Audience reception of documentaries seems to be central to the claim that documentaries tell the truth. Audiences make distinctions between fiction and nonfiction films in the same way that readers make distinctions between fiction and nonfiction works. The assertions and intentions of the author or filmmaker certainly play a role in how the audience judges or perceives a film. When, for example, the book by James Frey entitled A Million Little Pieces was originally released as a memoir – meaning that it claimed to be a nonfiction account of true events – then later was investigated and revealed to be largely fabricated, the audience for the book might have felt they had been misled. In fact, the revelation that the book was not truthful led to enough reader complaints that it was dropped from Oprah Winfrey’s book club (Freedman, 2006, p. 51). Speaking on the claims that writers of autobiographies make towards telling a truthful account, critic Maureen Corrigan refers to the implicit contract between the author and the audience, saying that “…it’s the autobiographer’s pledge to try to tell the truth that makes a reader respond differently… and when this quaint contract turns out to be a con, we feel like rubes.” (Freedman p. 51). Corrigan’s statement speaks to the trust relationship present in the reception of nonfiction accounts by an audience.
This relationship is also present in the way that documentary films are received by audiences. As Crofts (1987) writes, "The immediacy and apparent truth of the image confers an historical veracity on the material presented." (p. 91) The nature of film means that documentaries appear to capture true events in a more direct, less mediated way then traditional arts. Aitken (1994) refers to this when he writes that “Other media … may also encourage us to suspend our disbelief, but film is peculiar because of the semblance of reality attributable to the image-event and the obscurity of its very production.” The nature of film and its appearance of being an immediate information-bearing object that hasn’t been translated or otherwise mediated means that audiences for films engage in a trust relationship with the filmmaker.
However, it is evident that documentary films can engage in distortion, lies, and mistakes. Journalists and memoirists who engage in fakery or practices that falsify their writings are castigated when the nature of their work is revealed. If documentary films were held to the same standard, would viewers be upset when typical practices were revealed? The claims of cinema verite filmmakers show that those filmmakers were upset with what they perceived as the artificial ways in which narrative was implied, soundtracks were inserted over footage, and scenes were recreated for greater effect in documentaries in the United States. Flaherty’s practice in Nanook of the North included recreating scenes to capture a better shot, thus showing what he wanted to be featured as the truth in his story to its best effect. This practice is seen as anathema to some documentary filmmakers, but still falls within the realm of the “creative treatment of actuality.” Cowie (2006) addresses this point in the statement that:
Verisimilitude is … central to the documentary film… The world presented must
be believable, it must be like what we expect the world to be, in order for the film
to sustain our belief in its claim to reality. (in Juhasz and Lerner, 2006, p. 229).
Cowie’s argument that documentaries are required to be believable and credible in order for the film to be accepted as truthful does not eliminate the possibilities for creative treatment and manipulation, but cautions that filmmakers must craft films that appear to fit into the audience’s experiences.
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