Travelling on a Eurostar train recently, I noticed that their film service had two categories of what to watch: Entertainment, for fiction films and TV series, however grim and serious; and Documentaries, for nonfiction. As with the in-flight service on planes, the assumption is that there are “proper” films and programmes with made-up stories, and they shouldn’t be confused with the films about reality, which inevitably are not going to be entertaining. The People v OJ Simpson gets to cruise with the flashy, made-up tales; OJ: Made in America has to stay in the slow lane with the boring old bangers, even though they’re telling almost exactly the same story at the same, extended length.
This ignores two facts: that documentaries are sometimes fun to watch, and that the rigid boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in films don’t make sense. Observational footage is of course the main component of many docs, but some use scripted dramatic reconstruction; some rely on improvised material, featuring characters riffing on their real lives; some experiment visually with the whole idea of truth.
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