The Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: Documentary Studies and Analytic Aesthetics in Conversation

Theories of documentary film oftentimes devote their opening pages to the distinction between fiction and documentary. In its earlier more radical instances, documentary theorists have claimed that discursivity itself i.e. the use of film tropes, introduces fictive elements into all films, documentaries included (Renov 1993). Later accounts have been more moderate in arguing that it is not discursivity in general but specific textual features such as the degree of fabrication that constitute fiction (Nichols 2017). But the fact remains that the current consensus in documentary studies is that the documentary/fiction distinction is a matter of degree rather than that of a firm boundary.

Analytic aesthetics has also had a fruitful tradition of discussing the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Here, by contrast, earlier classic works (Currie 1990; Walton 1990) have established a firm boundary where fiction essentially involves imagining whereas nonfiction essentially involves believing. More recent authors like Stacie Friend (2012) and Derek Matravers (2014), however, have put this strict divide under pressure and the border appears more fluid than it was 30 years ago. Presently, then, documentary studies and analytic aesthetics appear to be closer than ever in their views on the fiction/nonfiction distinction, yet little dialogue exists between the two. This special issue aims to bolster the disciplines’ common ground as a step in that direction.

In the case of analytic aesthetics, the debate has mostly focused on the fiction/nonfiction distinction in literary texts. Given that the latest accounts of documentaries have been developed some twenty years ago (Carroll 1997; Currie 1999; Plantinga 2005) this is a significant opportunity for analytic aesthetics to address documentaries as a paradigmatic case of nonfiction, and to engage with the latest scholarship in documentary studies. Reciprocally, documentary studies gain to benefit from engaging findings in analytic aesthetics, especially the claim that whether something is true or not is independent from whether something is fiction or not.

This special issue has grown from the second Analytic Aesthetics and Film Studies in Conversation conference titled ‘Documentaries and the Fiction/Nonfiction Divide’ held at Queen Mary University of London, 15–16 November 2019 and sponsored by the British Society for Aesthetics. The issue brings together 3 documentary film scholars and 3 analytic aestheticians in conversation. Mario Slugan opens the issue with an overview of the discussion of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in documentary studies and suggests that it is imaginative engagement rather than the use of tropes/degree of fabrication that pushes documentaries into fiction. Anabelle Honess Roe, a pioneer of animated-documentary studies, investigates the way in which imaginative engagement in those documentaries is used to facilitate knowledge and how this bears on the fiction/nonfiction distinction. John Ellis further develops the theme of how knowledge is facilitated through markers of truthfulness now seen as a key element in how documentaries separate themselves out from fiction. In the first contribution among analytic aestheticians, Stacie Friend argues for abandoning necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing fiction from nonfiction also in the domain of film, and proposes to think of the two categories as supergenres instead. Manuel García-Carpintero, on the other hand, rejects Friend’s claim by arguing that the core of documentaries remains the invitation to believe while the core of fiction remains the invitation to imagine. In conclusion, Eric Studt considers Virtual-Reality documentaries as examples that combine the viewers’ fictional attitude toward their presence at the scene with their nonfictional attitude toward the depicted content.

Rather than summarising these contributions in any more detail (for their abstracts already speak for themselves), we propose instead to plot a very short and very selective history of how the respective disciplines came to share some common ground on the permeability of the fiction/nonfiction distinction. There are three main reasons for this overview. First, the six contributions here tackle only contemporary debates and do not discuss pre-1990s contributions. Second, such a brief overview should benefit those readers who are unfamiliar with either of the two disciplines’ histories. Finally, it is not only analytic aesthetics which became more sceptical about the possibility of a firm boundary between fiction and nonfiction over the years – the same also holds for scholarship on the documentary.

Some of the earliest sustained discussions on the fiction/nonfiction distinction can be found among Soviet film theorists of the 1920s. Among them at the time, the term ‘documentary’ was not yet as widely used, and the relevant terminology was Russian: ‘igrovoi’ v. ‘neigrovoi’. Already the concepts’ translation – ‘played’ v. ‘unplayed’ – reveals what was understood to be at the core of the distinction. Whereas ‘igrovoi’ films recorded actors playing their roles, ‘neigrovoi’ had no use for players. For Dziga Vertov, notably, ‘neigrovoi’ film captured ‘life off-guard’ (Vertov in Hicks 2007, 25) or ‘life as it is’ (Vertov in Tsivian 2004, 125). But before it came to be used as synonym for ‘documentary’ and its Russian version ‘dokumentalnyi’ in the early 1930s, ‘neigrovoi’ was a broader category including newsreels and experimental cinema.

Perhaps the most articulate debate about the distinction between the two types of films among the Soviets took place on the pages of Novy LEF (Left Front for the Arts) in the late 1920s (Brewster 1971). Boris Arvatov summarised the general view held by Novy LEF contributors as follows: ‘Lef theory considers cinema of the right to be characterised by “play”, narrative-structure (fabula) and deformation of the object, while a film of the left is “unplayed”, non-narrative and does not deform the object’ (Arvatov in Brewster 1971, 80). He then quickly proceeded to correct this by pointing out that narrative need not belong ‘to the realm of imagination, [rather] any fact out of reality developed in time obviously has a narrative structure’ (Brewster 1971). In this he was also implicitly criticising the view espoused by Sergei Tretyakov (in Brewster 1971).

Tretyakov proposed a tripartite taxonomy of cinema – in flagrante, scripted, and played. For Tretyakov there was a continuum from the purest unplayed in flagrante Vertov-like films which catch their subjects unawares, through scripted directions of non-professional actors in Eisenstein, to acted bourgeois photoplays. Crucially, and not unlike Renov, Tretyakov argued that the distinctions between these categories are a matter of degree and rest on the level of deformation of the film material, where deformation includes everything from the selection of the subject matter, through cinematography and mise-en-scene, to editing and narrative. For Tretyakov even a found footage film like Esfir Shub’s The Great Road (1927) is ‘played’ because its raw material is deformed through montage. Arvatov, by contrast, held that general transformations of this sort should not be construed as deformations for by that logic a scientific demonstration of, say, water synthesis would also need to be counted as ‘played’ because a lot of rehearsal and staging goes into it. In other words, for Arvatov the border between played and unplayed was firm – it simply lay elsewhere than the misplaced equivalences between narrative and played suggested.

John Grierson who started using the term ‘documentary’ around the same time of this debate, also found non-fiction to include a range of unplayed films – documentary proper, but also newsreels, magazine items, ‘interests’, educational films, scientific films, etc. Although ‘unplayed’ was not a part of his terminology, Grierson clearly contrasted non-fiction to studio films which ‘photograph acted stories against artificial backgrounds. Documentary would photograph the living scene and the living story’ (Grierson [(1932–34) 2016], 218). Much like Arvatov, then, Grierson did not think that a film becomes fictional simply because it makes use of ‘creative’ interventions such as selection, cinematography, editing, story, or dramatisation. His categorisation of films as diverse as Moana (Robert Flaherty, 1926) and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1926) as documentaries evinces this position.

In the first book-length study of documentary, Paul Rotha (1939) for the most part upheld a similar firm boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Documentary is again a subset of nonfiction including teaching, publicity, newsreel, travel, and ‘interest’ film. And the border with fiction is cashed out in terms of story construed as imaginary events:

Documentary is not concerned with what is usually called ‘a plot’, meaning a sequence of fictional events revolving round imaginary individuals and the situations that develop from their behaviour. Rather is it concerned with a theme, which in turn is expressive of a definite purpose, thus demanding from an audience an attention quite different from that of a fictional story. (Rotha 1939, 141)

Although he does not deny that documentaries can have narrative structure, Rotha uses ‘story-film’ and ‘fiction film’ as well as ‘non-story film’ and ‘non-fiction film’ interchangeably. Whatever we might think of how felicitous using ‘story’ as a shorthand for ‘fiction’ is, the fiction/nonfiction barrier remains firm for Rotha. The firmness of the boundary is not in question even if he categorises films like Rien que les heures (Roberto Cavalcanti, 1926) or October (Sergei Eisenstein, 1927) as documentaries. This merely means that the boundary has moved over the years. And this does not mean that for Rotha hybrid films are impossible either, but simply that he identifies only a few of those.

Sigfried Karacauer continued this line of thinking in his Theory of Film where he distinguished between story and the non-story film, further subdividing the latter into experimental films and films of fact. Film of fact which includes documentary, crucially, ‘shuns fiction in favor of unmanipulated material’ (Kracauer [(1960) 1997], 193). The same can be said of Lewis Jacobs (1979). For him, documentary is a part of a larger group of nonfiction films or films of fact and ‘deal[s] with real people and real events, as opposed to staged scenes of imaginary characters and fictional stories of the studio-made pictures’ (Jacobs 1979, 2).

In Richard M. Barsam and Erik Barnouw’s pioneering histories of documentary and nonfiction film from the 1970s, both authors interestingly do not even attempt an account of the fiction/nonfiction distinction. While Barsam only makes a point that ‘[a]ll documentaries are nonfiction films, but not all nonfiction films are documentaries’ (1973, 1), Barnouw (1974) immediately dives into the discussion of the 1895 screening in the Salon Indien at the Grand Café and The Arrival of the Train (Lumière brothers, 1895) as canonical examples of nonfiction. It seems that for the two the fiction/nonfiction boundary is not only firm but also so self-understandable that it does not even need an explanation.

It is undeniable that over the years, voices closer to Tretyakov’s view of a more permeable border between nonfiction and fiction had not completely vanished. Appearing even in Jacob’s anthology, for instance, Parker Tyler (1949) argued that the emphasis on crime detection as a scientific method in then contemporary crime films like The Lady in the Lake (1947, Robert Montgomery) and Boomerang! (1947, Elia Kazan) transformed those movies into ‘documentary fictions’. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr made the point even more explicitly arguing ‘that the line between documentary and fiction is tenuous indeed’ (Schlesinger [(1964) 1979], 381). The reason is because both are artefacts based on selection and editing, with their own viewpoints arising from artistic vision, where the use of professional actors as opposed to untrained subjects is nothing more than an economic fact.

This line of thinking would culminate in the 1970s in the idea that there is no distinction between fiction and nonfiction at all. Most famously, it was Christian Metz who argued that, because the cinematic signifier is present as an image of the object but absent as the object itself, ‘[e]very film is a fiction film’ (1975: 47). Although the most recent accounts in documentary studies no longer dismiss the distinction fully and focus on its permeability instead, Renov’s (1993) claim that discursivity itself is equivalent to fictionality is clearly a variant of the view that the fiction/nonfiction distinction is moot. This variant had undoubtedly strongly influenced the beginnings of modern documentary studies, i.e. the critical mass of scholarship that started to appear on the subject from the early 1990s onwards, highlighted by the inaugural Visible Evidence conferences held in 1993.

While the early sustained discussions of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in analytic philosophy also took place in the 1970s, their starting point was the idea of a firm boundary and how to best capture it in a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Initially, fiction presented a problem for philosophy of language for how could sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes looked at Watson’ express truths if neither Holmes or Watson are actually existing objects and as such do not denote anything. As Richard Rorty (1982, 110) put it, fiction raises the question ‘What must be said about truth such that the sentences “Gladstone was born in England” and “Sherlock Holmes was born in England” can both be true?' One influential idea was to distinguish between ‘truth’ and ‘truth in fiction’ which demanded clarification between fiction and nonfiction. Notably, John Searle (1975) proposed that fictions are non-deceptive pretend illocutionary speech acts, where authors pretend to be making assertions like ‘Sherlock Holmes looked at Watson’ while making it clear that they do not mean to deceive anybody into thinking these statements are actually true. In another influential account, fictional worlds were construed as subsets of all logically possible worlds so that there exists a possible world where Sherlock Holmes and Watson exist and have the properties expressed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, thereby making sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes looked at Watson’ true or false (David Lewis 1978).

It is this model of fiction coming from the philosophy of language that informed a lot of work in analytic aesthetics. Gregory Currie (1990), for instance, explicitly developed his theory of fiction on Paul Grice’s theory of communication. For Currie,

[t]he author who produces a work of fiction is engaged in a communicative act, an act that involves having a certain kind of intention: the intention that the audience shall make believe the content of the story that is told. (1990, 24)

Noël Carroll (1997), similarly, defined fiction film as film by which the author communicates to the audience the intention to treat its propositional content as unasserted. Nonfiction film, then, is a film by which the author communicates to the audience the intention to treat its propositional content as asserted.

Starting already in the 1970s, it was Kendall Walton (1978, 1990) who circumvented the problem of truth and reference by recasting fiction as a game of make-believe. Instead of modelling fiction on linguistic expressions and more general communicative acts, Walton proposed children’s games of make-believe as the model for fiction. Much like a child make-believes that she is having a dinner party by using toys as props for her imagined friends, so do consumers of fiction make-believe Holmes’ actions by using Conrad’s sentences as props. Importantly, for Walton anything can be a prop i.e. the prop is not essentially linguistic in nature. Although in literary fiction it is the sentences that are props, in other media props are different. In film, they are primarily images and sounds e.g. we imagine Rick from Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz) with recourse to sounds and images of Humphrey Bogart.

For Walton, like for the other philosophers above, the border between fiction and nonfiction is firm and clearly defined. In his case, fiction is mandated make-believe i.e. a work is fiction if and only if the audience is supposed to engage the work as a prop for imaginings. Conversely, if the audience is not supposed to engage the work as a prop for make-believe then we are dealing with nonfiction. At the same time, Walton’s category of fiction is broader than that of his colleagues for it also includes especially vivid and evocative works typically understood as nonfictions such as William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru.

The consensus in analytic aesthetics that the fiction/nonfiction distinction should be cashed out in terms of imaginings v. lack thereof which lasted for approximately two decades since Walton’s (1990) Mimesis as Make-Believe has, however, recently been shaken. Friend has argued that it is impossible to define the fiction/nonfiction distinction in terms of necessary and sufficient criteria precisely because there are numerous examples of categories like above that we usually classify as nonfictions – e.g. vivid histories – that invoke imaginings. Instead, according to Friend (2012), it is best to think of fiction and nonfiction as genres whose borders are as fluid as any other genre. Matravers (2014) even denied that the fiction/nonfiction distinction has explanatory significance. Kathleen Stock (2017) and Manuel García-Carpintero (2019), on the other hand, have defended the distinction from Friend’s and Matravers’ criticism.

At present, however, both in documentary studies and in analytic aesthetics there is a significant tendency to see the fiction/nonfiction border as permeable. Undoubtedly, there are differences in both the substance of these views and traditions of thought behind them. But the very proximity of their respective positions should be reason enough to engage in dialogue. Earlier exchanges between the two camps which can be tracked to Carroll’s (1983) discussion of scholarship on documentary and Metz’s bold claim were closer in spirit to combative critique than amicable conversation. The same can be said of Carroll’s later work on the definition of documentary (1997) and its relationship to postmodern thought (1996). Although a more dialogic approach is on evidence in Plantinga (1997) and while documentary scholars such as Stella Bruzzi (2006) have also been able to integrate Carroll’s insights into their work, we contend that the exchange between analytic aesthetics and documentary studies is still sporadic at best. We are certainly unaware of an edited volume of this type which gives equal space and voice to both disciplines. We hope that what follows is only a first step in a genuine and fruitful conversation between the two.

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Notes on contributors

Mario Slugan

Mario Slugan, Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, works on the intersection of film theory, history, and philosophy. He has published in Early Modern Visual Cultures, Projections, and Film and Philosophy, and has authored three monographs – Montage as Perceptual Experience (2017), Noël Carroll and Film (2019), and Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema(2019). He is also co-editor of the special issue of Apparatus titled Fiction in Central and Eastern European Film Theory and Practice (2019) and New Perspectives on Early Cinema (2021, forthcoming).

Enrico Terrone

Enrico Terrone is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at Università di Genova. He was visiting researcher at Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, and Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow at LOGOS Research Group, Universitat de Barcelona. He works on philosophical issues concerning fiction and depiction. His primary area of research is philosophy of film. He published papers in international journals such as The British Journal of Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Erkenntnis, Ergo, The Monist, Dialectica. His last book, co-authored with Luca Bandirali, is Concept TV – An Aesthetics of Television Series (2021).