Research

video art and film between documentary and fiction

One-day Symposium Wednesday 9 June 2010 10.30-6pm Grimond Lecture Theatre 3 and Aphra Theatre

Speakers: Irit Rogoff (Goldsmith’s) and Jon Dovey (U. of West of England)

Panels with artists and academics: Adam Chodzko, Brian Dillon, Jeremy Millar, Lauren Wright, Sarah Turner, Elizabeth Cowie and Michael Newall.

The symposium addresses video and installation art that engages the social through combining techniques of documentary and fiction. In this context it also examines participation and reflexivity – approaches that are often important to such art. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is one which emerged primarily in relation to literature and to journalism. However it was with the development of photography and later cinema that a specifically documentary project emerged, and which developed as a film-making practice in the 1920s and 1930s not only of social scientists, such as John Grierson, but also of artist film-makers, Hans Richter, Germaine Dulac, Joris Ivens, Humphrey Jennings, Luis Buñuel. It was a project influenced by both abstract art and surrealism and that reappears within conceptual art. But while many contemporary artists have a moving image practice where works ‘move between reality and fiction’ – indeed it is an oscillation that is now something of a cliché, which we as viewers can easily decode – this symposium addresses the question of why in an art work these transitions occur at a particular point in its temporal organisation. It asks: why, at particular moments in a work, does a document of the real become excessive such that it seeks a correcting truth of fiction as a ‘surreality’, or alternatively, why and when does a fictional work deploy the truth of documentary?

I have been researching information on documentaries, especially within art, to guide me through this medium which is new to me. I found the short text above from 2010 which was a talk at Kent University about video art and film between documentary and fiction. Although the passage has not given too much away it has made me think about vital points such as, at what point does a documentary become a documentary and not fiction?

I feel as if I need to create all relevant and truthful information and facts to create my documentary and to justify it as a true documentary and I need to use real sources, for example people who know what they are talking about.