Our class discussion of Notes on Blindness centred around the idea of hybrid documentary, and the relationship between nonfiction filmmaking and “the real”. All documentary films incorporate some level of fiction or subjectivity, and some nonfiction films choose to incorporate much more than others, just as fiction films can use the formal language of nonfiction for their own purposes.

I imagine a spectrum, where one side is “fiction” and the other is “nonfiction”, and every film ever made could be plotted at some point along the axis. An observational documentary like Woodstock (1970) sits further towards nonfiction than, say, any of the films by Werner Herzog, who is quite clear about where he sees himself in terms of striving for objectivity:

But even the film furthest along on the nonfiction side, i.e. the most nonfiction film ever made (if there is such a thing), still couldn’t fairly be considered objective truth, because by definition filmmaking involves some level of subjectivity and cannot possibly tell the whole story.