ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 is a case study of Stephan Burle’s design for The Kingdom (2007) that is simultaneously a series of credits and a miniature documentary about the history of United States—Saudi Arabia relations over the course of the twentieth century and into the (then–) present. The centrality of brings ‘objective realism’ into its a central role in ‘documentary reality’: the audience must first decide that the work is (at least potentially) a valid depiction of the world for its claims to become effective. When indexical claims to being–factual are presented as ‘documentary reality,’ i.e. are explicitly understood by their audience to be statements about ‘the real,’ they automatically demand an identification of the work as discursively factual and entirely unlike the artificial presentations of ‘realist fiction.’
