Unexpected findings and documentaries

Abstract

This paper proposes a comparison between recent attempts at a recalibration of the term “documentary” that have been consistently identified as the most relevant: Noël Carroll’s Gricean proposal, with its radical substitution of the term “documentary” by the more accurate notion of “presumptive assertion film” , Gregory Currie’s more essentialistic approach based upon the distinction between “testimony” and “trace” (adapted from Kendall Walton) added to the spectator’s awareness of the causal flow of meaning from the image / trace to the narrative, and Carl Plantinga’s non-definitional account that sees documentaries as proposing “asserted veridical representations”. This text proposes a panoramic view of all three accounts, a summary of their respective shortcomings and, briefly, a way to compile their insights into a workable explanation.