Stretching Out the Canvas

CONFLATING NONFICTION AND REALISM IN FILM MAY BE UNDERSTANDABLE, but it’s as much of a historical and cultural conjoining as it is a formal or practical one. Before the advent of portable sync sound in the late 1950s and early ’60s, recording spontaneous audio coterminous with observed imagery wasn’t possible. What that meant was that half the presentation of documentary was expressive or editorial in nature—not the domain of dramatic realism. But it hasn’t stopped us, in the decades since, from equating style with truth, from considering footage captured and presented in a realistic fashion as more legitimately nonfiction. Such assumptions don’t hold up when a longer history of art and documentation come into consideration.