Fiction and nonfiction

The great divide between fiction and nonfiction is seen it is wide context of narratizstion and dramatization of storytelling. This genre can sometimes be inseparable from each other as fiction, nonfiction and documentary overlap. They do so due to the interrelationships between drama documentary and documentary drama, where people appear in reconstructed and re-enacted scenes. Author Ward states this in his examples of how real people/non actors play themselves in some way through acting and simply being. For Ward, it is the re-enacting of the real where the performing of real-life scenarios becomes fiction and nonfiction.

The documentary about the serial killer Aillen Wuornos, is what Ward names as truth valued: ‘how such acted dramas can have a documentary or truth value is something returned to below via the discussion of the various versions of the story’. Here, for Ward, (and also to be seen in Tina goes shopping or Pissed on the job), these are fictional in the sense that they are fabricated. Even though there were real life people being interviewed upon their real life story, these docus were reconstructed with performing actors.

But what about Ben Cousins’ Such is life? Is that fictional? Whether it is killings, alcohol or drug addiction I think what these have in common are the nature and the reality of a personal problem indicating a wider social issue, through fictional performance. A camera trick that I learned here from the text was shown numerous of times in Such is life, in both part one and two when the talents (Ben, the sister and the father) were speaking. Given the example of Aileen Wurons’ close up, when the talent speaks, the camera holds the talent in close-up achieving a fly on the wall observational intimacy, recognized in many documentaries and is often take as the marker of ‘authenticity par excellence’.

I think whether I was filming Aileen, Ben or Yanni, I would have to include this observational interviewing trick, to show the importance of the talent’s true story.