How to Mediate Reality: Thinking Documentary Film with Adorno and Horkheimer

When Robert Kramer wrote, in 1991, that “[p] ower is the possibility to define what is real,”1 he was referring to the complex political and ideological potency of documentary formats. A documentary filmmaker himself, he was well aware of the political element of perception and the persuasive force of films claiming to address reality directly. And indeed, documentaries, especially those that are transmitted through official channels, are commonly considered as serious, trustworthy productions. Allegedly based on facts, they are supposed to document, explain, reveal that which matters in the actual state of the world – the real world, the one that we share with those that appear in the films and in which “issues of life and death are always at hand,” as Bill Nichols puts it (Nichols 1991: 109). Therein lies the additional value and characteristic seriousness of documentary. And therein also lies its assumed authority: its direct association with the factual world grants it with a specific credibility