Unlecture, Week 7: Documentary

Fiction vs non-fiction

The main difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fictional stories are ones about “a” world, while documentary stories are about “the” world. Adrian made the example fictional truth claims, like in Star Wars when we’re told that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s dad. However, non-fiction’s truth claims are about “the” world and are contestable; as audiences we don’t accept them as arbitrary truth nor are they presented in that way, but we have the agency to accept or reject the ideas presented to us.

Genre

Defining or attributing genre to documentaries is “a really stick one”, says Adrian. This is because some people argue that documentary is a genre in itself, or whether documentary is made up of different subgenres, and my position is a hybrid of these two. I think documentary is a genre – a type of typically non-fictional film “[documenting] some aspect of reality” (cheers Wikipedia) – but that holistic view can then easily be broken down into a plethora of different styles. Interactive, participatory, expository and even hypertextual, the list is endless.

The author

“Authors cannot control their text and the reader’s interpretation; never has and never will.” – Adrian.
The idea of the author has been a running thread in this course over the past few weeks. We’ve been taught to dissolve old ideas about the author being in complete control of the story. Instead, the relationship between the author, the reader and the medium itself (i.e. book or Internet) all have agency and all influence the overall experience.

It’s the author’s responsibility to be aware of their limitations and that their intent will never be fully replicate the reader’s final understanding. (This is not always a confounding variable or something to be afraid of; this is what the art-house genre thrives on.) This made me think about my obsession with Catcher in the Rye after reading it as a 13-year-old. I was obsessed with that book. Not to the point I was ‘gonna go out and kill a Beatle, but J.D. Salinger’s masterpiece had a really deep emotional impact on me, even to this day. However, I’ve since learnt through many (often heated) discussions with friends that it’s a really polarising novel; some love it and some simply despise it. In a roundabout way, this all relates back to the reader’s individual interpretation and how, at the end of the day, the author has very limited control over their work.

Elliot put it very nicely, saying, “we assume there’s a message and we try to understand it”, “we recognise there’s intent“, but “context cannot survive”.