Media ontology, epistemological contract and performance politics of film, drama and documentary
Summary
"What is the difference between film, drama and documentary?" is usually understood as a horizontal comparison between the three art types, but this question implies a misplacement at the category level: film and drama first stipulate how the work is produced, preserved and presented, and therefore mainly belong to the category of media and art institutions; documentary first stipulates how the work points to historical reality, how to organize evidence and what factual responsibilities the creator should bear, so it mainly belongs to the categories of epistemology, pragmatics and ethics. Documentaries can be movies, or they can take the form of drama, sound, photography, interactive media, etc.; movies can be fictional or documentary; dramas can play fictional characters or present real testimonies and historical archives. Based on film ontology, performance research and documentary theory, this article proposes the three axes of "media tense-referential contract-performance construction" and the threshold model of "ethical accountability". By analyzing the documentary theater practices of "Summer Chronicles", "The Act of Killing", "Twenty-Four Cities" and Rimini Protokoll, this article demonstrates that: liveness and documentaryness are not absolute opposites, nor are performance and documentaryness mutually exclusive attributes; what determines whether a work is documentary is not whether it looks natural or whether the images are not staged, but whether the work makes verifiable claims about the real world to the audience, and whether it takes responsibility for the source of evidence, the method of re-enactment, the situation of the participants and possible consequences. Therefore, film, drama and documentary should not be understood as three mutually exclusive containers, but should be placed in a multi-dimensional and intersecting media coordinate system.
Keywords
Film; drama; documentary; media ontology; liveness; factual claims; performance; documentary ethics
1. The question raised: a category error concealed by parallel grammar
The three are not parallel categories, but answer questions at different levels.
In everyday language, "movie" is often tacitly equated with a feature film, "drama" is tacitly equated with a fictional performance on stage, and "documentary" is understood to be a direct record of reality. So the three seem to form a neat set of oppositions
Movies tell stories, plays stage stories, and documentaries record reality.
This statement is convenient, but it creates three misunderstandings in theory.
First, it reduces "film" to "fictional film" and ignores news films, ethnographic films, film essays, experimental films, animated documentaries, and a large number of image forms between fiction and non-fiction. Cinema in the academic sense is a broader institution of the moving image rather than a synonym for feature film.
Second, it associates "drama" with "unreality," as if performing on stage necessarily implies fiction. Yet testimony theatre, courtroom theatre, verbatim theatre, historical reenactment, political action theatre, and documentary theater can all make explicit factual claims about real people and historical events.
Third, it defines documentary as "reality itself" without creation, selection, or performance. This view not only ignores the role of camera position, editing, sound, subtitles, interviews and distribution context in constructing meaning, but also fails to explain why highly staged documentaries may still have epistemic value, nor why "mockumentaries" that use handheld photography, synchronized sound and interview styles still belong to fiction.
To be more precise, these three concepts are not at exactly the same logical level
concept
Top questions to answer
Main categories
movie
Through what moving image devices is the work produced, fixed, edited and projected?
Media-Device Category
Drama/Theatre
How do performers and audiences co-constitute an event in a specific time and space?
Performance-Event Category
documentary/documentary
How does the work point to historical reality, make factual claims, and bear the burden of evidence?
Epistemology-Ethical Categories
Therefore, the core proposition of this article is
Film and drama mainly stipulate the way the work exists; documentary mainly stipulates the responsible relationship between the work and reality.
The "main" here is very important. Of course, film and theater also have epistemological, ethical and political dimensions; documentaries have also formed stable production institutions, stylistic traditions and distribution systems. But from the perspective of conceptual distinction, film and drama are first and foremost a question of "how to present", while documentary is first and foremost a question of "why the reality is stated in this way."
2. Theoretical Genealogy: Recorded Images, Events and Accountable Statements
Film as a repeatable audiovisual object: projection, viewing and media installation.
(1) Film: from photographic traces to repeatable audiovisual objects
Classic film ontology often starts from the causal connection between photographic images and reality. Bazin believed that the particularity of photography was that the optical traces of objects could form images with less reliance on manual depiction; Cavell understood film as the automatic projection of a world in front of the audience. Unlike painting, photographic film seems to retain traces of something's presence in front of the camera (Bazin 1967; Cavell 1979).
However, it cannot be concluded that "film is a record of reality". First of all, photography only guarantees that a certain optical event has occurred, and does not guarantee that subtitles, narration, character identities, and causal explanations are real. Second, animated films, digitally composite films, and entirely computer-generated images still belong to film culture. Rodowick's discussion of digital cinema has shown that cinema should not be defined solely by the materiality of film or the indexicality of photography (Rodowick 2007).
Compared with "photographic traces", the more stable feature of film is that it processes one or more shooting, recording, design and performance activities into a relatively fixed, repeatable audio-visual object. A film actor's performance is not equivalent to any one complete action that occurs on set. It is often split into different scenes, camera positions and shooting times, and is finally recomposed by lens selection, editing, sound design and color processing. Performance in film is therefore a co-production of body, camera and post-production
"Composite Performance"
。
The basic time structure of the film is also formed from this: the audience usually watches the object that has been completed, selected and fixed. The audiovisual sequences seen by different viewers at different times can be substantially the same.
A film screening can certainly become a social event, and the audience's reaction can change the viewing experience, but these reactions usually do not reversely change the sequence of shots that have been completed.
(2) Drama: from textual works to co-generated events
"Drama" in Chinese includes at least two objects that are related but cannot be confused with each other: one is the drama text that can be read, published and adapted, and the other is the theater performance that takes place in a specific place. If no distinction is made, Shakespeare's play, a specific performance, and the entire performance tradition of the play will be mistaken for the same object.
Aristotle understood tragedy as imitation accomplished through the actions of actors rather than mere narrative. But modern theater theory further points out that theatrical performance is not about pre-existing script content being transparently put on the stage. The actor's physical state, audience reaction, venue acoustics, accidents, social environment and performance rhythm together constitute an event that cannot be completely replicated.
Peggy Phelan emphasizes the evanescent nature of performance
Fischer-Lichte used the "autopoietic feedback loop" to illustrate how actors and audiences influence each other.
The audience's silence, laughter, restlessness, and even departure may change the actor's rhythm, and the actor's actions will continue to reorganize the audience's attention and emotions (Phelan 1993; Fischer-Lichte 2008).
The same play can be performed repeatedly, but it repeats the structure, rules or score, not the same events.
However, treating liveness as the pure essence of theater uncontaminated by technology is equally problematic. Auslander points out that modern "live" experience has been redefined in the media environment of radio, recording, film and television (Auslander 2008). Video projections, remote actors, real-time data, live audiences and virtual spaces may all find their way into contemporary theatre. Therefore, site and mediatization are better understood as different degrees of organization rather than as either-or metaphysical oppositions.
The archetypal characteristic of drama is not that it is "absolutely without a medium," but that the main aesthetic object of the work still includes
An ongoing performative event with feedback possibilities and live contingency.
(3) Documentary: Not reality itself, but claims about reality
The core of the documentary is not "no processing", but how the evidence enters public judgment.
A fundamental turning point in documentary theory is to abandon the understanding of documentary as "raw reality." Grierson's famous "creative treatment of reality" has acknowledged that documentary not only uses the real world as its material, but also necessarily formalizes reality through composition, editing, narrative and sound.
Bill Nichols further understood documentary as a social practice, historical tradition, and way of viewing, rather than just a text with a certain fixed style. The poetic, interpretive, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative modes he distinguishes just illustrate that documentary does not have a single "objective appearance"; its theoretical framework also puts voice, persuasion, evidence and ethics at the center of documentary research. ([Indiana University Press][1])
Carl Plantinga's "assertive stance" and Noel Carroll's "presumptive assertion" theories provide more rigorous epistemological explanations
Documentaries invite viewers to understand the central statements in the work as claims about the real world, rather than as assumptions in a fictional game.
The so-called "real world" is not unmediated nature, but a world in which people, institutions, and events may be tested by historical evidence, witnesses, archives, and public discussion (Plantinga 1997; Carroll 1996).
Documentary identity cannot therefore be determined solely by the appearance of the image. Fiction can use interviews, surveillance footage, shaky shots, and news subtitles; documentaries can use animation, reenactments, models, dance, and dreams. What really matters is what kind of relationship is established between the work and the audience
alleged contract
。
This contract does not guarantee that the work will be correct. Documentaries may make mistakes, lie, or intentionally mislead. Precisely because it makes factual claims, we have reason to accuse it of being untrue. Characters in fictional works do not have real resumes, which does not constitute deception; documentaries fictionalize the identity of the interviewer, but make the audience mistakenly believe that the interviewer is a real witness, which constitutes a breach of the record contract.
From this we can distinguish three concepts that are often confused
reality
Refers to whether the characters and events discussed in the work are placed in the historical world
authenticity
Refers to whether specific statements, images, and explanations are credible
Documentary
It refers to whether the work places itself in the relationship between evidence testing and public accountability.
Documentaries do not have a monopoly on "truth." Fictional films and dramas can equally reveal deep emotional truths, social structures, and historical experiences. But documentaries bear a more specific obligation
When it says "this person exists", "this thing happened", "this image comes from a certain time and place"
The audience has the right to ask for evidence.
3. "Three Axis-One Threshold" Model
Three axes and ethical threshold model: media tense, referential contract, performance construction, and ethical accountability.
In order to avoid repacking film, drama and documentary into three closed containers, this article proposes a heuristic analysis model. Any work can be tentatively represented as
W = <M, R, P; E>
Among them, the three descriptive dimensions are media tense, referential contract and performance construction; ethical accountability constitutes a normative threshold. The notation here does not require a mechanical quantification of a work of art, but rather shows that several properties can vary independently of each other.
1. Media tense axis (M)
This axis examines what kind of objects the work mainly exists as
At one end is a fixed, copyable and replayable record object
At the other end of the spectrum are live events that rely on simultaneous participation of performers and audiences
The middle includes live movies, remote theater, interactive images, real-time generated performances and stage videos.
Traditional film is usually closer to the "recorded object" end, and traditional theater is closer to the "live event" end. But this is an archetypal difference, not an insurmountable boundary.
2. Referring to the Contract Axis (R)
This axis examines how the work asks the viewer to understand its statement
The fictional side invites the audience to engage in imagination "if these characters and events existed"
The factual side requires the audience to understand the core statement as an assertion about the historical world
It includes autobiographical fiction, historical drama, documentary novels, film essays and mixed fiction and reality.
This dimension has nothing to do with whether the work is "profound" or not. Fiction can have powerful historical insights, and documentaries can be superficial. The difference is whether the audience has reason to treat a specific statement as a fact that can be externally verified.
3. Performance construction axis (P)
This axis examines how well the creator organizes scenes, language, and character behaviors
The lower end includes long observations, incidental events, and unrehearsed interactions
The higher end includes scripts, rehearsals, role plays, reenactments, sets, and highly stylized mise-en-scène.
The key point is that the degree of construction is not inversely proportional to documentaryness. Low intervention does not automatically produce truth, nor does high performance automatically eliminate documentary value. Interview questions themselves shape responses, and observational photography excludes large amounts of information through framing and editing; conversely, reenactments can sometimes reveal memories, traumas, fantasies, and power structures that could not be recorded by the original camera.
4. Ethical Accountability Threshold (E)
Ethical accountability is not another style but a condition for the legitimacy of factual work. Include at least
Traceability of sources of archives, data and testimonies
Appropriate disclosure of levels of reenactment, synthesis, doubles, and fictionalization
Ongoing assessment of participant knowledge, risks, and power inequalities
Responsibility for contextual editing, translation, anonymity and identity presentation
Ability to respond to factual errors, harm consequences, and public questioning.
Therefore, even if a work is on the "factual" end, it does not mean that it is ethically qualified. Documentation is a commitment, and ethical accountability determines whether the work fulfills this commitment well.
5. Coordinate distribution of typical forms
Work form
media tense
alleged contract
performance construction
Main responsibilities
fictional movie
Mainly fixed records
fictional
usually higher
Do not pretend to be factual evidence
observational documentary
Mainly fixed records
facts
Explicit construction is low
Context, Editing and Participant Responsibilities
reenactment documentary
Mainly fixed records
facts
higher
Clarify the nature of the re-enactment and its evidentiary limits
traditional dramatic drama
Mainly on-site events
fictional
higher
Performance and Production Ethics
documentary theater
Mainly on-site events
facts
Can be high or low
Testimonial Sources, Representation and Representational Harm
mockumentary
Mainly fixed records
fictional
Borrow record form
Contracts cannot be concealed for long periods of time in a deceptive manner
stage video
Fixed records and live derivatives
Depends on the original work
Keep stage construction
Distinguish between original performance and video recording object
animated documentary
Mainly fixed records
facts
Very high visual construction
Explain the relationship between images and evidence
This table shows that documentary is not a third medium next to film. "Documentary" in a narrow sense can be defined as
Documentary practice in the medium of film or moving image.
Documentary theater is
Documentary practice in the medium of live performance.
4. Systematic differences between the three
(1) Basic units of the work: lens objects, performance events and factual relationships
The basic aesthetic unit of a film is usually an audiovisual object that has been fixed and programmed.
Even if the filming process is full of chance, what the audience ultimately comes into contact with is still a edited version.
The basic unit of drama is a performance event. The script, director's plan and stage design can be relatively stable, but the time experienced by the actors and the audience cannot be completely reproduced.
A show can repeat the same lines every night without replicating exactly the same rhythms, missteps, moods, and viewing relationships.
The core unit of documentary is neither the lens nor the stage action itself, but the relationship between images, sounds, testimonies and historical reality.
Evidence relationship
. A shot may be real but redefined by false subtitles
An actor's reenactment may not capture the past directly, but it can serve as evidence of how someone remembers, denies, or imagines the past in the present.
(2) Time structure: has happened, is happening and is claimed to have happened
Time in traditional movies is consummated. Filming and editing often precede viewing, and the viewer is confronted with an already settled arrangement.
Traditional theater has a progressive nature. A performance is not a mechanical reproduction of an original event, but a re-realization in front of an audience. Even when the ending is written, the physical processes that bring it to fruition are still at risk.
Documentaries have
double time
The present when the shooting was taken and the historical time it refers to. The interviewer's current expression may become indirect evidence of past events; archival images not only record the past, but are also given a new argumentative position in new editing.
Documentaries do not bring the past back to the present intact, but reorganize how we can understand the past in the present.
(3) Performance mechanism: playing roles, generating roles and performing oneself
Fictional actors often openly admit that they are playing characters that do not exist in reality. A film actor's performance is broken up by the camera and editing; a stage actor must maintain character actions over a relatively continuous period of time.
Documentary participants are often mistaken for "not acting." In fact, people almost inevitably organize their own image when facing a camera, an interviewer, or an audience. Interviewees may choose to dress, suppress emotions, exaggerate experiences, or use language that is socially expected. Performing oneself is not the same as lying; social identity itself is presented repeatedly in different situations.
Therefore, what the documentary needs to ask is not "did this person perform?" but
Who is he performing for? In what power relations is it performed? What is the performance trying to prove? How do creators explain this performance through editing?
The characters in the documentary are simultaneously social actors, images and sources of evidence in the creator's narrative. Precisely because the three identities overlap, documentary ethics is far more complicated than "obtaining consent for a single filming".
(4) Narrative and evidence: logic of possibility and logic of justification
Works of fiction rely primarily on possibility, coherence, and artistic form to establish persuasiveness. The audience will not deny "Hamlet" because Hamlet does not have a birth certificate, because the work never asks the audience to believe that this prince did exist in Danish history.
Documentaries require not only narrative coherence but also justification. Footage, testimony, and data cannot just "fit the story" but must form a legitimate connection to the work's claims. Documentaries can create suspense, create characters, and use symbols, but aesthetic effects are no substitute for evidence.
This also means that "real material" does not automatically tell the truth. Archival images must be dated, located, photographed, and originally used; testimonies need to account for memory bias, interests, and trauma; and statistics need to be caliber. The form of documentary is not a decoration outside of reality, but the way in which evidence is organized into public knowledge.
(5) Audience position: viewing the chosen world, co-locating with events and examining factual claims
The movie camera pre-selects the viewing position for the audience. The lens determines the distance, the editing determines the sequence, and the frame determines what is visible and invisible. The audience can make critical interpretations, but they cannot really move their eyes outside the painting in the established version.
The theater spectator, although constrained by lighting, scheduling, and seating, usually has greater freedom of immediate attention: he can look at the actors who are not speaking, watch the stage machinery, or observe other members of the audience. More importantly, the presence of the audience itself may become a performance condition.
Documentary viewers are given another role: not only to watch, but also to judge. Documentary viewing implies a structure of public scrutiny-whose claim is it, why should it be believed, what has been omitted, and who bears the consequences? The ideal audience for a documentary is therefore not one who passively accepts "truth," but a critical audience capable of distinguishing between evidence, interpretation, and rhetoric.
5. Boundary Cases: How Performances Become Documentary Evidence
(1) "Summer Chronicle": The camera is not a transparent window, but a participant in the truth experiment
Chronicles of a Summer: Cameras, Street Questions and Reflexive Experiments.
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's "Chronicles of a Summer" (1961) is often regarded as an important work of cinematic truth-seeking. The film gets close to the work, emotions, war memories and political situations of ordinary people in Paris through street questions, collective conversations and daily follow-up shots. Lightweight camera equipment and simultaneous sound recording expanded the camera's ability to enter everyday environments, but the film's most important contribution is not to claim that technology has finally eliminated mediation, but to turn mediation itself into a problem.
Later in the film, participants watch footage and discuss which scenes are "real" and which characters are "overacted." Screenings that were intended to verify authenticity instead exposed conflicts between standards of authenticity: some believed that emotion was too dramatic, while others believed that restraint was inauthentic. Relevant research points out that the film ultimately does not prove that the camera can reach unperformed life, but instead transforms "how the truth is produced between the camera, participants and audience" into the theme of the work. ([The Criterion Collection][2])
According to the model of this article, the media tense of "Summer Chronicles" belongs to documentary film, and the referential contract is obviously factual, but its degree of performance construction is not low: the questions are raised by the director, the group is convened by the director, and the feedback from the screening changes the participants' understanding of their own image. Its documentary value comes precisely from the disclosure of these conditions, not from the non-existence of "zero intervention."
The film thus reveals a key principle
Reflexivity is not a way for documentaries to admit failure, but a way for documentaries to incorporate their own production conditions into the chain of evidence.
(2) "Killing Performance": Reenactment is not a copy of the past, but evidence of current ideology
"Killing Act": Genre film-style reenactment turns the perpetrator's current ideology into an object of evidence.
Joshua Oppenheimer's Acts of Killing (2012) invites perpetrators of mass killings in Indonesia to reenact their actions in the form of their favorite gangster films, musicals, and horror films. If measured by the standard of "the more staged shots there are, the lower the documentary quality", this work should almost be excluded from documentaries. But this judgment misses what the reenactment actually proves.
The reenactments in the film should not be taken as accurate forensic reconstructions of the killings. What it documents above all is how the past is understood, paraded, aestheticized, and rearranged in the present by the perpetrators. Genre film imagination, make-up, costumes and exaggerated performances expose official historical narratives, masculinity, film culture and self-deception. As relevant comments have pointed out, what the film reveals through the "film-within-a-film" structure is not the behavioral facts that the perpetrators are unwilling to admit - they often admit it publicly - but how they use performance to escape, transform or experience guilt. ([The New Yorker][3])
In this case, the performative construct axis is high, and the factual referential axis is equally high. The object of evidence for reenactment is not "how each action actually occurred in the past" but "how the perpetrator today imagines the past as a heroic narrative for viewing." Performance does not cancel documentaryness, but changes the object to which documentaryness is directed.
However, this approach also raises acute ethical questions: By allowing the perpetrator to occupy the center of the narrative, will the victim be suppressed again? Does the image expose violence while replicating its spectacle? These issues cannot be ended by declaring that the film "is real" but must be continually discussed at the level of risk, context, victim safety and political consequences. This suggests that a documentary's ethical accountability is not an automatic add-on after a work acquires the "documentary" label, but is part of its epistemological validity.
(3) "Tale of 24 Cities": Collective Memory, Actors' Testimonies and Disclosure Responsibilities
"Tale of 24 Cities": A hybrid structure of real interviews, actor testimonies and collective memory.
Jia Zhangke's "Twenty-Four Cities" (2008) revolves around the relocation, closure and replacement of a large factory in Chengdu by a real estate project. The film juxtaposes interviews with real workers and testimonies of composite characters performed by actors, and is generally regarded as a hybrid form of documentary and fiction; reports at the time also clearly stated that the film contains real interviews and performances by actors, and uses it to tell the history of the factory and its labor groups. ([The New Yorker][4])
The actor's testimony was not simply "fabricated." Synthetic characters are able to bring together intergenerational experiences that cannot be fully borne by any one interviewee, and form an emotional history of the disappearance of the socialist industrial community through performance rhythms, face culture, and celebrity memory. The problem is: when the audience cannot clearly distinguish between recorded testimony and comprehensive creation within the work, different materials will be given similar weight of evidence.
If the film is treated as a purely fictional film, the performance of the actors does not pose a problem; if it enters public history in the name of a documentary, the identity of the performers, the source of the material and the way the characters are integrated should bear a higher responsibility for disclosure. The theoretical value of "Twenty-Four Cities" comes from this unstable position: it forces the audience to distinguish between "evidence of historical facts" and "poetic synthesis of historical experience."
Therefore, this work should not be simply judged as a "true documentary" or a "fake documentary". A more accurate term would be hybrid documentary film, documentary essay film or documentary fiction. It not only preserves the testimonies of real workers, but also produces the symbolic form of collective memory through actors; its evaluation criteria must also include both aesthetic interpretation and factual disclosure.
(4) Rimini Protokoll: Documentation does not depend on the screen
Rimini Protokoll's "100% City" series: experts in daily life and urban demographics take the stage.
"My own performance" in documentary theater does not automatically equal the truth. It still requires representativeness and the responsibility of testimony.
The German theater group Rimini Protokoll often invites "everyday life experts" with specific life experiences, professional knowledge or social identities into performances, and transforms real-life mechanisms such as shareholder meetings, urban population structure, transnational call centers and war experiences into theater structures. Their official introduction clearly emphasizes that they collaborate with expertise holders outside the theater and create new perspectives on reality through interactive technology and spatial transformation. ([rimini-protokoll.de][5])
These performances illustrate that documentary can exist in live theatre. The performers may appear with their own names, occupations and experiences, and the performance materials may also come from data, documents and real systems. But the presence of the body at the scene does not mean that the testimony is automatically true. Real people can also misremember, conceal, exaggerate, or obey directorial structures; "acting in person" can only prove that someone is present at the moment, but cannot alone prove all his statements about the past.
The epistemological significance of documentary theater is that it transforms evidence from traces on the screen into a face-to-face witnessing relationship. The audience not only hears the statement, but also directly experiences the speaker's pauses, physical vulnerability, and social position. At the same time, directorial control over personnel selection, representation, and order of speaking remains.
Therefore, documentary theater is not "theater without performance", but
Theater that organizes factual material in a performative manner and requires staged statements to be tested by reality.
6. Stress testing of several boundary issues
Boundary judgment does not look at the appearance label, but looks at the viewing contract established by the work.
1. Is "Based on True Events" a documentary?
No. Historical dramas can be based on real events, but generally allow for the merging of characters, rewriting of dialogue, and reorganization of cause and effect. As long as the work does not require the audience to treat each scene as factual evidence, it remains primarily a fictional contract.
"Adapted from real events" only indicates that reality is the source of the material, but does not indicate that the work bears the documentary evidence obligation.
2. Why is a mockumentary not a documentary?
Because documentary style does not equal documentary contract. Handheld footage, interviews, timecodes and surveillance footage are just a few semiotic resources that can be used in any work. Mockumentaries often invite viewers to understand characters and events as fictional in their titles, releases, genre cues, or final reveals.
On the contrary, if the creator deliberately creates the illusion of a real news event and refuses to provide fictional tips for a long time, the problem is no longer just an artistic type experiment, but may become a communication deception.
3. Animated documentaries have no photographic traces, so why can they still be considered documentaries?
Because photographic causation is not a necessary condition for documentaryness. Animation can make claims about reality to viewers based on diaries, audio recordings, judicial records, memories and scientific data. The images are contrived, but the events, experiences, and interpretations expressed are still open to evidence testing.
Animated documentaries instead make the process of construction more visible: instead of mistaking the images for unmediated slices of reality, the viewer becomes aware of the visual form as an interpretation of the evidence.
4. Once a stage performance is filmed, is it still theater?
Stage performances and stage videos should be viewed as related but not identical objects. The original performance is a live event; the video transforms the event into an audio-visual work that can be watched repeatedly through camera position, scenery, editing and sound.
For the live audience, the actors, audience and space together constitute the theater event; for the video audience, the viewing object has been reorganized by the camera. Video can record drama, but it cannot fully preserve the unfilmed spatial relationships, audience feedback, and contingencies of the original event.
Live theater falls somewhere in between: the remote audience and actors may share time but not the same physical space, and the ability of the remote audience to respond depends on the technical design.
5. Does reenactment automatically make a documentary fiction?
No. Two statements must be distinguished
"This is the original image of the events of that year"
"This is a re-enactment of the events of that year based on certain evidence."
The latter does not have to pass off as original evidence as long as it clearly identifies its reenactment and explains what material it is based on. The problem is not the reenactment itself, but whether to confuse the evidentiary status of reenactments, speculation, and archives.
6. Do documentaries have to be objective and neutral?
It is impossible for a documentary to be completely devoid of standpoint. Camera selection, issue design, editing sequence, and distribution channels all have a value orientation. Objectivity should be understood not as "the absence of an author" but as a set of methodological disciplines that can be openly discussed: distinguishing fact from interpretation, presenting the limits of evidence, checking contrary material, avoiding deliberate falsification, and allowing claims to be criticized.
Documentaries can be strongly involved in politics, but the stronger the intervention does not mean that the requirements for facts are lower. Conversely, the clearer the public claim, the higher the burden of proof will generally be.
7. Discussion: From ontological purity to relational definition
There is a continuous "purity impulse" in the history of film and theater: film theory tries to find the unique material essence of film, theater theory tries to defend the unreplicable liveness, and documentary theory tries to find a realistic image that will not be contaminated by artistic processing.
But media practice continues to produce counterexamples. Digital films no longer rely on film; theaters make extensive use of screens and remote connections; documentaries can be animated, performed, and interactive; fictional works can also incorporate archives and real people. By insisting on finding a single necessary characteristic for each art, theory can only keep declaring new forms "not pure enough."
The model in this article adopts a relational definition. The identity of a work is not determined by one material alone, but by the following relationships
Work identity = media organization × referential contract × performance method × institutional context and ethical accountability
This definition does not mean that all boundaries can be eliminated arbitrarily. On the contrary, it makes the boundary judgment more stringent: when judging a work, you cannot just conclude by "like a movie", "like a documentary" or "someone is on the stage", but you must specify what attributes it has in which dimension.
From this we can also re-understand the concept of "reality". Works of art involve at least four different realities
existence is real
Whether the person, place or event actually exists
proposition true
Whether statements about them are accurate
Experience is real
Whether the work conveys a certain feeling that the subject has actually experienced
Structural reality
Whether the work reveals the social relationships behind individual experiences.
Documentaries especially bear the responsibility of the first two truths, and may also pursue the latter two; fictional films and dramas may not necessarily bear the factual obligations of specific propositions, but they may be more insightful than some documentaries in terms of empirical truth and structural truth.
Therefore, "fiction" does not equal falsehood, and "documentary" does not equal truth. The difference between the two is that they make different promises to the audience.
8. Conclusion
There is no simple, symmetrical dividing line between film, drama and documentary.
Film is first and foremost a media system that organizes moving images into repeatable audiovisual objects; drama is first and foremost a performance system that uses body, space, time, and audience feedback to constitute live events; documentary is first and foremost a practical way of making factual claims, organizing evidence, and accepting ethical accountability around historical reality.
Four conclusions can be drawn from this.
First
Documentary is not the opposite of film, but a mode of factuality possible within film and in other media.
Second
Drama is not synonymous with fiction.
Theater can present fictional characters and organize archives, data, testimonies and real identities.
Third
Performance is not the opposite of documentary.
Documentary characters necessarily present themselves in some way, and reenactments and role-playing can also produce knowledge. The real epistemological crisis arises from the obfuscation of archives, speculations, substitutions and fictions without disclosure.
Fourth
Documentation is not about the "realistic content" of a work, but how the work is responsible for its claims to reality.
Therefore, for any borderline work, four questions should be asked
Does it exist primarily as a documented object or as a live event?
Does it invite the viewer to adopt a fictional attitude or a factual judgment?
How does it organize performances, staging, reenactments and editing?
Does it take sufficient responsibility for the evidence, actors and consequences of dissemination?
In a prototype sense, the differences between the three can be condensed into one sentence
Cinema fixes and organizes the visible, drama organizes events that are shared together, and documentary assumes an arguable responsibility for reality.
But the most important theoretical conclusion is not to build higher walls around them, but to recognize that: while film and theater describe how works appear, documentaries describe the commitment of works to talk about the world. The three are not three closed categories, but media coordinates that can be superimposed and transformed into each other, and at the same time must accept different evaluation standards.
References
Aristotle. 1996. *Poetics*. Translated by Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin.
Auslander, Philip. 2008. *Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture*. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Bazin, André. 1967. *What Is Cinema?* Vol. 1. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2002. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." In *Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruzzi, Stella. 2006. *New Documentary*. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Carroll, Noël. 1996. *Theorizing the Moving Image*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. *The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film*. Enlarged ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. *The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics*. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge.
Grierson, John. 1946. "First Principles of Documentary." In *Grierson on Documentary*, edited by Forsyth Hardy. London: Collins.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. *Postdramatic Theatre*. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge.
Martin, Carol. 2013. *Theatre of the Real*. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nichols, Bill. 2017. *Introduction to Documentary*. 3rd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. *Unmarked: The Politics of Performance*. London: Routledge.
Plantinga, Carl R. 1997. *Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Renov, Michael, ed. 1993. *Theorizing Documentary*. London: Routledge.
Rodowick, D. N. 2007. *The Virtual Life of Film*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1991. *When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics*. London: Routledge.
Winston, Brian. 1995. *Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited*. London: British Film Institute.
Film and performance cases
Jia Zhangke, dir. 2008. *24 City* / "Twenty-Four Cities".
Oppenheimer, Joshua, Christine Cynn, and Anonymous, dirs. 2012. *The Act of Killing* / "The Act of Killing".
Rouch, Jean, and Edgar Morin, dirs. 1961. *Chronique d'un été* / Chronicle of a Summer.
Rimini Protokoll. 2000-present. Documentary theatre, urban projects and interactive performance series.