Documentaries Defined
The word ‘documentary’ is defined as “a film or television programme that provides a factual report on a particular subject.” This doesn’t seem to totally encapsulate the word’s meaning, though.
The presentations of realism in fiction and in documentaries do somewhat differ: while audiences tend to accept whatever fiction presents as the story to be real in that world, documentaries strive to meet those expectations of reality; the narratives in fiction films tend to be made-up by the screenwriters, whereas we would expect documentaries to be wholly based on reality. However, the differences aren’t so black-and-white.
Bill Nichols’ ‘Everything Is A Documentary’ theory claimed that, in a sense, all films are documentaries: even the most fantastical fiction reflects some sort of reality. Nichols’ divided ‘documentaries’ into two categories: wish fulfilment (fiction films like Star Wars) and social representation (the stereotypical documentary). The boundaries between these two categories are flexible.
It’s difficult to truly differentiate between fiction and documentaries because documentaries often feature acted-out reenactments of situations, and fiction can often be based very accurately off of source material. There does not need to be a boundary here, and we’re perhaps better looking at it like a scale going from fiction to ‘pure’ documentary, with no line drawn in-between.