The reel claiming the real: An actornetwork approach to understanding the achievement and management of documentary authority and authenticity

The last fifteen years have witnessed the widespread adoption of the realist style of film-making, traditionally the reserve of the documentary film on news broadcasting. As a result, it has become more difficult for a documentary to function as an objective, authentic representation of reality. In other words, the ‘real’ appears to be slipping away from the documentary ‘reel’. In this article, we examine how documentary films maintain their authoritative claim of the ‘real’ now that the monopoly of the realist style has been lost. We argue that the management of the production process has become crucial for any documentary claim of authenticity and verisimilitude. The production process has become a site of intense negotiation between the different actors involved, ranging from the director, producers and protagonists to the technological equipment itself. Using actor network theory, we flesh out this decentred vision of the production process of documentary film and subsequently illustrate how documentary authority is constructed, negotiated and contested, with excerpts from a set of 35 interviews with documentary-makers.