Theorizing Documentary (AFI Film Readers) - Hardcover

"Theorizing Documentary" addresses a wide range of theoretical issues specific to the documentary form. Documentaries encompass a wide range of forms, educational TV, personality profiles, ethnography, cine-poems, polemic tracts, and autobiography. What unites them is their common bond with the domain of lived experience. Today, as fictional and non-fictional forms become increasingly hybrid (TV docu-drama, historically-based feature films such as Oliver Stone's "JFK", "info-tainment", tabloid television), the question "What is documentary?" is particularly compelling. "Theorizing Documentary" offers essays by leading critics and theorists, addressing questions such as: How fictional is non-fiction? What gets to count on film as history - and why? To what extent are representational forms adequate substitutions for social historical phenomena? Can one culture (or subculture) ever be translated for another? How can the documentarist prevent the spectator from conflating real life and the film's fabricated reality?