Docummunity and the disruptive potential of collaborative documentary filmmaking

In 2010, two American films were released that were as interesting for the ways in which they questioned the formal status of the documentary as a vehicle for representations of the 'real' as they were about the subject matter portrayed within them. Directed by Casey Affleck and co-written by Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix, who is also the ostensible 'subject' of the documentary, I'm Still Here (2010) was presented to the world as a chronicle of the downward spiral of Phoenix as he attempted to throw in his celebrity towel as an actor and embark on a new career as a hip-hop artist. Despite initial claims from Affleck that the film was 'not a hoax', a claim that garnered support from Phoenix's strange public performances in the year leading up to the film's release, Affleck later went on to admit that in fact the so-called documentary was actually a work of fiction masquerading as a document of real events. In contrast, the makers of Rogue Pictures' Catfish (2010), brothers Yaniv and Ariel Shulman and Ariel's filmmaking partner, Henry Joost, maintain that their film is an authentic documentation of Nev's experiences when he discovered that the online relationship he had been pursuing for nearly a year was not quite what it seemed, despite the ongoing (and sometimes legitimate) questions that have been raised about the 'truth' status of the film. What the reception of both of these films articulates is an ongoing uncertainty, in the public imagination at least, about the delineation between fiction films and documentaries. This is, of course, a question that has occupied scholars of visual representation for some time. And yet, as the debates over the authenticity of the films described above attest, the desire for an answer to the question of decidability in relation to what is 'real' and what is 'not real' remains strong. If anything, the widespread theoretical acceptance of the textuality of filmic productions seems to have spawned an excess of public interest in the real if the growth of reality television and the expansion of documentary production and consumption in the past two decades is anything to go by. We now fetishize the question of the real to such an extent that the realness of a representation is of as much concern to us as viewers, as the thing represented. That said, is it, or for that matter has it ever been, the function of documentaries to document 'the real'? The answer to this question is critical to an understanding of how the documentary format may evolve in networked digital environments.