ABSTRACT
At odds with the formal austerity intertwined with a more or less explicit selfconsciousness of the mainstream documentary are the various new forms and techniques being imported as a consequence of cultural and generic change. John Corner has argued that Big Brother in particular has had an aesthetic and a social impact on the genre of documentary, the shift towards what he calls ‘diversion’: ‘a performative, playful element has developed strongly within new kinds of factual production’.1 This influential analysis attempts to account for the ‘imperative for playfulness and the erosion of the distinctions between the public and the private sphere, between the private citizen and the celebrity and between media and social space’.2 Theorists of the classical documentary such as Bill Nichols suggest that Reality TV signals the death of the documentary and therefore the end of modes that encourage and mobilise the viewer to ‘act in the world, with a greater sense of knowledge or even a more fully elaborated conception of social structure and historical process’.3 Contemporary documentary has, in his view, eschewed this impetus toward education and citizenship. Linda Williams similarly argues that the weakening of historical specificity and the rise of populism mean that society has ‘plunged into a permanent state of the selfreflexive crisis of representation’.4
