‘Documentary Filmmaking in the Postmodern Age: Errol Morris & The Fog of Truth ’

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine the contemporary Western crisis of realist documentary through the lens of Errol Morris's filmmaking style. The recent widespread popularity of Morris's nonfiction films has in fact signaled a seemingly new trend within documentary filmmaking in the US. Taking Morris's Academy Award-winning ‘The Fog of War’ (2003) as a paradigmatic example of American postmodern documentary films pitched to a mass audience, this piece explores the concepts of “historical narrative” and “documentary truth” against a background of diminished public confidence in the “objectivity” of the camera. What has been the impact of the academic critique of realism on the evidential power of documentary filmmaking? How has the postmodern attack on historicism operated to subvert the ways in which documentary form is now conceived? More specifically, in what ways does ‘The Fog of War’ address the impasse that the ‘metanarrative’ of history has reached at the turn of the twentieth-first century? What m...

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