I remember the feeling of radical displacement, and the aimless, homeless feeling that I couldn't seem to shake. These people are not actors. The only drama in a documentary comes from the fact that the viewer knows that the people on camera know they are being filmed. The camera intrudes, but talented documentary film-makers seem to be able to work past this limit. The drama is derived from the film-maker's attempt to solve the obvious problem.
Great documentaries are ones where the camera no longer seems to be turning.
The people enter your living room. They are your neighbors and friends, and they speak to you with a familiarity that convinces. Aesthetic distance functions in fiction to create a separate world, inhabited by uncontroversially fictional characters. Documentary film creates a world, but the lingering effect of that creation is a realization that the world created is, in fact, the world where we live. Metaphor I read a very interesting essay by my friend Scott Olsen last week.