ABSTRACT
What, then, is documentary? We can be fairly sure, to begin, that
something like the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999) is not – at least, the only thing it would seem to have in common with works marketed as ‘non-fiction’ is an indexical link to heavily contrived actions and scripted exchanges that once took place in front of the
camera: it is a documentary solely in the sense that it is a record of a fiction dreamed up by a real person, living in actual times, and bound up, like you and me, in a socio-political context. Works of obvious fantasy and imagination, from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001) to the
James Bond movie Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster, 2008), represent
varying degrees of fidelity to our own experiences (none of us has seen a hobbit; a very few of us will have seen gun fights), but both are pro-
ducts of the human psyche and its real-life sources. As Bill Nichols, probably the foremost academic theorist of non-fiction, would say, George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), despite its documentary-like claim to have taken place in a real time and location (‘a long time ago, in a
galaxy far, far away’) is a ‘documentary of wish-fulfillment’, as distinct from a ‘documentary of social representation’ (Nichols 2001a: 1).
