ABSTRACT
Although there can sometimes be a naive tendency to assume that documentary films, broadly, are either ‘documents’ themselves or based on documents, and in either case represent somehow scientifically objective attempts to purvey ‘the truth’, in practice this is not necessarily the case, as noted in Chapter 1. However, whether parti pris or academic, and whether current affairs or documentary, or one-off, or series, the actuality form, despite its differences from fictional cousins, is underpinned by the triangulation of interpretation with images and experience. Indeed, film’s strongest role in terms of registering and analyzing detail and events lies beyond the sphere of the fiction film treated thus far. Actuality films, whether individual films or series, may be more important in this respect, even if they do not gain the size of audience that mass entertainment ventures might achieve. Despite the apparent emphasis on reporting ‘factual’ matters, it is the necessary blend of image and experience that defines interpretation in these films. This chapter demonstrates this by reference to various types of actuality film in relation to particular conflicts, starting (in roughly chronological perspective of the conflicts themselves) with documentary series related to the Yugoslav War, followed by treatment of the conflict in Chechnya, and then its extension into North Ossetia and other neighbouring regions – handled specifically in relation to the Beslan incident. Both the events of September 11 and their aftermath are covered in the subsequent section, which includes the highly polemical approach of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, contrasted with the reverential 9/11 by Jules and Gédéon Naudet. The final section looks at documentary work emerging from the ‘embed’ scheme established by the military for the 2003 Iraq enterprise. This confirms the trinity of image, experience and interpretation (and, hence, legitimacy) – argued by reference to feature fiction films in Chapter 3, and the variation of form and style between films, with the brash and the humble, and the conventional and the unconventional appraised by reference to particular moving image texts, as in the previous chapter.
