Il documentario e la sua condizione necessaria: l’effetto autenticità

It is generally agreed that documentary never moves away from the factual. Indeed, when one watches a documentary, one expects that the content does not fail to refer to reality (Friend, 2012). Standard accounts interpret this relation as the intended function to persuade the viewer that what they see is true, intending the function as necessary for membership in that kind. Nevertheless, the same function might be possessed by other kinds, such as scientific papers, photographic portraits, or even paintings. Thomasson (2014) claims that for many artifact kinds, having a particular intended function is not necessary for membership in those kinds, nor it is sufficient. Other features are required for classification, such as perceptual, structural, aesthetic, and normative. Moreover, in documentary filmmaking, the involvement of purposes other than the epistemic, such as artistic and financial purposes, raises questions regarding the feasibility of a notion of truth in the sense of correspondence. Indeed, although it is agreed that documentary is intended to refer, metaphoric contents and the use of rhetorical devices challenge views underpinned by the mimetic principle. In this respect, several works collectively recognized as documentary by the intended context, namely the collection of individuals and organizations forming the cinema-world, count as refutation for standard theories. For example, “You Have No Idea How Much I Love You” is an awarded Polish documentary film featuring two actresses and one actual psychotherapist improvising a psychoanalytic session, inspired by an actual one. According to standard theories, it could be defined as fictional work, despite the collective recognition of the documentary community. Since privacy norms forbid filming of an actual psychoanalytic session, the author has resorted to the improvised performance of two actresses, sharing the experience with the actual patients, and the intended audience has accepted the work as documentary. In my view, documentary refers to reality, however the character of the relation is neither determined by the intended assertive function alone, nor underpinned by the mimetic principle, rather it is marked by the phenomenal character of the filmmaker’s experience with reality. The essay shows that the necessary feature of documentary is what I call ‘the authenticity effect’, the perception that documentary is a proxy of the filmmaker’s experience, determining the viewers’ belief that the content of the work is true. The author commits with non-amenability of the external world and interprets reality by means of subjective modes of representation. Interviews, archive material, re-enactments, observational footage are elements enabling the filmmaker to represent actuality without violating its structural non-amenability. The Authenticity Effect can be formulated as “transparency squared plus the Non-Amenability Constraint” (AE=T^2+NAC). The non-amenable character of reality, which the author is committed to, shines through the transparency of the filmic image and implies the truth of the work. However, whereas reference to the real is justified, truth of the work is not, thus authenticity of documentary is an illusion. My approach presents two main advantages. First, it warrants the assertibility of documentary without resorting to a semantic notion of truth, hence it accommodates artistic purposes. Second, it accounts for the transformations within the genre.