Fiction in Documentary Film

Fiction in Documentary Film explores the use of fictional elements in contemporary documentaries about personal trauma.

Bruce Eadie argues that the documentary-making process can be a dynamic, therapeutic process which bears comparison to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Traumas rooted in the past are reactivated in on-screen relationships and fictions bring representational content to otherwise unrepresented aspects of traumatic experience. With reference to Freud, Winnicott, Bion and especially post-Lacanian French psychoanalytic thinkers, Eadie emphasises the theatrical, enacted, bodily and affective aspects of trauma and documentary. The book includes detailed case studies of The Act of Killing (2012) and The Blonds (2003).

Fiction in Documentary Film will be of great interest to academics and students of film, media and television, trauma and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, as well as those interested in the application psychoanalytic ideas both inside and outside the clinic.