Volume 56, Issue 2

Theories of the fiction/nonfiction distinction generally choose one particular measure of referentiality on which to ground their divisions. Thus nonfiction has been variously distinguished from fiction by authorial intention, genre conventions, or the ontological status of the text. However, not even the most reasonable and straight-forward of such measures has compelled widespread agreement among critics on a clear-cut border. The complex reality of how humans use narrative to model experience suggests that no single formula will ever explain how different readers experience different texts, either in the moment of their consumption or afterwards in the construction of readers’ views of reality. The web of ways we use narrative conventions - and are our-selves constituted by those conventions - suggests that we need to develop a more subtle and complex theory of fiction and nonfiction, and abandon the beautiful dream of a simple sorting machine

In this essay I outline the historical provenance and recent development of Documentary Theatre produced in Britain during the millennial period (1990-2007). Specifically, the essay takes account of “Verbatim” and “Tribunal” Theatre productions at the National and Royal Court and Tricycle Theatres. I define both forms and describe some of the distinctive theatrical characteristics of each. The essay traces the evolution of these documentary forms from British and German pre-and post-war practices involving non-naturalistic modes of theatre. I argue that the new forms have developed in order to represent, and to oppose, a new, privatised, political culture in which collectives have been sidelined and individuals placed centre stage. The rhetorics of courts and confessionals have become central to theatrical representation of crucial current social and political issues such as racism and international conflict. I argue that individual “bearing witness” (in the first person singular) has overtaken political analysis (conducted in the third person plural) in the new theatrical conjuncture, and that audiences too are implicated in acts of witness

This article provides some reflections on developments in factual TV programming in the UK in the last couple of decades. In principle, the term ‘factual programming’ covers an extremely wide range of material and could include news and current affairs as well as a number of other genres that one could regard as ‘non-fiction’ in their general orientation (see Hill 2007, 3-5). For the purposes of this article, however, I will confine my remarks to types of work which producers claim has a certain affinity with documentary and to which broadcasters themselves will generally attach the label ‘factual’ in their schedule information and in other promotional material. Even so, the amount of programming that is paraded under the factual banner still remains relatively extensive. It ranges from the cheap and cheerful docu-soap to the more challenging multi-part documentaries on topics of more serious concern

This essay examines some of the contours of new documentary’s relation-ship to war, first characterizing historical and theoretical frameworks while considering the social and spectatorial impact of moving images that have engaged with war themes and imagery. The focus falls on new documentary and representations of the war in Iraq, asking if these cultural mediations of war might indicate shades of an ‘Iraq syndrome’ in the making. Finally, a close reading of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 considers the film in light of social and representational issues facing new documentary, marking the film’s postmodernist and surrealist tendencies. I argue that Moore’s film ends up projecting ambiguous and perhaps self-contradictory conclusions about the US’s reliance on war as a mechanism for advancing its global social, ideological, and economic agendas. At the same time, the film manages to capture elements of the heterogeneity and instability of Americans’ own national and patriotic self-perceptions