Documentary Fiction

Abstract

This chapter looks at the emergence of a ‘documentary fiction’ mode in artists’ moving image installations. Documentary fiction is defined with reference to Jacques Rancière’s view of the creative and selective force of memory which overrides binary distinctions between documentary and fiction. Featuring the work of Pierre Huyghe, Omer Fast and Clemens von Wedemeyer the chapter considers why artists have chosen to engage with memory and historical events through aesthetic formats derived from cinema such as the film set and the film extra. In playing with the slippage between filmic mise-en-scène and profilmic reality, their work problematizes the role of cinema and television in contributing to collective memory and underscores the experience of historical time as mutable and chimerical.