybrid documentary lecturer and now academic colleague and dear friend. Her passion for hybrid documentary and kindness in sharing ideas and conversation have been a source of enduring inspiration.
I want to express my deep appreciation to Jill Chivers, Frank Aldridge, James Saunders and Sereena Damanhuri for responding to the street casting callouts to become the subjects of a hybrid documentary and then agreeing to discuss their experiences of the process up to ten years later.
Filmmakers Errol Morris, Brian Hill, Lynette Wallworth, Anna Broinowski, Robert Greene, Payal Kapadia and Kirsten Johnson were generous and expansive in their interviews and spent an embarrassing amount of time responding to my appallingly messy edits. Often listening back to their voices speak with such erudition and precision about documentary, I’d be shot through with a visceral sense of my universe expanding. Long may they all creatively prosper. Thanks to Fabiola Washburn and Max Bowens for making my trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, complete.
Thank you to those who let me talk their ears off about the book and who were not shy about arguing back – particularly Dr Anna Broinowski and Dudi Rokach, the Artistic Director of the magnificent Antenna Documentary Film Festival.
My regards to the University of Technology, Sydney for giving me leave to complete the book and for giving me such a fabulous bunch of boisterous,
x Acknowledgements
smart and bolshie colleagues to work with. To Alex Munt, Greg Ferris, Matt Gidney, Matthew Dabner, Bettina Frankham, Margaret McHugh, Emmeline Dulhunty, Liam Brannigan, Justin Harvey, Deb Szapiro, Deb Cameron, Maurice Giacomini, Pat Grant, Marcus Eckermann and Nick Henderson thanks for holding and expanding the fort while I was away. Media Arts and Production at UTS was a legendary place to learn filmmaking in Australia long before I joined its ranks. In the last week we’ve had one of our older alumni win an Oscar and one of the newer ones be picked out by the New Yorker as one of the most exciting directors of her generation. It’s a wonderful place to work, create, teach and play.
My love, adoration and gratitude to Dylan Blowen – he’s had to put up with me and this book longer than anyone – he was always willing to listen and give me the ballast to continue – we have walked an adventurous and complex road through the world of documentary together, proving always that the greatest discovery is always just around the next corner.
Finally, my love as always to Dashiell Blowen, my greatest non-fiction accomplishment.
1 What are hybrid documentaries?
Re-contextualising the hybrid documentary in theoretical contexts, challenging the non-fiction–fiction definition
What is meant by the term hybrid when applied to documentary? A ‘hybrid between what and what?’ (Moody 2013). Most film and documentary theorists, critics and commentators state, unproblematically, that a hybrid documentary is a combination of fiction and non-fiction. I don’t agree. This ignores both the realities of documentary production and important ethical and practical issues not least of which is an understanding of the obligations all documentary makers have to the truth and the ethical treatment of the subjects in their film – issues that need to be considered seriously.
Despite the impact of breakout hybrid documentary hits on the film festival circuit, there is relatively little published research devoted to the form. Furthermore, there is very little interrogation of the idea that the form is basically a hybrid between documentary and fiction. The assertion is often laid out as self-evident and uncontroversial, and frequently there is little analysis of what this might imply. By fiction do they mean – made up? Untrue? Lies? And if these films are simply a free-for-all mish mash between the two, don’t the latter elements call into question the veracity of former? Is this really what they are? I will argue that a definition based on the non-fiction/fiction dichotomy is reductive1 and that it is more useful to think about the hybrid documentary as being explorations at the frontiers of cinema of inventive and deliberate combinations of form, content and praxis that reach for different ways to articulate deep and unseen, or difficult to see, truths. These films often draw upon a variety of differing philosophical definitions of the truth – the Platonic, the Aristotelean, the Socratic, as well as those explored in contemporary philosophical theory – ideas that will be pursued further in Chapter 3. Hybrid documentaries are often bold experiments in innovative cinematic documentary form and practice.
To identify how hybrid documentary is manifest in contemporary documentary theory, it is useful to track how they have been described in recent literature and what examples are cited by scholars and why. As mentioned, for the most part they are presented as documentary films that combine elements of non-fiction and fiction. This predominant fiction/non-fiction definition is strongly influenced by the larger schism, that emerged in the late 1980s, in how documentary was defined coinciding with the birth and boom
Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth of contemporary documentary theory. This schism has theorists like Michael Renov (Renov 1993, 2004), Brian Winston (Winston 2000, 2008, 2013) and Bill Nichols (1991, 1994) firmly on the side of blurry boundaries, subjectivity and slippage between fiction and non-fiction that they argue characterises all documentaries, a position deeply influenced by late 20th-century post structuralist and postmodernist suspicions of grand progressive narratives about truth and reality.2 Scholars like Carl Plantinga (Plantinga 1987, 1997, 2016), Trevor Ponech (Ponech 1999) and Noël Carroll (Carroll 2003, 2021) on the other side have devoted considerable analysis, carefully or combatively attempting to dismantle and challenge these stances arguing that documentary can, in best practice, make claims to represent truth, reality, evidence and objectivity. Other academics particularly Stella Bruzzi (2006) and Jane Chapman (2009) have thoughtfully attempted to bridge the chasm – but the gulf remains.
For a documentary practitioner like me who came to teaching documentary very late and documentary theory even later, the rupture seems remarkably unproductive, endless and bordering on the sophomoric. It had echoes of conversations I have had with undergraduates who insisted nothing was real and that all documentaries were fictive constructs. Perhaps, because my academic background was as a historian, I found this posturing an odd way to go about comprehending the world which is in fact real. Real like climate change or the holocaust, one’s family, a trip to Disney world, Mount Everest, whales and the massacres of Indigenous communities. Of course, daily, most of us are not crippled with confusion about what is real, clear about our need to distinguish between the truth and what is fictional and know why we don’t like being lied to. Many children when hearing a story for the first time will ask ‘is this a true story’? When most of us watch documentaries, we believe it is a true story, and that involves a basic contract between spectator and maker that the content will be verifiably true. Even more critical is the bedrock of the relationship between documentary maker and subject who are often not renumerated for their involvement and appearance. It’s hard to imagine attempting to build trust with a potential subject or television commissioner using the rhetoric of Michael Renov:
As for the statement Derrida attributes to the philosophical tradition –‘truth declares itself in a structure of fiction’ – it may well be that any presumption of documentary’s relative exclusion from the critical ranks is simply ill-advised. If we substitute ‘non-fiction’ for ‘truth’ in that prescription but give due emphasis to the efficacy of ‘structure’ within the equation, we are left with only a paradoxical formulation, albeit one requiring some qualification. For, it is not that the documentary consists of the structures of filmic fiction (and is, thus parasitic of its cinematic ‘other’) as it is that ‘fictive’ elements insist in documentary as in all film forms.
(Renov 1993, p. 10)
How would one use this thinking to explain to the parents of a missing child you are hoping to involve in a documentary series about how different agencies search for missing persons? Would you explain that the series was simply a somewhat fictive construct and that, I the director, would be frequently crossing the fiction/non-fiction divide? Likewise, commissioning editors do need assurances that the commissioned team and the content they produce have some fidelity to the truth and fact checking. In the last few years, the national public broadcaster in Australia has faced a storm of controversy over the veracity of two major documentary series and had to pull them off the air (Meade 2021; Peterson 2021).
It is interesting to note that the major documentary theorists who emerged in the 1990s were distinct from those that came before them, in that the former (with the exception of Brian Winston3) did not and do not make documentaries. Unlike Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub, John Grierson, Paul Rotha or Robert Drew, for example, they did not develop their theories, ideology, or definitions about documentary through praxis. Most contemporary documentary theorists reflect on documentaries made by others whereas those that came before often made them themselves. This is an important distinction and one I will return to throughout the chapter as it provokes a critical question . . . what is theory for?
One of the things which is essential to ask, is how does academic documentary theory and ideology play out in and contribute to the world of documentary funding, commissioning, making, participating in and watching? I am not hostile to theory, but I am conscious that post structuralism that was so liberating in helping to dismantle edifices in the 1980s and 1990s has become a bit of an edifice itself, out of step, potentially, with recent ideas vital to documentary such as research by praxis, participatory action research, representation and inclusivity.
Before we get into the weeds let’s start here, again.
What are hybrid documentaries?
What are they indeed? Many non-fiction filmmakers even dislike the word documentary as a term to describe their work. As John Grierson quipped, ‘Documentary – a word . . . so ugly nobody will steal it’ (Sussex 1975, p. 3). I agree there are many interpretations of what documentary means, but let’s settle on the word as indicative of a certain type of non-fiction filmmaking. Even amongst those who do accept the word, it is hard enough to find much consensus among contemporary practitioners and theorists about what exactly frames, defines and constitutes a documentary – is it really reality? Are they simply constructed subjective simulacrum? Do they just exist in a fog-bound twilight zone in which, Bill Nichols the behemoth who sits astride contemporary documentary theory asserts,
[T]he distinction between fact and fiction blurs when claims about reality get cast as narratives . . . where the world put before us lies between
Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth
one not our own and that very well might be, between a world we may recognise as a fragment of our own and one that may seem fabricated from such fragments, between indexical (authentic) signs of reality and cinematic (invented) interpretations of this reality.
(Nichols 1994, p. xi)
Or is such a post structuralist-infused analysis shared by other two towering figures who make up a powerful triumvirate presiding over documentary theory, Michael Renov and Brian Winston, self-defeating and deeply flawed, as argued by Noël Carrol, and thus incoherent, unstable and unhelpful.
[T]he flaws in contemporary nonfiction film theory show us something about one of the major problems in contemporary film theory in general. For there is a striking tendency for film theorists to repeat the errors of nonfiction film theorists insofar as they derive their preferred philosophical premises from second-hand sources. They do not evolve these premises themselves, but get them from authority figures, whom they paraphrase or have paraphrased for them by second and thirdgeneration authority figures. Film academics typically do not subject these premises to criticism but treat them as infallible axioms to be used deductively in film criticism and theory.
There is only one remedy for this sort of intellectual stagnation. Namely: film theorists, especially nonfiction film theorists, must become philosophers themselves, or, at least, learn to think philosophically about their deepest presuppositions. Film theorists need to become interdisciplinary – not in the sense that they simply quote authorities from other fields – but in the sense that they become capable of thinking for themselves in terms of issues addressed by those other fields that are germane to film studies. Nonfiction film theorists need to learn to think philosophically – as well as historically, sociologically, and so on – if the field is to develop beyond its present state of arrogant sloganeering. (Carrol 2003, pp. 188–189)
Given such a polarised environment focusing on the whys and wherefores of hybrid documentary to illuminate this particular corner of practice can seem a bit like tilting at windmills.
Just to ground the argument in what Carl Plantinga would regard as the ‘pragmatics of non-fiction film’ (Plantinga 1997, p. 6), the types of films we are discussing include early 21st-century examples like Forbidden Lies (2007), Cicada (2008), Rabbit ala Berlin (2009), The Arbor (2010), The Act of Killing (2012), Stories We Tell (2012), The Imposter (2012), Casting JonBenet (2017), Dick Johnson is Dead (2020), The Midnight Gospel (2020), Procession (2021), A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and A Cop Movie (2021). There will always be robust dispute about what is and is not a hybrid
What are hybrid documentaries? 9
documentary, as we will find, along with contention about their respective value. It is also important to acknowledge that the form is not new, and Chapter 2 will examine hybrids from the 20th century, but for now the above stand as relatively solid representatives.
How are hybrid documentaries defined and described by recent theorists and commentators?
Robert Stam, Ohad Landesman and Tom Roston share a common high regard for hybrid documentary seeing it as representing an exciting new and innovative filmmaking practice. Landesman (who uses the term docufictions to stand for hybrid documentary) describes them as a ‘striking new development in documentary cinema’. For him they are documentaries that ‘simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction’ (Landesman 2015, p. 9). Stam writes ‘that the hybridization of documentary and fiction has been mobilised as a radical aesthetic resource’ (Stam 2016, p. 16), and Roston who is, admittedly, more blogger than academic refers to them as simply ‘awesome’ (Roston 2013). However, the examples each of them cites as illustrations of these hybrid documentary fact and fiction blends are wildly varied and display little consensus. It is here where things get complicated. Tom Roston, (possibly because of his ties to documentary practice though his POV Doc Soup festival blogs) references films that are generally regarded as existing solidly within the documentary orbit (insofar that they would be categorised or marketed as such in say a film festival line-up or by a film distributor), The Act of Killing , Stories We Tell , The Imposter and The Thin Blue Line . However, he also includes films seldom referred to as hybrids such as The Cove (2009) and films that certainly many would regard as sitting outside the boundaries of documentary and better referred to as experimental fictions such as Medium Cool (1969). Roston provides a definition of hybrid documentary that seems to equate ‘fiction’ with what others may characterise as cinematic devices or tools regularly deployed by a huge range of documentary makers for over 100 years.
The most basic definition I’d use for a hybrid documentary is a film that weaves together traditional nonfiction filmmaking with traditional fiction filmmaking. That’s it. It’s the offspring of two different elements. So that means a documentary that incorporates techniques such as animation, recreation, intentionally directed sequences, characters who speak from scripts, and so on.
(ibid., p. 1)
Landesman provides hybrid exemplars as Medium Cool, The Idiots (1998), In this World (2002), 24 City (2008), Ten (2002), Ford Transit (2003), the films of Errol Morris and Michael Moore, Nanook of the North
10
Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth (1922), Daughters’ Rite (1980), Sweetgrass (2009) and the films of Pedro Costa as films that ‘invite the viewer to welcome and embrace their aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not so much to dupe, mislead or mock’ as is the case of mockumentary that he sees as ‘flirting with the . . . format of formal hybridity’ but instead ‘offers a different tactic that exists along a fact-fictional continuum’ (Landesman 2015, p. 11). Stam adds an even greater range in his examples of ‘Hybrid Variations on a Documentary Theme’ citing, the documentaries of Agnes Varda, Frederick Wiseman and Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, Padhila’s Onibus 174 (2002), The Act of Killing (2012) but also City of God (2002) and what he describes as historical precedents of hybridity Citizen Kane (1941), Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) and Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (1950). This extremely eclectic corralling of films as examples of hybrid documentary would certainly seem strange to the average practitioner, distributor or commissioner of documentary. For them, many of those cited would be defined as straightforward examples of fiction films that are based on a true story or examples of observational cinema.
This grab bag tendency to include whichever film reference fits a particular theorists’ notion about hybridity can also be found in the writing of Zoe Robertson. She, like those authors above, strongly affirms that hybrid documentaries are a mix of facts and fiction. In her analysis, she puts forward The Act of Killing (nominated for best feature documentary at the Academy Awards in 2014) and Boyhood (nominated as best fiction feature in 2015) as consistent exemplars of ‘hybrid documentary film act[ing] simultaneously as a problematic and deeply effective tool for presenting reality’ (Robertson 2016, p. 1). This is despite the fact the former film had the perpetrators of a historical genocide recounting their past actions over the course of the film, and the other is a wholly invented story featuring fictional characters shot over a 12-year period. What is it that Robertson feels binds these seemingly disparate works so closely together? The answer lies in her seeing potent affinities between the fantastical reenactments performed by the members of the Indonesian killing squads and the 12-year production process of Boyhood, which filmed a boy’s physical transformation into adulthood which, in turn, informed elements of the fictional narrative. For Robertson, what makes them so alike is the possibility that one can potentially arrive at a ‘more vibrant understanding of the truth’ when
you insert additional or highlight particular elements of a scenario, and distance yourself from cold cut reality . . . Hybrid film becomes a kind of reverse-Dogma style wherein, rather than inundating a fictional narrative with a measure of reality, the real is invigorated by an element of fiction.
(ibid., p. 2)
Janet Merewether is a theorist writing about hybrid documentary who also makes them (as are Robert Greene and Lorenzo Ferrarini, referenced later). Her very thoughtful analysis of ‘hybridised filmmaking’ includes her own films, the work of Brian Hill, Peter Greenaway, Errol Morris and Dennis O’Rourke. While she regards hybrid documentary as a relatively new phenomenon very much tied to innovative postmodern post-colonial critical thinking, she does reference the work of ‘early innovators’ – Dziga Vertov, Jean Vigo and Jean Rouch – and Chris Marker as employing ‘hybrid techniques’ as part of the lineage. She also provides a more nuanced definition of the relative straightforward documentary/fiction fusion cited earlier.
I define the hybrid documentary as a nonfiction film which employs a stylised form of representation of the subjective voice and which may incorporate experimental and self-reflexive modes of production. The hybrid documentary frequently integrates fictional characteristics and formal innovation in performance, design and mise en scène. This mode of production often presents voices from the margins of society, and has been particularly embraced by feminist, queer and avantgarde filmmakers seeking to invert the position of the subject as victim and establish new aesthetic possibilities for the documentary. It may incorporate documentary, media art and performance art practice.
(Merewether 2009, p. 2)
In Merewether’s practice, she describes integrating ‘observational and fictional sequences to present the private world of the film subject’ (ibid., p. 2). She encourages a blurring of boundaries of fact and fiction by encouraging participants to see themselves less as potentially passive subjects to being performers in their own narrative. In doing so, her intention is ‘to collapse the conventional distinction made between documentary and fiction’ (ibid., p. 2). Merewether derives her ideas of hybridity from definitions found in biological science describing the artificial grafting process involved in crossfertilisation and from post-colonial theorists such as Bhabha (2012) and Werbner and Madood (2015), whose influential theories on cultural hybridity emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s challenging ideas about ‘naturalized’ boundaries, instead, highlighting ideas about ‘liminality’ and ‘in-betweeness’ (Bhabha 2012).
Karen D. Hoffman in her analysis of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is perhaps the most uncontroversial of all the academics in her selection of films to elucidate her ideas. These two films are widely regarded as classic examples (again from a practitioner, or commissioner, or programmer stance) of hybrid documentary and are cited in much of the scholarly work discussed here. Like those writers, she favours the form as having a tendency to ‘veer into fantasy and blur the line between fact and fiction’ (Hoffman 2016, p. 517). Similar to Landesman,
12
Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth in his somewhat pejorative assertion that these kinds of films are ‘lying to be real’, she argues that hybrids are ‘deceiving into the truth’. For her, both these hybrid documentaries ‘offer filmic deceptions aimed at expressing truth indirectly’ (ibid., p. 518).
Like Hoffman, Lorenzo Ferrarini also selects Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing as core examples of ‘Documentary Hybrids’ for which to build his argument about this form of filmmaking ‘that mixes fictional and nonfictional footage without clearly identifying or labelling either’ (Ferrarini 2020, p. 164). Ferrarini, a practitioner like Merewether and Greene, argues that documentary hybrids have ‘only been consolidating as practice during the last two decades [but that] their origins are as old as documentary itself’. Like Merewether, he cites post-colonial contributions on cultural hybridity as the source of his understanding of the term ‘hybrid’ (he does not reference the biological sciences definition) ‘where the impossibility of identifying a dominant component reveals the artificiality of static and essentialist identities’ (ibid., p. 164). He cites Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) as formative hybrid examples primarily because of their ‘dramatized’ scenes (he calls them docufictions) but excludes The Thin Blue Line (1988), which he instead describes as an example of straightforward (and now, what he regards as, common place) dramatised re-enactment. It is Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) that he holds up as a kind of patient zero – ‘the first experiment in documentary hybrids’ because of its overt reflexive and performative practices throughout and the frames within frames (such as the participants coming together to watch themselves on the screen and discuss their impressions) that explicitly ‘questions’ the real. Ferrarini adds to his list of hybrid documentary examples, most of the documentaries (or ‘fabrications’ (ibid., p. 167)) of Werner Herzog; Orson Wells’s F For Fake ; the Iranian film The Mirror (1997) and examples of his own films A Migrant’s Tale (2008) and Kalanda –The Knowledge from the Bush (2015). Ferrarini is coming from a position that asserts that non-hybrid films have (or claim/pretend they have) an objectivity that these hybrids eschew, instead celebrating ‘ambiguity’ and subjectivity through their shared ‘refusal to distinguish between fact and fiction’ (ibid., p. 170).
Even in this brief overview of the field, it does seem that almost anything goes, as to what can, or can’t, be defined as a hybrid documentary. On the one hand, it seems that any film that references real events could be deemed a hybrid or any film that apes a ‘documentary style’ shaky cam like The Blair Witch Project or the Office. This latter argument belongs to a sort of subset of theorists like Jane Rosco et al. who are preoccupied with elevating mockumentaries into the arena of serious documentary scholarship (Roscoe 2001). On the other hand, former Storyville commissioning editor Nick Fraser in answer to his own questions, ‘Are documentaries a definitively niche form? Should they be thought of as campaigning tools, as just one aspect of the
many efforts to improve the world? Do they really change anything?’, states ‘My own conclusions are that [all] documentaries are attractive, sturdy hybrids, capable of survival in adverse circumstances’ (Fraser 2013, p. x).
Further complications in our understanding of hybrid documentaries is how this term is interpreted with screen practices that intersect with documentary. In animation, the term ‘hybrid’ has been applied to mixes of 2D and 3D animation in the one work (O’Hailey 2010). ‘Hybrid documentary’ is also used when referencing the mix of animation and documentary content (Skoller 2011). In addition, recent research about interactive documentary and the New Documentary Nexus, ‘hybrid forms’ are described as blends of Nichols modes of representation familiar in linear audiovisual documentary – the poetic, the observational, expository, reflexive, participatory and performative mixed with (amongst other things) essayist genres, theatrical practices, digital journalism, VR, AR and/or multimedia installations (Wiehl 2019, p. 7). It is important to note this scholarship, about these experimental interactive documentary cocktails, contains no assertions that such structural and aesthetic inventiveness are examples of facts bleeding into fiction. It seems that the notion of hybridity despite its relatively straightforward origins in science is in flux.
This lack of consensus is in part of what inspired Robert Greene’s provocative British Film Institute article, ‘Die Hybrid Die’ . . . ‘I do not like the term hybrid . . . and I’m here today to try and kill it’4 (Greene 2019, p. 1). As a filmmaker and festival programmer he viewed the label as a ‘marketing term, not unlike “Mumblecore”, [which] might be useful in some vague branding sense, but is ultimately reductive and potentially damaging to the films to which it becomes attached’ (ibid., p. 3). Greene argues that the term hybrid is randomly and unreflectively assigned to ‘formally ambitious documentaries’ many of which have no hybrid tendencies at all, citing examples such as Leviathan and These Birds Walk. Greene recognises that there are some films intent on exploiting the ‘increasingly blurry line between fiction and non-fiction’, but he also feels strongly that there are many more innovative and boundary-pushing documentaries that are not. Greene, like Plantinga, Bruzzi and Carrol before him, suggests that what academics and commentators are referring to as a fiction/non-fiction blur is instead fact-based documentaries exploring, adapting and deploying innovative cinematic, narrative and aesthetic choices in their storytelling. He also issues the warning that lightly tossing out definitions that highlight the ‘blur’ can needlessly distort a documentary’s ‘relationship with reality’. He also argues that these kinds of documentaries have existed since the form’s inception in the early 20th century and are better described as ‘Cinematic Non-Fiction’.5
For Greene, hybrid documentaries of the 21st century are in fact ‘throwbacks. Hybridisation, innovation, heterodoxy and integration have been crucial to the advancement of non-fiction since the beginning’, citing examples made by filmmakers like Rouch, Flaherty, Buñuel, Marker, Ackerman,
Guzman and Watkins (ibid., p. 4). Despite his initial death threats about the term – Greene does capitulate somewhat by concluding that
Documentaries are hybrid monsters by their very nature; wild combinations of realities and fictions have undisputedly yielded some of the most inspired cinematic moments in movie history. So, let’s drop the ‘hybrid’ name and get to calling these things movies.
(ibid., p. 4)
Greene by his conclusion has tied himself up somewhat in a Gordian knot, that in defending the innovations of documentaries they seem, by the end in his analysis, to have no unique or distinguishing qualities which leads to deeper questions. If they are all just movies, why do we use the word documentary, let alone hybrid documentary to frame them? For me, a core part of questioning and renewing the theoretical framework around the development of hybrid documentary is to do with interrogating notions of the truth and asking questions such as: why tell non-fiction stories? Why distinguish between non-fiction and fiction? What is the truth? Why tell the truth? How does one come to it? Why is it important to audiences? What contract exists between them and these films? Why does telling the truth matter and why do we care?
Documentary festival programmer, curator and creative director Luke Moody shares some of Greene’s questions about easy and simplistic assumptions about the form but goes much deeper in his critiques. In his wonderfully titled Act normal: hybrid tendencies in documentary film (Moody 2013) Moody, like Greene, argues that many of the references to fictional elements, content or devices apparent in some hybrid documentaries are in fact better described as explorations of cinematic style, form and approach. He also argues convincingly, like Greene, that such explorations are far from new and are embedded in the origins of documentary as a distinct form of filmmaking.
For Moody, part of the attention and controversy that hybrid documentaries, like The Act of Killing, were courting in the early 21st century was because of the wave of non-negotiable, ‘fact presenting documentaries films’ that preceded them and not because they were doing something uniquely different in the canon although he, like Merewether, does link their evolution to roots in other creative and academic fields such as performance theory, grotesque and verbatim theatre and the ‘ethical playgrounds’ of Dogma cinema (ibid., p. 2). In as such, he regards hybrid not as a subgenre of documentary but as a ‘mode of tactical filmmaking’. The forms emerging have long lineages and multiple precedents and offer ‘a deconstructed point of view suspended within strategies for finding multiple truths’ (ibid., p. 2). He also regards them as a form of documentary making that is revitalising earlier avant-garde filmmaking with ‘new subjects and meetings of form/content’ (ibid., p. 4). While he believes they share traits – listed later – he cannily avoids lumping
them all together and instead looks at ‘simple groupings and genealogies’ of shared methodological trajectories. Not only are they simple he provides extremely clear descriptions that outline how the films work from a practical rather than theoretical point of view thus avoiding some of the incoherencies that the fact/fiction adherents manifest. For example, the description he gives to the grouping, ‘Performing the Archive’ (The Arbor, The Act of Killing) is ‘a means of addressing historic acts, records or media through creative reenactment, interpretation or improvisation’ (ibid., p. 4). Other groupings include ‘The Literate Layer’ (the films of Chris Marker), ‘Intelligent Provocateur’ (Mads Brügger’s Red Chapel, The Ambassador) and ‘Improvised Self’, a ‘method’ of dramatising the self to achieve representational clarity or reveal the fantastic ‘magical’ self (Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach with past references being Flaherty’s Nanook and the work of Jean Rouch).
Moody is sceptical about the fact/fiction mash-up assumptions as accounting for the complexity of hybrid documentaries and indeed their intent regarding it as having ‘little digestive reflection’. It was Moody who asked that important question a hybrid between what and what and raised the possibility that this fact/fiction blur is simplistic. While he accepts that perhaps some may operate on the boundaries of fact and fiction, he encourages one to think about what other ‘boundaries do they operate between?’ He offers up a cornucopia of other possible dualities and boundaries that exist between, ‘observation and instigation, life and art, the actual and the possible, translation and interpretation, presence and performance, construction and deconstruction, evidence and hearsay, authorship and plagiarism, meaning and abstraction’ (ibid., p. 2).
Moody shares with Hoffman the sense that hybrid documentaries deploy strategies that utilise ‘indirect’ means of finding the truth. For Moody, this does not amount to a strategy of trickery or dishonesty but rather because they are an open form of filmmaking that is responding to a rise of distrust of traditional and mainstream media narratives by encouraging audiences to not simply accept given information or facts but to question and explore ideas to grasp ‘deconstructed points of view’ and ‘multiple truths’. Hoffman argues the inverse. For her this indirect path is a process of deception that echoes Kierkegaard’s invocation of Socrates avoiding of direct communication in favour of forms of communication that encourage audiences and participants to ‘think through the material’ and thus ‘develop their own sense of what is true and determine the significance that truth has for their lives’ (Hoffman 2016, p. 518). While there is a great deal of fascinating territory to explore in these notions of indirection, Hoffman takes a rather relativist and somewhat unnuanced approach to such strategies and decides that the filmmakers of Stories We tell and Act of Killing take each of these hybrid documentaries into fantasy and fact fictions blurs by deliberate acts of deception. However, the examples Hoffman provides to illustrate such duplicitous actions are unconvincing. She writes about Kierkegaard’s invented author stating claims ‘puppet like’ from his creator’s clever mind as examples of the
16 Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth
deceptive practices in the hybrid documentaries she examines. Yet neither of these films Hoffman analyses has a character that is made up.
Hoffman writes about the lack of voice-over in both films as liberating the audience from knowing what to think, failing to note that there are literally thousands of documentaries without voice-over narration and that for many years this stood as a marker (rightly or wrongly6) for ‘quality’ documentaries (many of them observational) that avoided it. Likewise, Hoffman makes assertions about director Sarah Polley’s intent that seem misleading. Polley regards her film as a hybrid, somewhere between a documentary and an experimental film, not a fact and fiction mix. Hoffman asserts that the evidence for Polley pushing the boundaries of documentary into fabrication is when the director refers to her film as an ‘interrogation process’. This simply misconstrues the context in which Polley, in the opening of her film, says this on camera clearly as a joke to the man she calls her father. In answer to Michael Polley’s quip that the way Sarah Polley is filming (two cameras and so on) is ‘not the usual way of doing things’, she replies ‘We told you it was a documentary but it’s actually an interrogation’. This scene is followed by a sequence in which Polley’s older siblings are shown humorously displaying their awkwardness being filmed by their sister as the cameras and lights are set up. The sequence establishes a tone of warmth and connection between all the family members which is clearly not what documentary makers or audiences would describe as ‘interrogatory’ in intent (as one might describe some of the work of documentary maker Nick Broomfield). Hoffman also questions the veracity of the subjects in the film suggesting that they are unreliable narrators and unable to distinguish between truth and lies – condemned to a ‘dual persona’ because they work as actors, producers and directors. This is despite the fact that at no time do any of these subjects appear as anything more than family members of Polley’s talking with her about the ramifications of a long-held family mystery/secret. For both films, Hoffman views the use of reconstruction and re-enactment as further examples of the ‘use of elements of fiction in the service of nonfictional film’ (Hoffman 2016, p. 530) and that throughout the film The Act of Killing, ‘makes little effort to differentiate fact from fiction’ (ibid., p. 522). Ferrarini also regards the fantastical re-enactments in Oppenheimer’s films as ‘enactive filmmaking’ and Herzogian examples of ‘fabrication and imagination and stylization’ (Ferrarini 2020, p. 167) but adds that they take one beyond the ‘simple idea of mixture of the fact and fiction’ because it does not approach reality as a ‘given’ but a negotiation between parts (ibid., p. 168).
Through slightly different analytical lenses Hoffman and Ferrarini come to the conclusion that because of the ambiguity and the blurry negotiations between fact and fiction – hybrid documentaries are producing more complex subjective versions of the truth which are either ‘transcendent’ (Hoffman 2016, p. 533) or ‘poetic and ecstatic’ (Ferrarini 2020, p. 167). A kind of truer truth. In this they are asserting a superiority of this kind of filmmaking over ‘Direct Cinema’ which mirrors the hierarchical values ascribed to different modes of documentary making championed by Renov, Winston and
What are hybrid documentaries? 17
Nichols – direct cinema at the bottom and reflexive documentary at the top. It also echoes the provocations made by Werner Herzog in his ‘Minnesota Declaration’ in which he criticised what he regarded as the delusional truth claims of ‘verite’ documentary – the ‘truth of accountants’ (collapsing the direct cinema practices of Robert Drew with the reflexive verité praxis of Rouch and Morin) instead favouring using imagination, fabrication and stylisation to achieve an ‘ecstatic truth’ (Herzog 2016).
Both Hoffman and Ferrarini ascribe an ambiguity to the construction of hybrid documentary that is at odds to the relatively straightforward and uncontested theses, assertions and conclusion of each documentary. Sarah Polley was correct that her family lineage was problematic when she finds out in the film that Michal Polley is in fact not her biological father. Despite the antics of Anwar Congo and his team of killers at no point is Oppenheimer’s audience presented with the idea that what they did is anything other than utterly heinous. It could be argued that both films are extremely transparent about their means to production and that rather than blurring fact and fiction they signpost clearly what is constructed and what is not.
In this context, Ferrarini’s argument that Polley’s revelation in the second half of her film that some (not all) of the archive in her feature documentary is in fact re-enactment is evidence she is refusing to distinguish between what is real and what is made up is problematic. Polley transparently and deliberately at a precise point in the film reveals to the audience that she has constructed many of the super eight scenes using actors playing her parents and her parents’ friends making it clear that it is in fact re-enactment and not archive. She did this, as she herself made clear, to underline the complexity and nuance of memory not to assert that the memories are deliberately fabricated by the participants (Barlow 2013). There’s a big difference between a filmmaker making fictional content and a documentary filmmaker exploring how different people can have different recollections about the same event (this is surely a defining characteristic of The Thin Blue Line) using reenactment to illustrate this point to the audience and the impact this can on real lives. Polley can explore, probe, interrogate and play within the context of her foray into the past, but she is bound by the verifiable facts of the past. The film’s coherency and impact would collapse if we found that her Mother was not dead, in the same way The Thin Blue Line would have little impact if we discover suddenly that Randall Adams was free man when he was interviewed and not on death row for a crime he did not commit. Some things remain inviolate, unnegotiable and necessarily verifiable for the films to retain their internal logic. Neither Polley nor Oppenheimer’s hybrid documentaries are ‘refusing’ to ‘distinguish between fact and fiction’ (Ferrarini 2020, p. 170). On the contrary, the facts of each documentary are the critical bedrock of why these films have such resonance. Polley factually has a dead mother and is uncertain who her biological father is – she wants to find out and does. Oppenheimer is filming a group of men who unambiguously participated in a genocide for which they remain unashamed, unapologetic and unpunished.
18 Overview: hybrid documentary theory and the truth
Mario Slugan has argued that the idea that re-enactments (stylised or not) in documentaries are ‘fictional representations’ as characterised by Bill Nichols, and the writers above fails to account for the clear contexts in which they are presented as ‘veridical accounts’ thus plausible representations about the events of which they relate and not fictions – the life of Sarah Polley’s mother or the murder of Indonesians. Slugan gives the example of emailing friends a recollection of Donald Trump’s claims in a presidential debate as having the same plausible re-reconstructive elements as those inherent in a re-enactment in which he dresses up and performs Trump’s speech in a wig, films and then sends to his friends. Both acts are ‘plausible reconstruction’ and not fiction. The latter could pervert what happened ‘but this would only make the re-enactment a deliberate misrepresentation and not fiction’ (Slugan 2021, p. 117).
The
persistence of the blurry boundaries debate
Is it possible that part of the preoccupation of documentary theorists analysing the hybrid documentary through the non-fiction/fiction dichotomy is the collapsing of what would be properly regarded as experiments and innovations in aesthetics, form and cinematic structure and style into assertions about definition and intent. It is also inextricably connected to the larger ongoing debate and division amongst contemporary theorists about whether one can ever differentiate documentary/non-fiction from fiction. A debate that has persisted, at this point, for almost half a century.
Five years before the publication of Bill Nichols’s Representing Reality (1991) and seven years before Michael Renov’s Theorising Documentary (1993), Carl Plantinga wrote about the ‘despair’ that film scholars sometimes had as to whether they would ever be able to sufficiently define documentary and be able to distinguish between fiction and documentary. As a result, he argued that ‘much of our theory is shackled by uncertainties and misperceptions’. In the essay ‘Defining Documentary: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Projected Worlds’ (1987), Plantinga was confident he would be able to ‘clear away some misleading assumptions about documentary that must be abandoned’ (Plantinga 1987, p. 44).
Alas, decades on, this has not been the case, the disputes about the blurry boundaries of documentary have not only endured but come to dominate much scholarship. The debate is alive and proliferating, one could say even metathesising. David LaRocca’s introduction to The Philosophy of Documentary (2016) is devoted to the debate and what he regards as documentary’s ‘controversial, unsettled state’ and starts with a ‘is he or isn’t he?’ question about the protagonist in Medium Cool (an image of whom somewhat oddly adorns the cover of a book about documentary) – the answer to which (fairly uncomplicatedly) is – no, he’s not a real person, he’s an actor in a fiction film using volatile political locations as a backdrop.
The whole of the 2021 Volume 15 of Studies in Documentary Films is devoted to the topic and while there is much nuance and complexity in the various journal articles the debate remains positional and somewhat entrenched.
Erika Balsom captured the self-defeating, ‘claustrophobic’ and potentially destructive, illogic dominating the current debates in contemporary documentary theory in her seminal 2017 essay, ‘The Reality Based Community’;
Have you heard that reality has collapsed? Post-truth politics, the death of facts, fake news, deep-state conspiracies, paranoia on the rise. Such pronouncements are often feverish objections to a nightmarish condition. Yet inside the echo chamber of twenty-first-century communication, their anxiety-ridden recirculation can exacerbate the very conditions they attempt to describe and decry. In asserting the indiscernibility of fact and fiction, the panicked statement that reality has collapsed at times accomplishes little but furthering the collapse of reality. Proclaiming the unreality of the present lifts the heavy burdens of gravity, belief, and action, effecting a great leveling whereby all statements float by, cloaked in doubt.
(Balsom 2017, p. 1)
Rather than ‘breathe the stale recirculated air of doubt’ (ibid., p. 5), surely there is a way to describe the difference between films like Nomadland (2020) and The Act of Killing (2012), between Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Stories We Tell (2012) and to chart the critical factors that differentiate Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and Humphrey Jennings’s The Silent Village (1943). It is in these very differences that lie the essential DNA and ethical obligations of all documentaries.
One could also ask to what end does this polemic function. Who does the debate serve, and what is its relationship to those who make documentaries or being taught to make documentaries? A recent volume of the Journal of Cinema and Media studies (Vol. 61, No. 9, 2022) focused on Documentary Pedagogy observes the ever-widening and problematic gulf between theory and practice in tertiary environments teaching documentary. Latsis and Lessard note that
the specific exigencies of documentary pedagogy in fine arts and media studies context have been given little systematic attention by practitioners, theorists, and historians, at a time when the ethical, material, and environmental underpinnings of the moving image –especially in its rapport to socio-political realities – have never been more pressing.
(Latsis and Lessard 2022, p. 1)
In ‘Approaches to Creative Actuality: Documentary Pedagogy in the Contemporary University Environment’, Atakav and Hand comment that ‘there can often be a tension in the context of higher education when it comes to the creative-critical practice of documentary production’ (Atakav and Hand 2022, p. 1). They argue that while the relationship between practice and theory is ‘paramount’ they also observe the frequent absence of the latter in practical or vocationally orientated tertiary film schools teaching documentary. There is no virtue reiterating the theoretical minutia of the competing sides of what C. Paul Sellors calls the ‘paradox of blurred boundaries that too often haunts discussion of non-fiction film’ (Sellors 2014, p. 120) which are well known to most documentary scholars and well-articulated in texts like Stella Bruzzi’s New Documentary (2nd ed., 2006), Paul Ward’s Margins of Reality (2006) and Jane Chapman’s Issues on Contemporary Documentary (ibid., p. 4). However, it is worth noting having revisited many of these canonical texts representing each side I am struck by how bound they can be by the era in which they are written.
Winston, Nichols and Renov were clearly deeply influenced (despite Winston and Renov’s protestations) by post structuralist theories that swept Western humanities campuses (like my own) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were also clearly impacted by the huge bearing a film like The Thin Blue Line had on documentary audiences and practitioners when it burst into cinemas in 1988 and its challenge to the dominance of direct cinema since the early 1960s as the prevailing mode of ‘quality’ documentary.7 What the three theorists have in common is their extraordinary dislike of this style of filmmaking, suspicious of its claims of ‘purity’ and ‘truth’ and the ‘enhanced claims of observational documentary to be offering objective evidence’ (Winston 2013, p. 13). Winston accused direct cinema of weakening the ‘responsibility of the audience making its own judgments’, lording it over and negating all other forms of documentary practice such as reconstruction or being more susceptible to ‘fakery’ and ‘fraud’ (ibid., p. 13).
Whether the pioneers and practitioners of direct cinema were in fact all unanimously guilty of the mob-like behaviour of what they were charged –asserting observational film was purest and best form of documentary – is debatable. Film historian David Resha questioned these accusations:
[I]s it the case that the Drew Associates had a child-like, potentially harmful naivete about truth, reality, and objectivity in their films? It is important to note that many characterizations of the Drew Associates’ rhetoric are not representative of how the filmmakers discussed their work. Conceptual issues like truth, objectivity, and subjectivity are not a prominent part of the filmmakers’ characterization of their filmmaking.
(Resha 2018, p. 32)
