‘Believe Me, I’m of the World’: Documentary Representation

Abstract

Documentary concerns itself with representing the observable world, and to this end works with what Grierson called the raw material of actuality. The documentarian draws on past and present actuality — the world of social and historical experience — to construct an account of lives and events. Embedded within the account of physical reality is a claim or assertion at the centre of all non-fictional representation, namely, that a documentary depiction of the socio-historical world is factual and truthful.