When I hear the word nonfiction, the first thing that springs to mind is high budget, well produced documentaries. Which is interesting, because in terms of my own consumption of non-fiction media, documentaries wouldn’t really be near the top of the list. I see things like news articles, photos, social media etc much more frequently than the amount of feature length documentaries I’ve watched. Still though, that stands out as the pinnacle of non-fiction media within my head.
In our studios so far, I’ve interacted with much more experimental nonfiction media. In his nonfiction collation, Reality Hunger (2010), David Shields pulls together quotes from hundreds of pieces of nonfiction, and groups them together in terms of central themes. Several immediately leapt off the page and seemed to have a form of almost inherent meaning. I don’t even know why, but number “130 act naturally” kept coming back to me. Perhaps just because it was short and easily remembered, but maybe because subconsciously it resonated with me.
This is the kind of media that I hadn’t really even thought about as being considered “nonfiction”. Narrative-less, experimental expression. Incredibly subjective, and completely different to any two audiences.
Leviathan, a 2012 film by directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, is another example of experimental non fiction that we looked at in our first studio. One shot from the portion of the film I saw really stood out to me. A camera, bobbing in and out of the water facing the front of the bow as it tore through the ocean. It just looked so incredibly cinematic. I immediately imagined it as the opening shot in a blockbuster, feature length film and wanted to try and recreate that shot myself some day.
Perhaps that’s the most important part of this kind of nonfiction. Everyone resonates with something different in these pieces of work, and those subjective responses can be used to draw inspiration from and develop new, different media.
Reference
Shields, David (2010), Reality Hunger: a Manifesto, New York: Knopf