Wonderful thoughtful piece! One quibble though I may be misunderstanding what kind of documentary you are referring to. People were making profitable docs at least since 1990s. Trials of Life was a massively successful Time Life series, Real World launched around then, Paris is Burning, etc.
Thank you Burton! Really appreciate it. You're right, I don't exactly know when documentary turned the corner to being profitable, but I could feel that shift happening while I was an adult. The perception for much of the '90s and '00s was that documentary was art house, or just kind of the poor stepsister to narrative, and that changed somewhere in the 2000s. Things like An Inconvenient Truth and Waltz With Bashir were revelatory for people. And then when the streamers appeared it all really took off. But you're right - my dates may not be exactly precise.
To follow up on Burton's comment, interested to know your thoughts on how nature documentaries fit into your thinking. At least in the ones made decades ago, the animals really were being filmed in the nature, but the events, like hunting and kills were staged to the extent that the predator and prey were thrown together, and the animals were often given names and personalities. In its essence it was posited as real. So are we just reinventing "Wild Kingdom"?
I know less than I might about nature documentaries. It's always felt like its own thing. I remember being at a crew meal where the cameraman explained that his life's ambition was to be dropped into the Marianas Trench in cage with an infrared camera and wearing a suit of chainmail so that he could film a certain kind of shark in pitch-black as it tried to attack his cage - and the rest of us around the table had to nod along and encourage him and pretend that this was something other than completely batshit crazy.
I guess for me the dividing line with documentary is the concept that you can just film regular people doing more or less regular things and that that could be as entertaining or at least as lucrative as a narrative feature film. Once that happens than the whole calculus of the arts economy changes. And I kind of remember that happening in a surprising way with reality TV with the "Pawn Stars" and "Ice Road Truckers" phase - which was basically just following around people working tough, blue-collar jobs and sprucing it up just enough that it became mass entertainment.
I think David Shields' _Reality Hunger_ is terrific. I used it when teaching Creative Writing at George Washington U--to Tom Mallon's horror. Apparently, they knew each other from Brown? though Mallon is much older, but his reaction to my use of the book I found alarming and a form of censorship to no effect, fortunately. I rely on _Reality Hunger_ in a new essay coming on October 4 via Fictionistas and I'll repost it in some way on my Substack site. The "borderland between reality and imagination" is what Shields is indeed exploring. I'll never give up on fiction--and I don't think Shields is either. He raised the bar along with all those he quotes to do this. On another note from this fine essay, W.G. Sebold's _Austerlitz_ was a bolt of lightning for me "out of the clear blue sky" you mention. We should be in conversation. Thank you for subscribing: That's how I found you and damn glad I did. xo Mary
Hi Mary, I really appreciate it! Let's be in conversation! Look forward to the Fictionistas piece and to continuing to read your work. This kind of interaction - meeting other writers - is exactly what drew me to the Substack idea in the first place. Please keep in touch! - Sam
Thinking today about Roberto Bolano and how his 6626 while I wasnot strong enough to have a face for all the maqulera dead he totes up in there . He left me room enough to keep pointing my attention in the border direction? The other notefromme is to remind us that if somebody welove needs to be filmed? To help monetize them? There is that method of Adam Curtis's.
Have you just never heard of Javier Cercas? Or are his "non-fiction novels" just somehow different from what you discuss here? I found them rooted in the same idea as the first book to use that designation, In Cold Blood, but significantly less afraid to place a viewpoint in the author.
Dasa Drndic, Maria Stepanova with In Memory of Memory, and Stefan Hertmans' War and Turpentine and The Ascent also fiddle and manipulate the standard repertoire of both autofiction and memoir as well as narrative nonfiction to confuse their formal truth status while holding narrative as the highest good.
For Cercas I recommend Soldiers of Salamis or the Imposter to start, although Anatomy of a Moment may be most up your alley in terms of the degree to which it enacts yet tweaks reality.
Keep it up!
Labatut's on the list. Thanks!
Wonderful thoughtful piece! One quibble though I may be misunderstanding what kind of documentary you are referring to. People were making profitable docs at least since 1990s. Trials of Life was a massively successful Time Life series, Real World launched around then, Paris is Burning, etc.
Thank you Burton! Really appreciate it. You're right, I don't exactly know when documentary turned the corner to being profitable, but I could feel that shift happening while I was an adult. The perception for much of the '90s and '00s was that documentary was art house, or just kind of the poor stepsister to narrative, and that changed somewhere in the 2000s. Things like An Inconvenient Truth and Waltz With Bashir were revelatory for people. And then when the streamers appeared it all really took off. But you're right - my dates may not be exactly precise.
writing to capture reality is like fucking to capture virginity
Rock on
To follow up on Burton's comment, interested to know your thoughts on how nature documentaries fit into your thinking. At least in the ones made decades ago, the animals really were being filmed in the nature, but the events, like hunting and kills were staged to the extent that the predator and prey were thrown together, and the animals were often given names and personalities. In its essence it was posited as real. So are we just reinventing "Wild Kingdom"?
I know less than I might about nature documentaries. It's always felt like its own thing. I remember being at a crew meal where the cameraman explained that his life's ambition was to be dropped into the Marianas Trench in cage with an infrared camera and wearing a suit of chainmail so that he could film a certain kind of shark in pitch-black as it tried to attack his cage - and the rest of us around the table had to nod along and encourage him and pretend that this was something other than completely batshit crazy.
I guess for me the dividing line with documentary is the concept that you can just film regular people doing more or less regular things and that that could be as entertaining or at least as lucrative as a narrative feature film. Once that happens than the whole calculus of the arts economy changes. And I kind of remember that happening in a surprising way with reality TV with the "Pawn Stars" and "Ice Road Truckers" phase - which was basically just following around people working tough, blue-collar jobs and sprucing it up just enough that it became mass entertainment.
Thank you for the comment!
I think David Shields' _Reality Hunger_ is terrific. I used it when teaching Creative Writing at George Washington U--to Tom Mallon's horror. Apparently, they knew each other from Brown? though Mallon is much older, but his reaction to my use of the book I found alarming and a form of censorship to no effect, fortunately. I rely on _Reality Hunger_ in a new essay coming on October 4 via Fictionistas and I'll repost it in some way on my Substack site. The "borderland between reality and imagination" is what Shields is indeed exploring. I'll never give up on fiction--and I don't think Shields is either. He raised the bar along with all those he quotes to do this. On another note from this fine essay, W.G. Sebold's _Austerlitz_ was a bolt of lightning for me "out of the clear blue sky" you mention. We should be in conversation. Thank you for subscribing: That's how I found you and damn glad I did. xo Mary
Hi Mary, I really appreciate it! Let's be in conversation! Look forward to the Fictionistas piece and to continuing to read your work. This kind of interaction - meeting other writers - is exactly what drew me to the Substack idea in the first place. Please keep in touch! - Sam
So, glad. I'll send you a link for that via email. It goes up October 4. xo Mary
Thinking today about Roberto Bolano and how his 6626 while I wasnot strong enough to have a face for all the maqulera dead he totes up in there . He left me room enough to keep pointing my attention in the border direction? The other notefromme is to remind us that if somebody welove needs to be filmed? To help monetize them? There is that method of Adam Curtis's.
what?
Have you just never heard of Javier Cercas? Or are his "non-fiction novels" just somehow different from what you discuss here? I found them rooted in the same idea as the first book to use that designation, In Cold Blood, but significantly less afraid to place a viewpoint in the author.
Dasa Drndic, Maria Stepanova with In Memory of Memory, and Stefan Hertmans' War and Turpentine and The Ascent also fiddle and manipulate the standard repertoire of both autofiction and memoir as well as narrative nonfiction to confuse their formal truth status while holding narrative as the highest good.
I've never heard of Javier Cercas! Will try to check him out. There's lots and lots of stuff I've never read!
For Cercas I recommend Soldiers of Salamis or the Imposter to start, although Anatomy of a Moment may be most up your alley in terms of the degree to which it enacts yet tweaks reality.