Fiction in Documentary Film

Bruce Eadie spent much of his career in television, making documentary films on challenging subjects often involving state-sanctioned violence, from forced sterilisation, to the death penalty, to French complicity in the Holocaust. In 1996, he won an EMMY for his film Nuremberg on the Nuremberg Trials. In recent years, he has returned to academic work, writing about museum cultures and documentary film. He is the film section editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

“This is a vital and important work. Facing traumatic experiences directly is often unbearable, and sometimes must be approached sideways, through fiction. In Fiction in documentary film, Bruce Eadie offers a sensitive and wide-ranging psychoanalytic interrogation of the way fiction and nonfiction intertwine in recent documentary films to make the representation and working-through of personal and historical trauma possible. This incisive and humane book challenges simplistic renderings of trauma, demonstrating the complexity of human struggles as they appear in film, fiction and ‘real’ lives.”Stephen Frosh, author of Those Who Come After and How to be Real. Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London.“Fiction in documentary film: a psychoanalytic exploration is a highly original contribution to documentary studies. Drawing on Shakespeare’s device of the play-within-the-play, Eadie argues that fiction sequences in documentary films about trauma can reveal truths that more conventional documentary devices cannot reveal. Referring to a very wide range of psychoanalytical material, and an equally wide range of writing on documentary film, Eadie demonstrates the role that can be played by fictional elements in documentary. Through his close analysis of key films, and drawing on a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma and affect, he presents a very significant new way of thinking about documentary’s “fictionings” and about the role of such fictionings as a therapeutic tool.”Elizabeth Cowie, Professor Emeritus, Film Studies at the University of Kent

• Series prefaceAbout this bookAcknowledgementsPreludeIntroduction1. Models for the film-within-the-film and interpretive framework2. The fictionality of fiction and the non-fictionality of non-fiction 3. The peculiar case of trauma and the demand for fiction 4. Cinéma vérité as filmo-therapy and autobiographical filmmaking as self-analysis5. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) ‘the play’s the thing’: Third-person documentary or documentary-making as analytic encounter6. Albertina Carri’s The Blonds (2003) ‘(like an outsider)’: First-person documentary or documentary-making as self-analysisConclusionList of works citedList of films citedIndex