Reimagining Reality

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Consider a few examples. Interview with the Assassin (2002) was presented as a documentary about a 'second gunman' in the assassination of President John Kennedy. For a viewer not versed in the 'mockumentary,' which uses the documentary form to tell a fictional story, it is possible to watch the film for a while and believe it's true. A documentary that explores the manipulation inherent in documentary filmmaking with much darker ramifications is The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993). While making Olympia in 1936, Riefenstahl shot the Olympic games by staging events and using narrative techniques. She shot high divers doing flips and ran some of the footage backward for better effect. Is this still documentary, if you cheat shots to get to the poetic grace of a dive?

Riefenstahl's 1935 film Triumph of the Will is considered a masterpiece of Nazi propaganda. This is perhaps the most dangerous example of the persuasive power of documentary. On the other end of the spectrum is the light, innocent manipulation in the recent hit Winged Migration. 'The footage of flying along on the wingtip of a bird,' Wilson points out, 'is of a bird that has been, from the day it hatched, used to people and cameras flying with it.'

'The stuff that is the most interesting and the most fertile to me are the films in which not only do I not know what is real, but I move past not knowing into not caring,' says Wilson. 'House of the Tiger King (2004) is a fantastic example. To this day I have no idea where the truth of the story leaves off and the fiction of it begins.' House of the Tiger King follows an explorer who thinks he's found a map to a lost city of gold in Peru and the documentary filmmaker who travels with him. 'They run out of food and film, and in the end, maybe this explorer got there, maybe he didn't,' says Wilson. 'There are indications that certain things have been fabricated.' But the film's director, David Flamholc, has called it a documentary.

Werner Herzog has long been fascinated with the membrane between what is real and what isn't. His mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004) explores this theme, and Fitzcarraldo (1982) portrays an impossible task that became the director's obsession.

'In making a movie about a crazy man carrying a boat up a mountain, you actually carry a boat up a mountain,' says Wilson.

With the line between truth and fiction blurring in such fascinating ways, does the viewer require a more sophisticated perspective?  'I'd love to see more media literacy taught in school,' says Wilson. 'We need to be able to watch films and think critically about them, question their accuracy and perspective. You have to open up your mind for something that is true and false at the same time. But you can't police. You can't make rules for the filmmakers.'

Danish director Lars von Trier, who with Thomas Vinterberg was responsible for Dogme '95, a set of satirical rules for filmmaking, has come up with the 'Dogumentary' rules for documentaries. 'There are five instructions,' explains Wilson. 'One is to allow for feedback from the subject at the end of the movie-a required 90 seconds for the subject to talk about how he or she feels about being in the movie.'

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