Studies in Documentary Film

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Textualism, extratextualism, and the fiction/

nonfiction distinction in documentary studies

Mario Slugan

To cite this article: Mario Slugan (2021): Textualism, extratextualism, and the fiction/
nonfiction distinction in documentary studies, Studies in Documentary Film, DOI:
10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142

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STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142

Textualism, extratextualism, and the fiction/nonfiction

distinction in documentary studies
Mario Slugan
Department of Film Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article critiques existing textualist and extratextualist Received 12 October 2020
(intentionalist and reception-driven) approaches to capturing the Accepted 26 April 2021
ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in
KEYWORDS
philosophical and film scholarship on documentary and offers an Textual features; intention;
alternative extratextualist approach dubbed institutionalism. I argue reception; institutionalism;
that textualist attempts fail because no textual element make-believe
(presentational strategy, misrepresentation, staging, or indexicality) is
necessarily either fictive or nonfictive. Intentionalism falls short
because films can change their non/fictional status over time (e.g.
phantom rides). Finally, reception-driven approaches confuse
personal categorizations for public ones. The proposed
institutionalism, by contrast, combines the strengths of moderate
textualism and reception-driven theories (allowing for the changing
status of documentary and nonfiction) with those of intentionalism
(denying that some textual elements are necessarily fictive and
others nonfictive) to capture the ordinary understanding of the
fiction/nonfiction distinction.

Introduction
Documentary film scholars generally agree that the distinction between nonfiction and
fiction is a matter of degree rather than some firm boundary. When focusing specifically
on documentaries, understood as a subclass of nonfictions in the first instance, it is also
common to say that documentaries regularly include fictive elements and exist ‘along a
fact – fictional continuum, each text constructing relationships with both factual and
fictional discourses’ (Roscoe and Hight 2001, 7).1 I propose to call these approaches tex-
tualist, insofar it is the presentational strategies and/or the content that constitute fictive
elements. Looking at some key accounts from this tradition, I argue that standard
examples of these elements – discursive forms, misrepresentation, staging and re-enact-
ment – are misplaced and that the boundary between documentary and fiction is much
less porous than assumed. To outline this border more precisely, I build on alternative
extratextualist (intentionalist and reception-driven) approaches and offer an

CONTACT Mario Slugan m.slugan@qmul.ac.uk

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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2 M. SLUGAN

extratextualist variant – an institutionalist approach which combines lessons from docu-

mentary studies and analytic philosophy.
When it comes to text, I understand presentational strategies to include mise-en-
scène, editing, camera, sound and syuzhet. Content I construe as what is represented
and made through these presentational strategies. Most importantly for us, this includes
the image and audio track, profilmic, fabula and assertions. Moreover, although I espouse
the neoformalist view that fabula is not in the text, but a spectatorial mental construct, in
this framework fabula is still a textual feature because it cannot exist without a text. Simi-
larly, reference, meaning and truth value as parts of making assertions are all mental
phenomena as well because they demand an agent interpreting signs which bear
content of these assertions. But they again remain textual features under this framework
because the text is necessary to mentally construct the relevant reference, meaning and
truth value.
Before proceeding, I also wish to emphasize that I am not interested in semantic poli-
cing but in the ordinary (narrow) understanding of fiction/nonfiction distinction. Lies,
falsehoods and deceptions are all legitimately called fictions in ordinary language. It is
perfectly proper to label Brexiteers’ claims that the weekly £350 m sent to Brussels will
be spent on NHS instead as fictions. Yet this broad sense of fiction is easily distinguish-
able from the narrow (no less ordinary) one where, for example, superhero movies are
fictions and family home videos are not. Narrowly construed, then, Brexiteers’ claims
are lies and not fictions. It is in this narrow sense that the fiction/nonfiction distinction
is understood here. Crucially, I argue that scholars interested in documentary should
focus on this narrow understanding of the distinction rather than the broad one.

Textualism
Perhaps the most radical example of the textualist approach in documentary theory is
Michael Renov who has argued that ‘all discursive forms – documentary included –
are, if not fictional, at least fictive, this by virtue of their tropic character (their recourse
to tropes or rhetorical figures)’ (1993, 7). They include: ‘character “construction”; poetic
language; emotionalizing narration or musical accompaniment; “embedded” narratives;
dramatic arcs; the exaggeration of camera angles, camera distance, or editing rhythms’
(1993, 198). Renov’s definition of fictive elements in terms of discursive (presentational)
strategies is far removed from both broad and narrow ordinary understanding of fiction.
Rephrasing a factual statement ‘Unfortunately, I missed my train’ into (poor) poetic
language ‘I missed the train/what a shame!’ does not introduce any fictive elements in
the ordinary sense. A presidential debate shot with cameras positioned at eye-line level
does not become fictive if low angles are used instead either. This does not deny that,
as Renov himself points out, ‘documentary has availed itself of nearly every constructive
device known to fiction (of course, the reverse is equally true)’ (1993, 7).2 Rather, it
means that presentational strategies are neither fictive nor nonfictive on their own.
According to a more moderate account by another key documentary theorist, it is the
specific textual features such as the degree of fabrication in content that constitute fiction
rather than discursivity in general: ‘The division of documentary from fiction, like the
division of historiography from fiction, rests on the degree to which the story fundamen-
tally corresponds to actual situations, events and people versus the degree to which it is
 STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM 3

primarily a product of the filmmaker’s invention’ (Nichols 2017, 8–9). For instance,
whether we treat Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) as documentary or
fiction, Nichols claims, rests on whether it is ‘a plausible representation of Inuit life
[or] Flaherty’s distinct vision of it’ (Nichols 2017, 9). But Flaherty taking liberties with
the facts does not mean he introduces any fictive elements. These liberties only point
to a (deliberate) misrepresentation of Inuit life. To flesh this out, consider Bowling for
Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) where Moore uses editing to misrepresent how
little time it takes to buy a gun. The misrepresentation is not a fictive element. Rather,
this misrepresentation (and others like it) reveals that the documentary which presented
itself as a plausible representation fails to be truthful under closer scrutiny. In other
words, Flaherty’s distinct version of Innuit life is not something apart from its plausible
representation but is precisely what is presented as the plausible representation (although
this plausible representation is in fact a misrepresentation). In another variant of Nichols’
vocabulary, Flaherty is not presenting us with a world, but still with the world – he is just
misrepresenting it. Much like with the Brexiteer slogan, misrepresentation (deliberate or
otherwise) does not constitute fiction, nor does it introduce fictive elements. In short,
textual features alone (presentational strategies and content) cannot determine
whether something is fiction or not.
Another specific textual element often deemed to be fictive in documentary context is
staging. Take, for instance, Springer and Rhodes’s introduction to a volume on
docufictions:
For the authors in this collection, these intersections begin literally at the beginning of the
cinema, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Blacksmith Scene (1893), Edison and
Dickson’s first publicly exhibited film, purports to show exactly that: three blacksmiths
working and enjoying a beer. But of course the men captured on film were not professional
blacksmiths but Edison employees, and the film was staged and shot at the Edison labora-
tory. (2005, 6)

Here staging is meant both as manipulation of mise-en-scène and deception. Undeni-

ably, the Blacksmith Scene was not recorded at the blacksmith’s but in Edison’s Black
Maria studio with a specific set design, props, lighting, character placement, work chor-
eography, etc. in place. However, since the manipulation of the mise-en-scène is a discur-
sive trope in Renov’s sense, it does not necessarily entail any fictive elements. Much like a
presidential debate does not turn fictional simply because it includes a complex mise-en-
scène of lighting, candidate placement, speaking rules, set design, etc. in front of a camera
so is a recorded wielding and hitting of hammers and passing the bottle not fictional
simply because it was staged in this sense. Matters do not change even when it turns
out that the protagonists using these tools and enjoying a drink are not blacksmiths
but actors. Precisely like with the Nanook example, then we are merely dealing with a
(deliberate) misrepresentation. In other words, Blacksmith Scene remains nonfictional
even in its deceptive aspects.
Staging can also be understood as re-enactment. Because of the extensive use of re-
enactments, The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012) – a documentary in which
perpetrators of Indonesian Killings of 1955–1956 re-enact their crimes – is regularly
cited as a mixture of nonfiction and fiction. As Nichols puts it:
4 M. SLUGAN

Usually, documentaries embed reenactments as acknowledged reconstructions (fictional

representations) of historical but originally unfilmed events within a larger context of
nonfiction representation. But this need not be the case, as The Act of Killing amply demon-
strates in a befuddling, disturbing, and illuminating manner. […] Befuddlement arises when
a clear distinction between fictional and documentary representation fails to materialize.
(Nichols 2013, 25)

Here Nichols treats re-enactments as fictional representations. But this cannot be the
case for a couple of reasons. The first is that whether something is a re-enactment is a
textual feature and as such is neither necessarily fictive nor necessarily nonfictive. Fur-
thermore, Nichols understands re-enactment as a recorded staged representation of a
previous event. Yet recorded staged representation can easily be nonfictional. For
example, I want to relate to my friends the latest claims made by Donald Trump
during a presidential debate. In the first version, in an email I send to my friends I
write down what Trump said. To the best of my recollection this is a reasonable recon-
struction of the event and as such a nonfictional propositional representation of the same.
In the second version, I re-enact Trump’s speech i.e. stage its performance through mise-
en-scène. I grab a make-shift podium, put on a wig, stand in front of my friends, and say
Trump’s lines. This time it is a staged representation, but nonfictional, nevertheless
because again it is presented as a plausible reconstruction. The representation remains
nonfictional in the final version as well where I record the re-enactment and send it to
my friends via Facebook. In fact, as the discussion of Nanook of the North and Blacksmith
Scene reveals, I could also be completely misrepresenting what Trump said but this would
only make the re-enactment a deliberate misrepresentation and not fiction.
Furthermore, most of the re-enactments in The Act of Killing cannot be fictions either
precisely because they are presented as veridical accounts of the killings i.e. plausible rep-
resentations in Nichols’ vocabulary. For instance, Anwar, one of the main perpetrators,
restages in detail how he used metal wire to ‘optimize’ the executions. The audiences are
supposed to either confirm the plausibility of these representations by believing in them
(in line with official Indonesian history) or deny them (from a critical humanist stand-
point). Undeniably, the re-enactments are repeatedly misrepresented as a heroic act
and as such certainly entail blatant fabrications, but they nevertheless make a claim to
how things happened. It is also true that other re-enactments in the film are often
highly stylized using visual tropes from gangster films, among others. But again, as the
discussion of discursivity has demonstrated, these are textual features which cannot
determine on their own whether something is fiction or not.
The last textualist feature I wish to address is indexicality. Unlike the preceding ones,
indexicality is a standard marker of nonfiction. The most recent iterations of this view
allow for non-indexical documentaries like animated ones (Nichols 2017, 12).3 But
they do purport that if there is an indexical link between the image and its relevant
content, then we are dealing with a documentary (Nichols 2017, 24–28). Phrased in ana-
lytic philosophy parlance, indexicality is a sufficient but not necessary condition for
documentary. The problem, I propose, is that indexicality standardly understood does
not even extend to most non-animated documentaries and nonfictions, analogue and
digital alike.
Since Peter Wollen (1969), indexicality has generally denoted an automatic causal link
and some form of contact between the photograph and its object. Much like a pawprint is
 STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM 5

an index of a dog imprinted through its weight so is a photograph of Sun an index of Sun
imprinted through its light. But what holds for photographs of light-emitting objects like
Sun does not hold for a much broader class of objects including dogs (and typical subjects
of documentaries) which only reflect light. In other words, while in the case of the paw-
print dog is in direct contact with the sand, in the case of the photograph the dog is not
the source of light but an object against which the light bounces off. This means there is
merely indirect contact between the photograph and the dog via light. Things get even
further removed once it is recognized that audiences virtually never watch the original
negative print of a given documentary film. In the case of analogue films, the screened
print would have gone through at least one photographic printing where a new source
of light is shone through the original. In this step, even the indirect contact where the
relevant light touched both the object and the photograph is lost. (In digital cinema,
copying does not even involve the image but its representation in the form of binary
voltage states). Put succinctly, even if original negatives are indices of objects further
prints are not (Slugan 2017).4
This is not to deny that there is a heuristic value to using textual features in distinguishing
fiction and nonfiction. Keeping track of real-life people vs actors, naturalness vs staging,
everyday events vs fantastic stories, on-location shooting vs spectacular sets, live action vs
animation, trace vs CGI can go a long way. But it falls short as a more robust categorization
strategy. Films and TV shows like This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Rainer, 1984) and Parks and
Recreation (NBC 2009–2015) make extensive use of documentary aesthetics but are
fictions, nonetheless (Roscoe and Hight 2001). Conversely, as Annabelle Honess Roe
(2013) has argued, despite animation’s traditional association with fiction film there are
numerous animated documentaries, including The Sinking of the Lusitania (Winsor
McCay, 1912) and Tower (Keith Maitland, 2016). It is even possible to conceive a nonfiction
film indistinguishable from A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) and a fiction empiri-
cally identical to The Arrival of a Train (Lumière brothers, 1895). In the first case, the film – A
Recording of a Trip to the Moon – is a single-take documentary recording of one particular
screening of Méliès’ film. In the other example, a gallery projects the Lumière brothers’ film
as The Arrival of a Train in Freedonia instructing visitors to make-believe train pulling into a
train station of an imaginary country resembling France c.1900.

Intentionalism
Given that textualist accounts produce too many counterexamples I propose taking an
extratextualist stance. This is usually the route taken by analytic philosophers interested
in film. Most notably, Noël Carroll (1997) has proposed that documentaries are films of
presumptive assertion while Carl Plantinga (2005) has defined them as asserted veridical
representations. Crucial for both are the authorial intentions:
[In the film of presumptive assertion] the filmmaker intends that the audience entertain the
propositional content of his film in thought as asserted. (Carroll 1997, 186)

When a filmmaker presents a film as a documentary, he or she not only intends that the
audience come to form certain beliefs, but also […] that the use of motion pictures and
recorded sounds offer an audiovisual array that communicates some phenomenological
aspect of the subject, from which the spectator might reasonably be expected to form a
6 M. SLUGAN

sense of that phenomenological aspect and/or form true beliefs about that subject.
(Plantinga 2005, 111)

For Carroll and Plantinga, then, films are documentaries if their authors intend them
to be seen as making truth claims about what is represented. Importantly, although the
two can coincide, the intentions in question are not what audiences infer from the film
(textual features), but what the authors actually had in mind when producing the film
(extratextual traits). The trouble with intentionalism is that it does not allow for films
originally intended as nonfictions which are now treated as fictions (Slugan 2019a,
170–173).
If we take producers’ promotional strategies as revealing the intentions behind
filmmaking, then we must concede that there are films like The Great Train Robbery
(Edwin S. Porter, 1903) and Tracked by Bloodhounds (Selig Poliscope Company, 1904)
which were originally promoted and intended as veridical representations but today
count as fictions (Slugan 2019b). Consider their contemporary advertisements:
[The Great Train Robbery] has been posed and acted in faithful imitation of the genuine
‘Hold Ups’ made famous by various outlaw bands in the West (Edison Film Catalogue,
1903, no. 201)

Tracked by Bloodhounds Or

A Lynching at Cripple Creek

NEGATIVE ACTUALLY MADE AT COLORADO’S GREAT GOLD CAMP AND OF

ACTUAL OCCURRENCE. (Selig Polyscope Company Catalogue, ‘Tracked by Blood-
hounds’, Supplement 17, 1905, 1)

Whereas The Great Train Robbery is admittedly presented more as an illustration or a

re-enactment of how a hold-up looks like rather than a reproduction of a specific one,
Tracked by Bloodhounds is claimed to be an actual recording of a specific genuine
event. A more recent example of such intentions is, of course, The Blair Witch Project
(Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick, 1999). Given that all these films are currently under-
stood as fictions, extratextualist approaches based on intentions also fail to deliver a cri-
terion for distinguishing nonfiction from fiction ordinarily and narrowly construed.
Intentionalists could dig their heels in and still claim that it does not matter how we cat-
egorize things now i.e. that the current categorization is mistaken precisely because it
neglects original intentions. But a theoretical account should not simply define the dis-
tinction at will – the approach is only as good as it fits the ordinary understanding of what
it tries to explain.
This specific issue is not a problem for Nichols (2017) who explains that the under-
standing of documentary also changes over time through the influence of producers
and distributors, filmmakers, films and audiences. Producers and distributors
influence how the film is going to look like usually by exercising pressure to use existing
conventions. These may be subverted by filmmakers. Films which are initially outliers
may come to popularize new conventions. Audiences, finally, have expectations in line
with conventions. This resolves the problems plaguing intentionalists and proposes
one explanation of how films can change their non/fictional status over time. But
Nichols’ approach remains textualist because what matters most is the relationship of
 STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM 7

these four agents to changing textual conventions.5 John Ellis (2021), similarly, speaks of a
‘social constructionist approach’ but then goes on to focus on a range of textual features
including patterns of misrepresentation, editing, sound, camera and mise-en-scène to
explain ‘How Documentaries Mark Themselves from Fiction’. Such theories, therefore,
are still vulnerable to the textualist problems which motivated extratextualist solutions
in the first place because for them there will always be some textual element which is
deemed fictive or nonfictive at a given point in time. I, by contrast, argue that re-enact-
ments, for instance, were not necessarily fictions neither today nor around 1900. Indexi-
cality defined as automatic causal link and contact, similarly, covered only a very small
subset of nonfiction films from their first appearance until present day.

Reception-driven approaches
A different extratextualist approach heralded by some documentary scholars like Dirk
Eitzen (1995) and Vivian Sobchack (1999) proposes that it is spectatorial experience
that defines the status of a film:
On first viewing (for people who do not know the film’s secret), No Lies [Mitchell Block,
1973] is labeled as a documentary, perceived as a documentary, and interpreted as a docu-
mentary. For all intents and purposes, it is a documentary. (Eitzen 1995, 94)

One viewer’s fiction may be another’s film-souvenir; one viewer’s documentary, another’s
fiction. (Sobchack 1999, 253)

Put succinctly, if a viewer experiences a film as non/fiction, then it is non/fiction. The

strength of this view is that it also allows for historical change of non/fiction, but the
problem is that it falls afoul the ordinary understanding of these categories. It is true
that spectators can, say, view The Favourite (2019) as a nonfictional recording of what-
ever was in front of the camera during the shooting of Yorgos Lanthimos’ film. But
although the spectators may experience it as nonfiction, The Favourite is still ordinarily
understood as fiction. Reception-driven approaches simply replace ordinary public cat-
egorization with personal experience. But for categorization purposes the point is to
understand how public categories come to be understood as ordinary rather than
change the definition by fiat. Arguably, idiosyncratic film readings can bring about
change in the film’s categorization much like specific films can break conventions of
non/fiction and establish new ones. None of this, however, happens in isolation and
no single element is the defining one.

Institutionalism
My proposal – which I dub institutionalism – combines the strengths of moderate tex-
tualism and reception-driven theories (allowing for the changing status of documentary
and nonfiction) with those of intentionalism (denying that some textual elements are
necessarily fictive and others nonfictive) while eliminating their shortcomings.6 First,
borrowing from analytic philosophers, I argue that the distinction between nonfiction
and fiction is not a matter of making truth claims as opposed to deceiving, but a question
of whether audiences are supposed to imagine something or not. Second, building on the
documentary tradition, I propose that a non/fictional status of a film may change over
8 M. SLUGAN

time. Third, diverging from both the analytic and documentary tradition, I claim that it is
not the change in textual conventions or idiosyncratic readings that are crucial for this
temporal fluidity of a film’s non/fictional status, but the negotiation between the
agents of production, filmmaking, promotion, exhibition and reception on whether to
imagine something or not. I will address these points in turn.
I have already argued that the ordinary narrow understanding of fiction does not
include misrepresentation, deliberate or otherwise. But to gain a firmer grasp of the
non/fiction distinction we should also briefly conceptualize what fiction is. According
to a dominant current in analytic philosophy, fiction is construed as ‘mandated imagin-
ing’ (Walton 1990; Stock 2016).7
Imagining is an as if stance which may include actions (imagining swimming), objects
(imagining an orange), experiences (imagining hearing), propositions (imagining that p),
etc. Unlike competing accounts of fiction like ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, imagining
is not internally contradictory, because imaginings are voluntary. By contrast, it is
impossible to willingly stop not believing in something. If we do not believe that there
is a rock band Spinal Tap, we cannot will ourselves into suspending that disbelief any
more than we can wish ourselves into stopping not believing that Jeremy Corbyn is
the Prime Minister of the UK. At most, we can refrain from behaving according to
what we do not believe in. But abstaining from actions stemming from beliefs is distinct
from suspending the content of those beliefs. In other words, when engaging fictions, we
do not willingly suspend our disbelief about the content of representation but imagine
that content.
Furthermore, unlike ‘belief’ which is true or false, imagining is ‘mandated’ or not. We
can imagine both things that are true (Joe Biden as US President) and false (Hilary
Clinton as US President). But mandate means something else. That imagining is man-
dated entails that although one is always free to imagine anything, a work is fictional
only so long as everybody is supposed to imagine the same thing in engaging the work.
When watching This Is Spinal Tap I am free to imagine that I am a rock star but I am
not supposed to imagine it. What I am supposed to imagine is (among other things) a
five-group rock band Spinal Tap as is every other spectator. By contrast, with Bowling
for Columbine viewers are only supposed to believe what is represented, and not
imagine it.8
Arguably, audiences are also supposed to believe certain things in many fiction films
and supposed to imagine specific things in some nonfiction films. Historical dramas like
Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995) often pride themselves on accuracy and invite audiences
to believe a plethora of information provided there. But even if everything presented in
that film were true, the audiences are still supposed to imagine all those things on top of
believing them, sufficient to call even a hypothetical historically perfectly accurate Apollo
13 fiction.9
The case with nonfiction is somewhat different. When watching especially evocative
nonfictions like Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) it could be argued that audiences are
supposed not only to believe what is represented but also imagine (parts of) it. Next to
believing the testimonies of Holocaust survivors like, for instance, Filip Müller who
recounts burning gassed bodies in the incinerator, it makes sense to say that audiences
are also invited to imagine the bodies piled up ‘like stones’ he speaks of. Here, admittedly,
we are dealing with fuzzy borders between fiction and nonfiction but in a different and
 STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM 9

much more limited fashion from how the boundary is usually presented in documentary
theory. Where earlier radical textualism spoke of discursive tropes like staging which are
present in virtually all documentaries including Shoah and more moderate theory focuses
on the deceptive features of content which can be found in a range of documentaries, my
proposal focuses on what is supposed to be imagined on top of only believed and as such
identifies a much smaller subset of hybrid films. If Shoah is in this fuzzy category it is not
because Lanzmann regularly prearranged the mise-en-scène where survivors made their
testimonies (Abraham Bomba, another survivor who worked as a barber, for instance,
speaks while cutting his friend’s hair). Rather, it is because of the mandate to imagine.
In other words, although important, the mandate to believe does not define either
fiction or nonfiction. The mandate to believe is only a necessary but not a sufficient
trait of nonfiction.10 It is the mandate to imagine that defines fiction and the absence
of this mandate to imagine that defines nonfiction.
But who or what determines what the audiences are supposed to do i.e. where do these
mandates to believe or imagine come from? I have already argued that it is not to be
found either in textual features, authorial intentions, or individual reception. The first,
because nonfiction can use any elements usually associated with fiction and vice versa.
The second, since a film can cross the non/fiction boundary over time despite authorial
intentions behind it. The last because fiction and nonfiction are communal categories,
not individual experiences. Instead, the mandate is a product of a negotiation between
production, promotion, exhibition and reception factors. To flesh this out consider the
case of phantom rides – films shot with a camera positioned in front (and on some
occasions back) of a moving vehicle, most often a train, popular c.1900.
Nowadays, phantom rides are classified as nonfictional recordings of traversed vistas
(Abel 2005). However, if promotion and reception at the time of their original appear-
ance is consulted it becomes apparent that their contemporaries were not only expected
to but also did engage them by imagining themselves travelling through space at then
incredible speeds. Put in Walton’s terms, they constituted fictions because they mandated
specific imaginings.
Consider, for instance, the newspaper reports of one of the first phantom rides – The
Haverstraw Tunnel (Biograph, 1897) premiering in London in October 1897 – that Bio-
graph was only too happy to include in its later bulletins:
If you desire a novel experience go to the Palace Theatre any evening at a quarter to ten and
travel (in imagination) on the cow-catcher of the locomotive of a West Shore (American)
Express through the Haverstraw Tunnel. (quoted in Niver 1971, 35)

Hitherto the audience merely watched moving objects, but in this recent addition the onloo-
ker, by the aid of a little imagination, can fancy himself sitting an [sic] the bogie tracks of an
engine travelling at the rate of sixty-five miles an hour with the landscape simply dashing
towards him. (quoted in Niver 1971)

As we can see, the reports from Daily Chronicle and Music Hall regularly invite the
viewers to imagine themselves riding on the cowcatcher. Importantly, the migration of
reports from local newspapers to producer Biograph Bulletins also demonstrates the feed-
back loop between audience reception and promotion, constitutive of negotiating man-
dates. In this case, the press suggests to audiences certain types of imaginative
engagement which are picked up by the film producers and included in their future
10 M. SLUGAN

promotional material which further regulates audience engagement thus reinforcing the
mandate.
The negotiation between the reception and promotion of another Biograph film
appearing in March 1899 – Brooklyn Bridge – demonstrates how in a space of only a
few years these mandates could easily dissipate and how a film sharing the same key
textual features – the presentation of an image from in front of a rushing vehicle – no
longer mandated any imaginings:
The view starts with a swift rush down the incline from the station on the New York side,
shows the Brooklyn trolley cars in motion on either side and pedestrians passing back and
forth on the platform in the centre, then takes a plunge in the iron archway which covers the
tracks of the electric line for about two-thirds of the distance. […] After spinning through
the archway at an almost dizzy speed, the car suddenly rushed out […]. (quoted in Niver
1971, 42)

This picture bewildered the spectators last week, for people who have crossed the bridge one
hundred times have never hitherto realized the immensity of the structure. (quoted in Niver
1971.)

In the review from Mail and Express, it is not the spectator but the car (or, at most,
the view) that dives into the archway at incredible speed. For the Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter, it is not imaginary travel that confounds the spectator but the scale of the
bridge. Put differently, even if the film was initially intended as inviting imaginings
on par with The Haverstraw Tunnel, Biograph did not shy away from reports empha-
sizing the illustrative power of Brooklyn Bridge instead and again made them part of
their promotional strategy. In doing so, the mandates for imagining set up less than
two years prior were dismantled, securing the present-day categorization of phantom
rides as nonfiction.11
In lieu of conclusion, it is useful to compare this institutionalist approach to compet-
ing views, textualist and extratextualist alike. Under more radical textualism, the unique
and novel camera placement in phantom rides could be understood as a discursive trope
introducing fictive elements. For intentionalists the intentions behind The Haverstraw
Tunnel secure its fictional status. For reception-driven theorists each personal viewing
determines the film’s status anew. But in all cases, this contradicts the present-day
general understanding of phantom rides as nonfictions.
A more moderate textualism could explain how phantom rides migrated from
fiction into nonfiction by arguing, say, that the convention of camera placement
on a rapidly moving vehicle stopped being a marker of fictionality over time and
became a sign of nonfiction instead. According to the institutionalist framework pro-
posed here, by contrast, it is not whether some textual convention is assigned to
fiction or nonfiction that is crucial but negotiating whether the whole film should
be engaged primarily as a veridical representation or (also) as a prop for imagining
in the first place. In other words, moderate textualism starts from textual features
and declares whether they are fictive or not at any point in time. In that sense, it
is not only that a film’s status changes over time but what counts as documentary
– at one time it is this cluster of textual features and at another time a different
cluster of such features. Winston (2013, 25), for instance, produces a table of
varying list of traits associated with documentary over the years – classic, direct
 STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM 11

cinema, Kino Pravda, cinema verité, and post-1990. Institutionalism, by contrast,

starts from the definition of fiction as mandated imagining, and then
proceeds to determine for a given film and time, whether this mandate is operational
or not.
More specifically, for moderate textualists it is the producers’, distributors’, exhibi-
tors’, filmmakers’ and audiences’ views on relevant textual elements – camera placement,
primarily – that determines whether phantom rides are fictions or not. For an institution-
alist, textual elements are secondary in determining non/fictional status. For an institu-
tionalist, phantom rides could use a completely different set of textual features like
placing a camera next to the locomotive driver or facing a passenger in the dining car.
Focusing on textual features would not solve any of her problems because at any given
time, no textual element is either necessarily fictive or nonfictive. Rather, the institution-
alist is interested in the power of the extratextual context that can shift the default
engagement with a specific film – one involving belief and the other (additional) imagin-
ing – with ease. Do the filmmakers intend audiences to believe what is represented in the
film or (also) imagine specific things by using the film as a prop? Does the promotional
material emphasize the film as a recording or an illustration of certain events or are the
audiences supposed to imagine these events (as well)? Does the exhibition venue or plat-
form provide any specific instructions or cues on whether to trust what is presented or
does it (also) invite imaginings? Do the audiences treat the film as making truth claims or
do they engage it imaginatively (as well)? And above all, how are all these potentially
competing positions between the agents of production, promotion, exhibition and recep-
tion negotiated?

Notes
1. Cf. Corner (1996, 43), Gaines (1999, 1), Rosenthal and Corner (2005, 11), Chapman (2009,
15–16), and Winston (2013, 6). Here, ‘fictive’ is a property of a textual element, whereas
‘fictional’ is a trait of the whole text which may include both ‘fictive’ and ‘nonfictive’
elements.
2. For a critique of the idea that all narratives are fictional see Winston (1995, 113–119) and
Carroll (1996).
3. Earlier versions like Currie’s (1999) account of documentary as trace excludes animated
documentaries.
4. If contact is removed as one of the criteria of indexicality and we insist only on the object’s
automatic trace, then the photograph is also an index of whatever preceded that object in an
automatic casual manner. Say we photograph remains of a forest fire caused by lighting. We
would then be forced to say that this is a documentary photograph of not only the charred
remains but also of the lighting though the lighting was never in front of the camera.
5. Plantinga (2005) does allow that what counts as veridical asserted representation may
change over time, but intentions remain crucial.
6. Nichols (2017, 11–13) speaks of “an institutional framework” which includes producers, dis-
tributors and exhibitors whereas I use the term “institutionalist” in a wider sense of bringing
together agents of filmmaking, production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. In his
earlier work, Carroll (1983, 24), similarly excluded audiences when speaking of films
being “indexed” as fictions or nonfictions by “[p]roducers, writers, directors, distributors,
and exhibitors”.
7. An influential dissenter further develops her theory in this issue (Friend 2021).
12 M. SLUGAN

8. This is another difference from reception theorists for whom categories hinge on what spec-
tators actually do, whereas under this framework the categories rest on what the viewers are
supposed to do.
9. For an institutionalist account of fiction in film see Slugan (2023).
10. The mandate to believe covers believing both in assertions and in how the recording looks
and sounds that Plantinga (2005) distinguishes.
11. See Slugan (2019a) for more details.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work has been supported in part by Croatian Science Foundation under the project UIP-
2020-02-1309.

Notes on contributor
Mario Slugan, Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, works on the inter-
section of film theory, history and philosophy. He has published in Early Modern Visual Cultures,
Projections, and Film and Philosophy, and has authored three monographs – Montage as Perceptual
Experience (2017), Noël Carroll and Film (2019) and Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema
(2019). He is also co-editor of the special issue of Apparatus titled Fiction in Central and
Eastern European Film Theory and Practice (2019) and New Perspectives on Early Cinema
(2021, forthcoming).

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