ABSTRACT
Vitali: I used to teach film theory to aspiring filmmakers. One day the students were told to find an idea for a documentary. One of the students-incidentally, a woman from Korea-said that she wanted to make a documentary about a dream she had dreamed, and proceeded to tell her dream. The teacher told her that she could not make a documentary about a dream because documentaries were about facts and reality. So, the following week the same student went to the teacher and, explaining that she had now found a good subject for her documentary, simply retold her story without, however, saying that it was her dream. This anecdote was told to me by my colleague, the teacher of the documentary module. His intention was to show me that some students really are confused. Contrary to my colleague, I thought that the student had grasped the central
problematic of documentary filmmaking and, more generally, the problematic of realism. I wanted to start this interview with this anecdote because your work, and particularly The Fourth Dimension, questions the conventional boundary between fiction and docu mentary, by explicitly confronting the issue of narration, and therefore of history and temporality.
