Is it time to retire the term ​“doc­u­men­tary”?

The new cen­tu­ry brought with it some­thing of a fad for films which merged togeth­er aspects of doc­u­men­tary and aspects of fic­tion tech­nique. The inher­ent unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of the doc­u­men­tary form became a locus for dis­cus­sion rather than an ide­o­log­i­cal incon­ve­nience, and where these works were once pre­sent­ed as arbiters of truth, they now seemed to exist as play­grounds for exper­i­men­ta­tion and as a way to explore ques­tions that ran deep­er than ​“this is a doc­u­ment of a thing that happened”.

Not long after, the ​“doc-fic­tion hybrid” (as it was loose­ly termed) became a form of eye-rolling par­o­dy among crit­i­cal cir­cles, as the tra­di­tion­al ​“doc­u­men­tary” didn’t seem the just nomen­cla­ture for the type chal­leng­ing work being pro­duced. By the 2010s, you absolute­ly could not move for doc­u­men­taries which brought in recre­ation, script­ed sequences, sleight-of-hand edit­ing, recon­tex­tu­alised archive footage, and all these lit­tle tics that are a sta­ple of fic­tion filmmaking.

Those who looked back to the ear­li­est days of the form could see the roots of this wave snaking right back there. Yet now things were in the open: the waters of sub­jec­tiv­i­ty had tru­ly been mud­died, and view­ers were habit­u­al­ly being sent around the hous­es with films which play­ful­ly ques­tioned our basic notions of ​“real­i­ty”.

Since 2016, the annu­al Frames of Rep­re­sen­ta­tion fes­ti­val has sought to cel­e­brate the pathfind­ing and inge­nious artists who essen­tial­ly sculpt with the doc­u­men­tary medi­um in search of new forms of expres­sion and artic­u­la­tion. You would be hard pressed to describe any of the films that play in the fes­ti­val as doc­u­men­taries, even though they do con­tain numer­ous visu­al and styl­is­tic cues that ten­ta­tive­ly place them under that broad umbrella.

Aside from its remit of cham­pi­oning for­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion, as well as cast­ing its pro­gram­ming net as far and wide as pos­si­ble in geo­graph­ic terms (this year’s fes­ti­val con­tains titles from India, Bolivia, Latin Amer­i­ca, Sub-Saha­ran Africa, and many more), Frames seeks to chal­lenge the need for audi­ences and fes­ti­vals to com­part­men­talise cin­e­ma on what they see as very flu­id lines. Per­haps this is a sub­jec­tive read­ing of the sit­u­a­tion now, but were I to attend a ​“doc­u­men­tary fes­ti­val”, my expec­ta­tion would be that I would be watch­ing pro­files with talk­ing heads, advo­ca­cy mate­r­i­al or a pre­view of some­thing that was on its way to tele­vi­sion broadcast.

To push this line of rea­son­ing fur­ther, doc­u­men­tary has itself become some­thing of a dirty word, infer­ring a tem­plat­ed con­cep­tion and exe­cu­tion, and the stan­dard­ised notion of a film­mak­er attempt­ing to fash­ion a tidy dra­mat­ic arc from messy real­i­ty. Celebri­ty biogra­phies are a sta­ple. And a doc­u­men­tary will like­ly con­tain a talk­ing head who starts to cry and the cam­era keeps rolling. This is, of course, not to say that there aren’t valu­able works being made in this cin­e­mat­ic sub-cat­e­go­ry, but the descrip­tion does, by asso­ci­a­tion, serve to ghet­toise the chal­leng­ing and idio­syn­crat­ic work show­cased by places like Frames of Rep­re­sen­ta­tion and, in the US, fes­ti­vals such as True/​False in Missouri.

For sake of brevi­ty there are some gen­er­al­i­sa­tions here, as this catch-all term ​“doc­u­men­tary” now, in indus­try terms, cov­ers such a diverse range of works that it now seems to have out­lived its use. ​“Non-fic­tion films” is a term that has been trilled, and it cer­tain­ly feels like a more close­ly descrip­tive descrip­tor. But is it still doing too much to offer bal­last to the divide that Frames of Rep­re­sen­ta­tion seeks to shatter?

Per­haps we could just start call­ing films which draw on aspects of tra­di­tion­al doc­u­men­taries ​“films”? Maybe then these works, which take no less effort and resource to pro­duce than fic­tion films, might more often be pro­grammed in fes­ti­vals in a way where they’re not shuf­fled off to a side­bar, or are play­ing in a spe­cial, small­er cin­e­ma across town? Maybe they’ll crop up in more cin­e­ma screens at the local arthouse?

Frames of Rep­re­sen­ta­tion begins on 24 Novem­ber at London’s ICA cin­e­ma with a screen­ing of Pay­al Kapadia’s A Night of Know­ing Noth­ing and runs through to 4 Decem­ber, with Alessio Rigo de Righi and Mat­teo Zop­pis’ The Night of the Crab King. Along the way there are dai­ly film screen­ings, work­shops, mas­ter­class­es and shorts pro­grammes to feast on, all of which com­bine to show view­ers that this small space between the are­nas of fic­tion and non-fic­tion is where the most inter­est­ing work is being done today. Go and watch one of these films and see if you’d dare call it a documentary.

Frames of Rep­re­sen­ta­tion 2021 runs from 24 Novem­ber to 4 Decem­ber at the ICA Cin­e­ma ica.art