Within and Beyond Reality - Forms of Representations Challenging the Documentary Fiction Divide

Overview

Key facts

By blending fact and fiction, some films draw on the stylistic traditions of both documentary and fiction films in various ways, at one time distancing its spectators from objective truth while on the other shedding a light on a kind of intensified reality.

If the history of documentaries as a film genre is a history of addressing the question of what constitutes the representation of social reality, and the fictional narrative film is an attempt to create an imaginative conception of what is called reality, recent contemporary examples have been challenging this divide in multiple ways, pushing the boundaries of the two genres to the extreme and merging one into the other. Nevertheless, far from being just a contemporary phenomenon, the blurring of these forms (documentary and fictional narrative) is a creative and interpretive challenge that filmmakers have been concerned with since the early days of cinema.

University College London (UCL) offers the Within and Beyond Reality - Forms of Representations Challenging the Documentary Fiction Divide programme.