Comparing Documentary and Fiction
“experience is turned into memory and the ways that memories become stories, the ways that memories become mediated, they become recorded and broadcasted and things like this”
Fast’s work doesn't so much address a specific historical situation, its internal tensions and its mediation by images, but instead tackles the moral issue of what images can or cannot make visible
Fast addressed the image in its materiality, as an object of the world - and not as a reflection or representation of it
Fast undermines the distinction between the factual and the fictional, and reveals the equally artificial nature of both
Jean Baudrillard
Hyperreality
“In our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer even be posed.”
Hybrid Forms
Documentary ➜ fidelity to the real
➜ bracket the necessary unrealization of the filmic image and the factors that
intervene between the real and its representation in order to better
communicate a sense of immediacy and veracity
Fiction ➜ depart into realm of fabulation
➜ minimize force of profilmic - strengthen impression of reality of its diegetic world
Authors of Aesthetics of film argued that every film, including documentaries are fiction as “what the spectator sees is not the thing in itself but its virtual double”. They are unreal as they are channeled through structures of representations, using images of objects and actors, hence the real event is fictionalized. Having said that, Balsom also believes that all films are also documentaries. Despite its tendency to transpose events, it is nevertheless a photographic record of a specific time and space.Subjected to various forms of transformations through representation, it may not evince reality, however there is still relevance to it.
Under certain circumstances, the antithetical coexistence of documentary and fiction is disrupted and a complex and erratic interaction between them is introduced. This has become a tantalizing option for contemporary artists to examine both the inveterate belief in documentary and the ideological function of fiction, without its historical dilemma. The hybridization of documentary and fiction heighten the friction between “traditions of recording traces of the physical world and creating grand spectacle”, thereon allowing artists to scrutinize the status of the image.
Jacques Rancière, “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.”
Balsom, E. (2013). ‘The Fiction of Truth and the Truth of Fiction’, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (pp. 149-184)’. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/
2. True Fiction
“We think when we're portraying social reality we can't allow imaginary elements in. Now, that's just a prejudice. And on the contrary, I even think it's essential to bring the harsh reality of a society closer to the realm of fable.”
Arabian Nights - Miguel Gomes
➜ fact and fiction, history and politics, drama and satire, free-form documentary and rigorous mise-en-scène
➜ “The result is this blending of reality and fantasy, a kind of dream of reality, where sometimes you know whether it's real or fantasy, and sometimes you don't."
➜ Nostalgic/ speaks of loss
Gomes is melancholic ( reflection of identity)
“fact is stranger than fiction”
➜ Didn’t want to do reportage/ how media depicts Portugal
fiction has other narrative possibilities
Reality : tragic/ comical/ absurd
➜ Make the viewer see the structure and the artifice in his films - share our wills, desires, complicities
Meeting the same bodies, the same faces in different characters is part of the game of artifice in the film
"The game of hide-and-seek played by fiction and reality doesn't need the endorsement of someone with a concrete existence.”
➜ Reacting to reality on the fly and building fictions based on reality therefore meantbelieving the
truth of a conversation
Driessen, K. (2016) ‘Miguel Gomes on Arabian Nights - interview’, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), March 16. Available at: https://iffr.com/en/blog/miguel-gomes-on-arabian-nights
Ferreira, F. (2015). ‘True Fiction’, Film Comment, 51(6), 42-50, Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/43746003.pdf?ab_segments=0%252Fbasic_SYC-4222%252Ftest&refreqid=excelsior%3Add1edb8a5870f2d24b45f0c22b5a0dc2
3. Fiction and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory (collection of essays)
Part II Interdisciplinary Perspectives
a) Epistemology and Fiction: Thought Experiments in Personal Identity
by Aleks Zarnitsyn (p137)
cognitive value of fiction may serve as a useful model for understanding the cognitive value of philosophical thought experiments in personal identity
Thought experiments in personal identity
Derek Parfit
“contemplating imaginary cases, we are not merely making up our minds about the situation in question hypothetically, but we‘d discover what we believe to be involved in our own continued existence . . . we discover our beliefs about the nature of personal identity over time”
Imagination brings to surface what is usually hidden from sight
Personal identity is not what matters in survival
Death
‘the reality is only that none of the experiential episodes will be causally connected to my brain and psychologically connected to my present experiential episodes – ‘and, in that redescription, my death seems to disappear’ ⬇
Harold Noonan : Criticize limitations of Parfit’s discussion
If identity doesn’t matter, one has no reason to prefer one’s own survival to the survival of somebody else who is not them but is appropriately psychologically connected to them
Susan Wolf : Criticize limitations of Parfit’s discussion
Whether identity matters depends on depends on how are expressive of the moral and evaluative practices that constitute our form of life
with reflection on what is valuable about persons as we know them, and this involves us in considerations that have little to do with the metaphysical composition of persons, and much to do with reflections about the ‘surface of the world’
personhood, metaphysical and practical
The epistemological significance of fiction
Philosophical thought experiments are structurally similar to our stories of doubling, head-swapping, invasion by spirits, and other transgressive fictions
reveal our standing preoccupation with the questions of change, sameness and difference, death and survival.
Whole areas of our conceptual understanding are shaded in the simplistic division between mind and body
Only by placing fantastic transformations in a more general worldly context can we make more explicit the interactions between isolated aspects of our personhood and the overall background of intelligibility.
Epistemology and fiction
articulating the role that our concepts play in our life, connecting the intellect to the world of living persons in interpersonal space.
We are not learning the concepts of mind and body, but by stretching them to their limit in telling fantastic stories we can explore the possible degrees of freedom that each may have in their mutual dependence.
The problem is that we do not have the conceptual resources to adequately capture the status of the fission-products.
elements of our life – psychological continuity, identity, uniqueness, etc. – should be understood as the structural requirements of our making sense of personhood, in contrast to thinking that these relations can be added into or taken out of the mix.
b) The Fictional Truth: Nonfiction and Narration
by Sarah Worth (p171)
Theories of Fiction
1. Use Theory (Kendall Walton)
a) something is made fictional when it is used as a prop in a game of make-believe
b) which is fictional is that which is treated as fictional?
c) Internal consistency
i. pretence account - a particular kind of alternative universe in which the ‘fictional
world’ is one that has the same kind of internal consistency, rules and coherence as
that of a ‘nonfictional world’.
ii. “It is true in the story…”
2. Intention Theory
If one intends something to be taken as fictional then it is fictional.
a) Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen
i. A language game which only exists within a certain practice of storytelling.
ii. ‘central focus is not on the structural or semantic properties of sentences but on the conditions under which they are uttered, the attitudes they invoke, and the role that they play in social interactions’
iii. ‘fictive utterance is ultimately a [particular] kind of communication, fiction is only fictional when used in a particular kind of storytelling community.
b) Gregory Currie
i. fictionality is importantly in the stated intentions of the author of the fictional
utterance.
ii. author of a fiction intend the reader take a certain attitude toward the propositions
uttered in the course of his performance, the attitude of “imaginative involvement” or
“make-believe”.
■ We are intended by the author to make-believe that the story uttered is ‘true’
3. Stacie Friend
a) fiction and nonfiction cannot usefully function in mutually exclusive or jointly exhaustive
categories.
b) a text but could potentially be in both categories at different times, or in different storytelling traditions.
4. Sarah Worth (author of paper)
a) Fictional worlds
i. Fictional or true sentences refer only to the truth status, not to the fictional world status.
ii. A theory of fiction must encompass the creation not only of imagining or taking
individual sentences in a certain way, but of a coherent system that is what
narrative describes
iii. Narrative and narration, which are produced by both fiction and nonfiction, should not be evaluated at the level of the sentence, but rather by the description it evokes and the world it creates
b) Belief - influence imagination of story elements
i. created and cultivated simultaneously along with plausibility, emotional cadence
and imagination.
ii. belief applies to our explanations of the ways in which we interact imaginatively
and emotionally not just with fiction, but with fictional and nonfictional literature.
Paradox of fiction
real emotional responses = must believe that the people and situations in question really do or did exist at one time
when engaged with fictional texts we do not believe that the events or characters really do exist or did exist
fictional characters and situations do incite (seemingly) real emotional responses.
Transparency
Photograph - realism & always of something “real”
Kendall Walton : Photography produces this kind of contact with its subject in a way that portraiture can never achieve.
Cynthia Freeland : sense of contact or presence with the represented subject
Part III Aesthetic Perspectives
a) Literature, Fictionality, and the Illusion of Self- Presence
by Samuel Kimball (p 229)
The phenomenology of that first-person consciousness by which an ‘I’ typically takes its reality for granted.
‘Auto-affective’ self-certainty and the phenomenology of first-person consciousness
The ordinary experience of being conscious of oneself is not an experience of being a fiction but of being real
“Auto-affective” — Jacques Derrida
“I” registers its self-reality in the experienced immediacy of knowing and feeling itself to be in the world
“I”
can modify itself as well as allow itself to be modified by its experiences, thus changing while retaining its self-identity over time.
is always susceptible to the possibility of believing falsely, of incorrectly thinking it knows what it (feels certain it) knows.
encounters itself as unmarked by the fictionality that always shadows its (seemingly) unmediated presence to itself.
encounters itself as unmarked by the fictionality that always shadows its (seemingly) unmediated presence to itself.
Nicholas Humphrey
the ‘I’ creates its experience of the world in terms of sensory and emotional qualities that it recognizes (or, rather, misrecognizes, misfigures ) as abiding in and coming from the things of the world rather than as inhering in the auto- affective projections that constitute the being of first-person consciousness
Experience = what sensations are like for us rather than neurobiology
Fictionality of first-person consciousness
the ‘I’ in its apparent presence to itself is captivated by the fiction, which it does not experience as fictive, that its representations are not representations but presentations of the way the world is; that its thinking is self-evident, universally true, and what is and must be the case.
fictionality, especially fictionality in literature
strange set of linguistic and conceptual resources by which human consciousness, locked into the auto- affective illusion that the ‘I’ is not a self- illusion, approaches its limit, the limit of its self- reference.
b) Fictionality in Film and Photography
by David Fenner (p321)
Photography and film are art forms when they intentionally and explicitly leave the ‘capture of representational reality’ through artistic transcending actions that introduce the fictional to these objects.
When does fictionality elevate photography & films ⇒ Art ?
➜ When invite and reward interpretation
◆ That an object is interpretable in the ways, it is sufficient to say that the work has transcended being a mere record, and that is sufficient to say that the work has the potential to be a work of art
➜ When are message-driven
◆ the communication of a message in a photograph or a film requires the cognitive
contribution of the viewer, then this is another case of fictionalizing what is given to the viewer on the paper or the screen.
➜ When they point to an identification relation
◆ Identification with character ➔ psychological hybrid /‘identity hybrid’
self-exploration and new discovery./ opportunity to ‘be someone else’
◆ Identify with social/identity themes
● involves the audience member bringing something to the experience of the object
that is not given in the object itself. Reality is changed
➜ When they engage one cognitively
◆ 21st century - more works of art that are found infinitely more rewarding when viewed from a cognitive perspective rather than an aesthetic one.
◆ We fictionalize what is given into something valuable by considering what the artist may have been intending to express or communicate.
● artistic version of Schrödinger’s cat – that actually brings the expression or communication to reality.
➜ When they are designed to evoke emotional response
◆ Infrequently because of the representational content of the photographs; it was rather because of :
● some bond that was created through my attention to a very wide range of aspects
of what was given in the photograph (representational elements, lighting, focus,
framing,etc.) and
● what associational memories and psychological states the works prompted in me
➜ When they are designed to inspire imagination
◆ for those willing to take the challenge of transport to the world of the photograph, the
worlds they present may be even more rewarding places to visit than we find through
films.
● with less objectively offered, the mind has more space in which to contribute
➜ When they convey the abstraction as opposed to the concrete
◆ When photographs and films stand as symbols of what is beyond the particular realities they record – when they convey the pattern more than the instance – a fiction is
introduced
● that fiction is the concretization of the abstract, the idealization of the time-and-
place- bound particular.
➜ When they engage one formally
◆ When we appreciate the formal aspects of a photograph or a film, our appreciation is,
by definition, aesthetic.
◆ aesthetic attention moves beyond what is given brutely by the object, and as it does this introduces fictionality – by definition something not offered through consideration of the object as a simple record of reality.
➜ When they point to film or photography as art forms
◆ it focuses attention away from the particular contents of what it records and toward the
medium itself.
◆ The audience member’s focus is no longer merely on the representational contents, and when the audience member is drawn to think about the editing ( or the lighting, framing, focus, etc. )
● the audience member begins to appreciate the film’s medium itself.
Sukla, A. (2015) ‘Fiction and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory’, Bloomsbury, Available at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/fiction-and-art-explorations-in-contemporary-theory/ (Accessed: 16 October 2019)
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