ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out how the landscape of America documentary film has evolved to be one of significant public profile and commercial potential. It explores the issue of what it means to embody risk through non-fiction performance. Jon Dovey’s study is one of the first works to associate the growth of factual entertainment – and specifically modes of first person media foregrounding individual performance – with everyday risk in advanced liberal societies. Thomas Waugh writes that ‘documentary film, in everyday commonsense parlance, implies the absence of elements of performance, acting, staging, and directing criteria which presumably distinguish the documentary form from the narrative fiction film’. The increased attention paid by scholars to performance within fiction film has been an important starting point for analysing performance within documentary. As a pervasive and enduring strand of media production, documentary needs also to be included in the corpus of risk representations helping to shape ‘everyday understandings and misunderstandings’.
