This article argues that an emphasis on how spectators piece together documentary structure is more useful than nonfiction film theory’s focus on epistemology and categorization. By examining individual texts such as The Aristocrats, critics can develop a set of devices that provide a better explanation of documentary comprehension at the local level. As an example, this article shows how a spe...

22 English Journal 99.4 (2010): 22–29 by a variety of new terms such as literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and documentary narrative. What distinguished these writings from conventional factual and informational texts was that they were not only well-researched accounts of real events or experiences but also artful narratives. They employed literary techniques borrowed from modern and po...

In his article "Representing Postmodern Marginality in Three Documentary Films" Robert LeBlanc traces the emergence of new epistemologies of documentary film experience within the cases of three recent films that explore the subject's experience of marginality as central to its constitution as subject. These films -by Marlon Riggs, Chad Friedrichs, and Jessica Yu -explore the crises of self-rep...

This paper presents an interactive production model for nonfiction multimedia, referred to as interactive documentary. We discuss the design of ontologies for authoring interactive documentary. A working prototype supports the use of reasoning for retrieving, composing, and displaying media resources in real-time. A GUI is designed to facilitate concept-based navigation which enables queries ac...

Sound in non-fiction is routinely manipulated in order to accentuate, suppress or replace some aspects of sound to present a clearer, more intelligible, exciting, involving or dramatic representation to the audience. This manipulation, or potential for manipulation, indicates the need for a discussion on the ethical dimensions of such a practice. Ethical models across a range of disciplines suc...

This article examines the techniques used by the makers of a popular documentary series that may encourage interest in identity, genealogical, ancestral, roots, or even diaspora tourism—where individuals travel to discover more about their ancestry. By adapting Jens Eder’s theory of character closeness to a nonfiction series, this article identifies the means by which the producers of the Austr...