Select from one of the readings and briefly describe two points that you have taken from it. Points that excite you, something that was completely new to you.

Paul Ward’s ‘Documentary: The Margins of Reality’ examines the “complex relationship between fiction, nonfiction and documentary as categories and how they overlap”.  Having studied True Lies: Documentary Studies last semester, it’s obvious now that the exploitation of these apparently separate forms is a common trait of recent films, and Ward reinforces this overlapping of modes via the use of reconstructions and re-enactments.  Ward explains that in many examples we are asked to take documentary as something that is in fact performed by actors, yet we don’t merely accept them as fabrications because they are (often) still real experiences of real people.

Documentary dramas (or docu-dramas) too, very much focus on the issues of truthfulness, instead relying on the viewer’s interpretation of what they see, with stories often given a number of different versions from different perspectives.  Often these stories are built on a ‘based on a true story’ foundation, but arguably should not be completely excluded from the ‘documentary’ category.  I’m personally unfamiliar with any of the reading’s discussed films, but a good example of my own sourcing would be the film adaptation of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ (1967), or closely-linked 2005 biographical film ‘Capote’, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role.  I feel that the best description of this genre is ‘creative non-fiction’, and am keen to explore this further.