Rethinking documentaries

The very first movies were, in their way, documentaries: snippets that showed the trot of a horse, a smoke-belching train pulling into a station or Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession. But the paths of fiction and non-fiction film soon diverged, and they remain distinct today, each with separate standards and expectations and consigned to separate categories at festivals and for awards.

But documentary filmmakers, chafing at those rules, eager to broaden the variety of tools at their disposal and hoping to tell their stories to a wider audience, have been pushing at the boundaries of their genre. The traditional ‘‘A-roll, B-roll, talking heads’’ paradigm, influenced by journalism, is increasingly being challenged by experiments in which all of the standard features of the traditional documentary — like voice-over and music cues — are being mutated and devices from the world of fiction embraced.

‘‘It almost feels wrong to call the films that are coming out now documentaries,’’ said Richard Rowley, director of the Oscar-nominated Dirty Wars, which used film-noir techniques. ‘‘It sounds like we are stenographers, filing away records for future generations to see what life was like here, not storytellers. But there’s a huge body of docs being produced now that are as immersive and transformational as a well-constructed fiction film.’’

There were indications of that approach in this year’s Oscar race, in which one of the nominees was The Act of Killing, a documentary about mass slaughter in Indonesia that relied heavily on re-enactments by members of death squads that committed the crimes. But it is even more evident in a crop of recent documentaries that includes The Missing Picture, a memoir of genocide in Cambodia, and Manakamana, which takes place entirely in a single cable car in Nepal.

In many ways, The Missing Picture, which last spring won the top prize in the Cannes festival’s Un Certain Regard competition for ‘‘original and different’’ work and was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language category, is a hybrid. An autobiographical account of the genocide the Khmer Rouge inflicted on Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, the film is directed by a survivor, Rithy Panh, and uses unusual techniques.

Confronted with the absence of family records and the relative paucity of official documents, Panh, 49, had to search hard to find substitutes. He ended up using clay figures set in dioramas and mixed in whatever grainy archival footage he could find, along with Khmer Rouge songs and speeches, dream and fantasy sequences, and a haunting original score, topping all that off with a hallucinatory, poetic, French language narration.

‘‘I’m not really very concerned when I’m starting a film whether it will be documentary or fiction,’’ he said in an interview late last year. ‘‘You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.’’

That creative restlessness and struggle with form also explicitly power Art of the Real, a documentary festival the Film Society of Lincoln Centre in New York City will be holding next month. ‘‘The documentary as we have come to know it, especially in the United States, emphasises content over form, information over aesthetics,’’ the festival’s programme note says, adding that there is consequently a need ‘‘for the documentary to be reconsidered as art”.

Festival offerings include Who Is Dayani Cristal?, which uses two contrasting techniques to examine the problem of immigrants dying in the Arizona desert as they try to enter the United States illegally.

Though more and more common, re-enactments remain a controversial tool, with the recent Oscars illustrating that point. The Missing Picture received a nomination for best foreign-language film, but it did not even make the shortlist in the documentary category, and, in the clearest sign of internal divisions among documentary filmmakers, Sarah Polley’s much-praised and innovative Stories We Tell failed to get a nomination.

That film, in which Polley examined a question of paternity in her own family, was the only documentary to be nominated for both Writers Guild and Directors Guild awards, winning the writers’ award. But members of the Academy’s documentary branch apparently balked at rewarding her for blending home movies with what she called ‘‘re-created’’ footage.

One increasingly important centre of innovation and experimentation with form is Harvard University. Three of the directors of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries studied at the film programme there, and the university’s Sensory Ethnography Lab has been the source of groundbreaking films like Leviathan and Manakamana.

In Leviathan, cameras normally used in extreme sports were strapped to fishermen as they worked on the high seas, producing a visceral, disquieting and sometimes abstract experience. On the other hand, Manakamana brings to mind one of Andy Warhol’s audition films.

Shot with a single 16-mm camera mounted inside a cable car carrying pilgrims back and forth to a Hindu shrine in the mountains of Nepal, Manakamana has no voice-over and, for the first 20 minutes, no dialogue at all. Instead, in a series of 10-minute episodes, it observes the passengers as they talk to one another, react to the scenery, play musical instruments or, in one wryly amusing episode featuring a well-dressed woman and another who appears to be her servant, try to eat ice cream before it melts.

“So much of documentary film is meant to inform, educate or explain,” said Pacho Velez, co-director of Manakamana. “I totally want the audience to identify with the characters and be invested with what happens to them, and if that’s entertainment, well, then we’re entertaining people.”