Hybrid variations on a documentary theme

Abstract

Although often assumed to be polar opposites, documentary and fiction are in fact theoretically and practically intermeshed, just as history and fiction, also conventually seen as opposites, are symbiotically connected. Historian Hayden White argued in Metahistory that the myth/history distinction was arbitrary and of recent invention. In words that apply to film as well as to writing, White pointed out that it matters little whether the world that is conveyed to the reader/spectator is conceived to be real or imagined; the manner of making discursive sense of it through tropes and emplotment is identical (WHITE, 1973). In this article, we will examine the ways that the hybridization of documentary and fiction has been mobilized as a radical aesthetic resource.