Act normal: hybrid tendencies in documentary film

On the release of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing in UK cinemas, some excitement is emerging about the possibilities of new hybrid forms of documentary.

“All great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Aside from this admiration, the film has provoked reactions of both shock and awe, effects that can be attributed to a recent lack of public critical engagement and discussion of the documentary form. This article is a minor attempt to create a current overview of the hybrid documentary by outlining some of influences and difficulties of these forms.

After a wave of non-negotiable fact presenting documentary films in the early 21st century, more recent filmmaking tendencies are offering plural directions for interpreting reality. The forms emerging are layered, offering a deconstructed point of view suspended within strategies for finding multiple truths.

These films have been loosely and conveniently referred to as ‘hybrid documentary’: A quick means of grouping factual based films that conceptually address the relationship between form and content in an attempt to pervert traditional factual production methodologies with new truth games. The more recognisable films that prompt this discussion present quite a broad spectrum of filmmaking: The Arbor, The Act of Killing, The Ambassador and Bombay Beach. Their differences motivate further discussion of what defines the ‘hybrid’ documentary and how its offerings might reposition future practices.

The notion of cinema ‘blurring the boundaries’ has created much buzz in the documentary world but little digestive reflection. An initial point of query is: ‘Hybrid between what and what?’ One general assumption is that these works emerge from the interstice of documentary and fiction – but what other boundaries do they operate between? Observation and instigation, life and art, the actual and possible, translation and interpretation, presence and performance, construction and deconstruction, evidence and heresay, authorship and plagiarism, meaning and abstraction.

Not all of these transcending devices work towards positive representation and some walk altogether different, more ethically challenging boundaries: from revealing to exploitative, from dissection to disgust, responsible to irresponsible, experimenting with to experimenting upon, dignity to deviation, orchestration to dictation, subjective to subjecting. Despite the hype generated by these films, their ambiguous genre means that many still have a hard time finding a home with funds, distributors, festivals and critics. These industry bodies still tend to operate on strict categories of fiction vs. documentary or alternately permit willful ignorance of their fraught distinctions.

Recognition of new waves and emergent trends tend to overlook the specific ideas and patterns of filmmaking. The ‘hybrid documentary’ is not a subgenre, it is a mode of tactical filmmaking. To come to terms with these modus operandi, rather than looking upon them as a singular movement, there’s a need to trace each trajectory of complex, rich methodology.

The origins of these documentary forms find some roots in other creative and academic fields: artists taking a novel approach to historiography and archival interpretation, Performance Theory, metafiction, the reflexive turn in the social sciences, ethical playgrounds of Dogme cinema, reality television formats, ‘making of’ films, online confessional ‘selfies’, the artistic tradition of ‘The Grotesque’, Verbatim Theater, video conferencing and further creative methodologies that make transparent their modes of production and modes of producing evidence. Only now are we seeing their influence on more mainstream, widely distributed documentary cinema.

The enlightened position of the viewer in relation to film production has further permitted the possibility of deconstructed narratives and transparent mise en scene. In the 21st century, developments in hardware and software have supported a combined rise in media literacy and an incessant practice of self-editing.

Human relations and knowledge transfers are increasingly rendered, retouched, dubbed, compressed, formatted and uploaded before being experienced – this occurs in both familiar (friends, work colleagues) and remote environments (Arab uprising). The objective documentary facts in these images are reduced to metadata of time, place, camera model.

It is thus difficult to separate the boundaries of drama and documentary when the reality many filmmakers experience and record is already hybridised. The social self is the telepresent self, premediated, auto-fictionalised, auto-caricatured an imitator of the fictions we weave. The documentary filmmaker remains wary of addressing these technologies of the self – taking caution to eliminate or edit out schizophrenic ‘acting up’ and performed presence in film. This fear has in the past promoted the use of authoritative fact-distributing characters in documentary cinema: a series of talking heads able to recite truths and nurture belief of the viewer, perhaps as a means of distancing the films from other purely fictional forms of cinema narrative. Clarity in form creates acceptance and trust in content.

This dictum resonates in drama documentary or fiction film rooted in real events. No dramatic eyebrow is raised when fiction films claim to be ‘based on a true story’, the most simple tactic of narrative credibility. Documentaries simply deploying dramatic reconstruction within a factual narrative framework are easily consumed, as the line between the ‘documentary’ and ‘drama’ sections are more clearly demarcated through formal devices: The Imposter, Man on Wire, Dreams of a Life and Who is Dayani Cristal. This practice perhaps opens up new audiences for the documentary genre by offering a more familiar method of storytelling: drama, but puts forward little progress for the form. The habit is not new, constructed realities have been present in documentary since their inception, Nanook of the North is essentially a series of staged sequences using real people in real places.

Each move forward in the documentary form revitalises earlier avant garde filmmaking with new subject and appropriate meetings of form/content. Without attempting to seed some neologisms, here are some simple groupings and genealogies of each methodological trajectory.

Among them:

Performing the Archive:

A means of addressing historic acts, records or media through creative reenactment, interpretation or improvisation

Joshua Oppenheimer, Act of Killing
Clio Barnard, The Arbor
James N Kienitz Wilkins, Public Hearing

Past references:
Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001
Irina Botea, Auditions for a Revolution, 2006