Disruptive docs: teaching hybrid documentary filmmaking in Australia

ABSTRACT

As a documentary educator and practitioner in Australia, ‘truth’ is an area of concern for both my students and I in undertaking the risky capturing and the representation of the lives of others. Documentaries are deceptively difficult to make, especially for the novice, and most especially when considering hybrid non-fiction genre forms. The questions my students pose often centre on how much can they blend reality in the ‘post truth’ moment, and what are the practical and ethical challenges of doing so? This paper urges teachers and makers alike to refer to established documentarians who investigate at truthful depictions that often transcend the didactic recitation of facts. Citing the examples of Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (directed by Martin Scorsese, 2019) and The Rehearsal (created by and starring Nathan Fielder, 2022), I present a pragmatic discussion as to how disruptive non-fiction form a pure triadic relationship between participants, audiences, and filmmakers, which necessarily involves the overlap of ethics and creativity. I refer to a recent student hybrid documentary film Bustard Head (directed by Lucy Lakshman, 2021) as an example outcome of this pedagogically oriented approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary studies
• film analysis
• narrative analysis
• creative practice
• genre studies
• disruption
• archival practices
• ethics
• filmmakers

Introduction

As a documentary educator and practitioner in Australia, ethics are an area of concern in undertaking the risky capturing and representation of the lives of others. Documentaries are deceptively difficult to make, especially for the novice, and most especially when considering hybrid non-fiction genre forms, which are inherently disruptive in their creative use of subjectivity and facts. During the pandemic, my students and I were trapped in our homes and only able to collaborate online. Like many filmmakers around the world, we too returned to the archives to find materials for creative storytelling during lockdown (Kaufman 2020) in order to explore alternative or underexplored narratives or ‘the deprivation of presence’ – an absence in the archive or historical record, a lapse in the official narrative (Peters 1999, 36).

In response to the lockdowns many students began consuming more non-fiction content, most often via online streaming platforms (Dams 2021). In such a saturated mediascape, my students and I, like many other creators, felt obliged to take risks to realise documentaries in engaging and edgy ways (Wiedeman 2023). This pressure prompted my students to ask questions of me such as, what were the most ethical choices when it came to making their films for assessment while staying creatively open? This paper is a discussion of my pedagogical approach to teaching how to make disruptive hybrid non-fiction films. One of the results was an award-winning short documentary film, Bustard Head (2021). This graduate documentary film recounts the gruesome and mysterious tragedies that occurred at a remote lighthouse on the Queensland coast in the 1880s. Eschewing archival conventions, the students employed Brechtian theatre inspired live-action and German Expressionist tropes to create a hybrid documentary, which ‘blur[s] the boundaries between fact and fiction, utiliz[ing] fiction film camera and editing techniques’ (Önen 2021, 4).

The hybrid documentary, also known as a docufiction, which is characteristically experimental, has been a sub-genre routinely utilised by filmmakers to unsettle dominant narrative paradigms (Svetvilas 2004). Hybrid documentaries often use the latest equipment and technologies to great effect. Virtual and augmented reality, glasses-free 3D film, interactive formats, and digital data visualisations have been used to dismantle power structures and advocate for change (Kim 2022). Even for more traditional documentary formats, these modern tools are useful, but their application may have consequences in terms of ethics and accuracy. For example, the makers of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021), directed by Morgan Neville, did not disclose the commissioning of a software company to use AI technology to analyse recordings of the deceased celebrity chef’s voice and create a narration, a decision which raised ‘fundamental questions about how we define ethical use of synthetic media’ (Rosner 2021). Conversely, films like Welcome to Chechnya (2020) used deep-fake technologies to digitally veil vulnerable participants while still retaining important facial nuances which would have been lost if their images were blurred or obscured in shadows (Heilweil 2020).

When I talk with my documentary students about the possibility of blending both fictional and non-fictional elements in the same programme, another common concern is the misuse of the media to excite emotions rather than grounding news and non-fiction film in facts. This phenomenon is routinely associated with Donald Trump. The former U.S. president reportedly made 30,573 incorrect or deceptive assertions during his four-year term (Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly 2021). During this time of ‘post truth’, viewpoints rather than established facts swayed public opinion, and dishonesties impacted the fragile international political arena (Aly 2020). As a result, accuracy in documentary filmmaking and the practices journalists and documentarians deploy have become strongly contested (Eitzen 2018; Pierce 2017; Speed 2022; López-Marcos and Vicente-Fernández 2021). This made my students and I fearful of the repercussions in freely expressing our creativity in the hybrid documentary sphere.

Confronted with the issues raised by faithful and ethical representation, my students and I kept returning to the wicked problems of how can much we blend reality and fiction at this time in history, and what are the practical and ethical challenges of doing so? This paper urges documentary teachers and makers alike to refer to contemporary filmmakers who investigate archival absence and arrive at a truth that often transcends the didactic recitation of facts. Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (Martin Scorsese, 2019) and The Rehearsal (Nathan Fielder, 2022) (available on Australian subscription streaming services at the time of writing) both use various screen narrative tools and techniques to form what I perceive to be a pure triadic relationship between participants, audiences, and filmmakers. These and many other documentary films blur the line between fictional and non-fictional films, but I contend that the filmmakers appear to do so with authenticity and the best interests of their participants in mind, and with the conviction that their audience can discern their intent. As such, Rolling Thunder Revue and The Rehearsal offer pragmatic and inherently disruptive illustrations with which to instruct students and to explore the overlap of ethics and creativity.

The triangle of trust

My discussions with students about hybridity in documentary and its concomitant ethical and creative considerations commence by citing documentary filmmakers such as Erroll Morris. Morris has routinely throughout his career recreated significant components of a real story’s past events for which there was little or no existing footage or archival material, using actors and deploying powerful cinematographic techniques. By doing so, he elevated films like The Thin Blue Line (1989) to the realm of high art. Morris’ work has inspired other filmmakers to try to engage audiences in a problem-solving or even co-conspiratorial relationship with the text, and the subjects represented within the film. For example, when director Kevin Macdonald extensively deployed dramatic recreations in his film Touching the Void (2003), he felt it was best ‘to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality’ rather than to struggle for exactness (Macdonald in Brookes 2010).

But how does this trust relationship work? And how does one present one’s own truth as a filmmaker? Documentary theorist Keith Beattie argues that there is relationship between the audience and the filmmaker, evidenced by ‘a tacit contractual agreement or bond of trust between documentary producers (whether an individual filmmaker or broadcasting institution) and an audience that the representation is based on the actual socio-historical world, not a fictional world imaginatively conceived’ (2004, 11). The documentary is in ‘perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation’ (Bruzzi 2000, 9). An audience trusts, even when a documentary filmmaker blends in fictive or highly imaginative elements, that what they are receiving is real by virtue of the film’s ‘self-declaration as a documentary’ (Cowie 2011, 45), and I contend this emerges as a triadic contract between participant, filmmaker, and viewer of a documentary.

How well filmmakers acknowledge the shared agency of themselves, their audiences and their subjects can be determined by interpreting the words of the filmmakers who have been instrumental in making hybridised documentaries (or docufictions). The key creatives behind these films tend typically to be credited as writers, and directors. On the public release of their films, they are typically interviewed at length about their works, often by fellow filmmakers or film and entertainment journalists for magazines, books, and journals. The purpose of these interviews may be to attract an audience curious as to why the filmmakers took the risk to do what they did. Their answers may give some clues as to their core intentions and may also be construed as advice by other practitioners.

Documentary filmmakers also organise their narratives via specific modes of address, as espoused by Bill Nichols, many of which embrace transparency and make audiences aware of their underlying making processes and key intentions (2001). As such, documentarians may include the microphone in the shot or allow the participant to address the camera directly, which ‘makes the audience more of a friend to the responsible filmmaker than to those whose claims to truth rely on smoke and mirrors’ (Rabiger 1998, 359). I will discuss transparency, as a key element in establishing a triadic relationship between filmmaker, subject and audience, later in this paper.

In the classroom, I stress to my students the ethical dimensions of documentary, no matter if it contains fictionalised elements or not. Documentary must, irrespective of its style, mode, or approach, be dutiful in its representation of others. Non-fiction filmmakers ought to be conscious that they are engaged in an ongoing negotiation with their subjects. Many participants of well-known documentaries describe their mental health struggles after their (traumatic) stories become publicly available (Adams 2023), and there have been many calls for greater accountability. Many question if it truly is the task of documentarians to offer a ‘voice to the voiceless,’ and instead critique ‘extractive and exploitative filmmaking practices that reward filmmakers who parachute in and out of peoples’ lives during a crisis in an effort to produce dramatic or impactful entertainment’ (Childress 2020). Manifestos have been produced with the aim of radically decolonising the screen industry, and giving power back to the people whose lives are observed and recorded by outsiders (Solanas and Getino 1970; MacKenzie 2014). The level to which documentary filmmakers can balance access to the lives of their participants with editorial control is an ongoing conversation (O’Falt 2017). At a fundamental level, documentary filmmakers must commit to understanding their subjects as fully as possible, to know their histories, feel their spirit, and empathise with their struggles. In my teaching I like to emphasise how these elements can be actively built upon at every stage of making the hybrid film (or docufiction).

Making a hybrid

When my students begin work on a hybridised or blended documentary, similar to how I start on my own creative journeys, I advise that we take stock of the tools, methods, and perspectives available to us now. Although many processes and aesthetics of documentary filmmaking remain largely unchanged (such as the recording and editing of interviews with subjects and of observable events and situations, and the ability to present a film in a theatre), the digital era still poses significant disruptions for traditional media such as print media, broadcast television and film. In a globalised and digitised media setting, documentary genres serve as important social and cultural mediums (Bondebjerg 2014). I highlight to my students that this connectivity has led to fundamental changes in audience behaviours and preferences. For example, many young people now perceive news as something that should be handy, stimulating and diverting (Galan et al. 2019).

I then balance the discussion of current trends in the industry with the current ethical debates around the techniques of inventive non-fiction filmmaking. Ukrainian-Australian filmmaker Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet (2017) is a documentary that questions the docudrama genre by filming actors auditioning for the role of family members of slain American child beauty queen, JonBenét Ramsay. Of Casting JonBenet, director Green has said the impetus behind the film was that she wanted to know how the community considered the morality of the case (Wilkinson 2017). Many actors tested for the role of JonBenét’s parents, American businessman John Bennett Ramsey and 1977 Miss West Virginia pageant winner Patsy Ramsey, whose complicity in their child’s death was still in question. In their interviews with Green about performing in the roles for a proposed docudrama on the highly publicised 1996 case and the motivations of the protagonists, the actors reveal a dark truth about the human condition and the volatility of memory and veracity in this reflexive hybridised documentary.

Referencing Casting JonBenet, Dirk Eitzen argued that ‘the best documentary is the one that gives viewers the strongest sense of engagement with reality, not the one that provides the most or truest information’ (2018, 100). John Ellis added that ‘the truthfulness or fictionality of any documentary cannot be judged from examination of the film text alone, but also requires attention to the historical and institutional context for which it is produced’ (Ellis 2021, 148). Both Ellis and Eitzen cautioned that the authenticity claims of documentary films have long been under review, with the former urging filmmakers to do whatever is necessary to find an audience, and the latter advising the same community of practice to ‘carry on carefully crafting stories’ (Eitzen 2018, 109).

Other researchers have suggested prior awareness of an ‘embedded fact’ is a precondition for viewing (and enjoying) docufictions. Nigerian academic-practitioners Nicodemus Adai Patrick and John Iwuh experimented by blending fact and fiction in a screenplay about a woman’s response to her family being murdered by Fulani herdsmen. The result was an unpublished screenplay entitled Dissent (2019). In assessing the response to their story, Patrick and Iwuh found that ‘the reader’s comprehension and satisfaction will be enhanced if the dichotomy between facts and fiction is spotted’ (Iwuh and Patrick 2022, 385). However, some theorists argue that in some cases such as nature documentaries, where audiences learn about animals and their relationship to the natural world, dramatisations in documentaries for entertainment purposes ultimately mislead (Cabeza San Deogracias and Mateos-Pérez 2013). The implication I convey to my students at the conclusion of this discussion is that although there is always a danger in blending factual and fictional content and practitioner approaches, with meticulous consideration, it can still be done, and done well as the following examples show.

Example 1: Rolling Thunder Revue

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) is a Netflix documentary about cultural iconoclast and folk musician Bob Dylan’s 1975–76 collaborative tour, which European filmmaker Stefan van Dorp documented at the time. In this hybrid documentary, American director Martin Scorsese ‘invents characters, reconstructs timelines, and generally blurs factual/fictional boundaries’ (Powers 2019). The film wilfully disrupts dominant paradigms about the post-war ascent of the American industrial-military complex and the legendary genius of Dylan as the defining countercultural voice of his generation (Remnick 2022). Rolling Thunder Revue commences with a Victorian-era magic disappearing act before transitioning to the occasion of the bicentenary of the USA in 1976, tipping its hat from the very start to the mercurial and re-historicising nature of Scorsese’s protagonist, Bob Dylan. The documentary represents a deliberate and masterful approach to hybrid and docufictional filmmaking, and like many modern arthouse offerings, the film dislocates spatial and temporal continuity, calls attention to the editing process, and has abstract qualities and visual rhythms (Toolan 2014).

Rolling Thunder Revue was Scorsese’s second documentary about Dylan (the first being No Direction Home in 2005), although the director admitted he had not spoken with his key character for more than two decades at the time of the film’s release (Greene 2019b). An interview recorded by Dylan two years prior to the release of the documentary was subsequently given to Scorsese ‘to craft whatever kind of movie he wanted’ (Greene 2019a). In that interview, the American singer and songwriter claims he had scant memory of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Dylan stated that it ‘happened before I was born’ and that ‘it’s about nothing … and that’s the truth of it’ (Bodde and Rosen 2019). With such a chasm in the lived memory of the key participant, Scorsese perhaps felt it was appropriate to take the documentary in an unexpected direction.

When probed for the film journal Sight and Sound, Scorsese said artists should logically assess the material available to make an archival documentary, and ‘use what’s there’ (Scorsese in Horne 2019). Scorsese also had access to the Dylan annals via Dylan’s manager and archivist (and credited producer of Rolling Thunder Revue) Jeff Rosen, which contained many hours of footage from which to assemble a documentary alongside van Dorp’s material, but on seeing the first working draft of the film (edited by David Tedeschi and Damian Rodriguez), Scorsese felt the documentary was ‘ … conventional. It’s just a film about a group of people who go on the road and they sing some songs. I’m going to have to start all over. We have to … go with the spirit of the commedia dell’arte’ (Scorsese in Horne 2019). Commedia dell’arte’ was a form of Italian theatre popular in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, in which masked professional players took on archetypical characters (Bob Dylan often wore face paint during his 1975–76 tour) and improvised scenarios often with hilarious and dramatic results (Chaffee and Crick 2014). By referring to this tradition, Scorsese gave himself license to ‘make it up’ as they went along, and to extemporise on a theme.

At the next phase of making Rolling Thunder Revue, the ‘mischievous’ Scorsese (Ehrlich, O’Falt, and Sharf 2019) chose to ingeniously reimagine both the ‘magical myth and droning reality … that Dylan put at the center of his work then (and now)’ (Powers 2019). Scorsese rearranged the chronology of events on the tour and cast and shot ‘interviews’ with iconic Hollywood actors Jim Gianopulos and Sharon Stone, who played Dylan’s fictitious concert promoter and college-aged girlfriend respectively. These interviews are overlaid with doctored archival photographs, showing them interacting with Dylan in the 1970s. Even the original documenter of the tour, Stefan van Dorp, is played by the actor Martin von Haselberg, who gives an ‘interview’ on the filmmakerStefan van Dorp’s behalf in the film. The plot focuses not so much on Dylan himself, but Dylan as myth, supported by a broad cast of participants (real and faked) and painstakingly restored archival materials to tell a ‘a good “Bob Dylan Story”’ (Greene 2019a). Rolling Thunder Revue’s distribution on Netflix meant that a new generation would be introduced to Dylan (who himself was ‘never being above poking fun at his most ardent of fans’ (Mosley 2022)) and a revisionist view of a critical moment in America’s political and cultural history.

Example 2: The Rehearsal

In the next example, the hybrid documentary branches into a new sub-genre of ‘reality-comedy’ (Shapiro 2022). The ‘disproportionate effort at play’ (Fry 2022) that Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder brought to The Rehearsal (2022), tends at times towards the ‘hallucinatory’ (Schube 2022). The HBO series, which documentary royalty Errol Morris dubbed ‘metaphysical clickbait’ (2022), allows ordinary people to prepare for ‘life’s biggest moments by rehearsing them in carefully crafted simulations’ (HBO 2022). The docu-series, which Fielder wrote, directed, and starred in, left many critics pondering whether The Rehearsal is a documentary at all, echoing the familiar refrain once applied to Morris’ work and approaches (Wilkinson 2022; Horton 2022). Some believe The Rehearsal was a succession of ‘performative refractions of reality that Fielder sets in motion’ (Fry 2022).

The narrative structure of The Rehearsal is not particularly innovative in that it is a typical series format designed to engender audience loyalty and continued viewership episode-to-episode (Krutnik and Loock 2017, 3). The Rehearsal is globally available on HBO and its affiliates, which ascribes to the precepts of quality television. These original programming guidelines require that the content is ‘rich, riveting, moving, provocative and frequently contemporary’ (McCabe and Akass 2007, 21). HBO furnished Fielder with an impressive budget, which allowed the detailed reproduction of the New York City dive bar where Episode One participant Kor Skeete could practice opening up about his lie concerning his educational status to his trivia night friends (Gamerman 2022). While some felt Fielder may have been exploiting his subjects’ anxieties (Quinn 2022), Skeete, who was not seeking fame, has since acknowledged his role in making trivia a ‘cool’ hobby since the launch of the series (Batton 2022). The Rehearsal, as disruptive docufiction, leverages this overwhelming ‘social experiment slash therapy innovation’ (Wilkinson 2022) to explore everyday life dramas.

Reality TV, an underrated cousin of the documentary, often undertakes a crucial social-cultural task by allowing audiences ‘to witness a range of mundane human activities, interactions and dilemmas’ while casting ‘an image of citizenship as people living together amidst their differences’ (Klein and Coleman 2022, 509–10). Fielder’s attention to the humdrum perhaps indicates the beginning of a new archive that The Rehearsal seeks to establish: an archive of the ordinary, which is often overlooked by historians who seek out the extraordinary and significant (Middlekauff 1991).

Although ostensibly shot pre-pandemic (The Rehearsal was released in 2022), the series exhibits elements of surreal anxiety and self-reflection which many people experienced during the widespread lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tia Byer, in analysing two post-modern literary metanarratives that deal with trauma after momentous occurrences in American history, Falling Man a novel by Don DeLillo and Dispatches a New Journalism book by Michael Herr, cites Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 analysis of society’s tendency to recreate reality through simulation, swapping real events with an imitation. In each of the texts Byer examines, the authors attempt to make sense of their own experiences of the World Trade Centre attacks and the Vietnam War via ‘deliberately fictitious and artificial means of representation to demonstrate how reality, when radically disrupted by the traumatic national events, is revealed to be similarly fabricated and illusory’ (Byer 2021, 10).

Fielder’s trauma may also be closer to home. In an interview, the filmmaker noted that it was ‘hard to know where ideas come from or why you feel something at a certain time’, adding that he had recently been through a divorce (Shapiro 2022). In the same interview, Fielder stated that he detests speaking about himself, and that he prefers to say little about his work, noting in his interview with Lucy Shapiro that he did not want to provide ‘any extra context’ for The Rehearsal and that ‘[t]he thing is the thing’ (Fielder in Shapiro 2022). Without further clarification, it could be surmised that The Rehearsal is most likely a ‘self-portrait of a man trying to reach past his relentless solipsism’ (Fry 2022) as well as a conversation Fielder created with his audience about the nuances of the human condition and a challenge to ‘live in the moment’ (Quinn 2022), a disruptive act in itself when considering the more didactic approaches of earlier documentary forms.

Lessons from disruptive docs

Rolling Thunder Revue and The Rehearsal demonstrate the overlap of ethics and creativity in docufiction and hybrid documentaries. In both films, there are core truths to understand about a moment in time or the nature of human relations. While both take liberties to embellish upon a theme, they assume their audience is intelligent and literate enough to be able to distinguish fact from fiction or will take pleasure in untangling the two. Both films pragmatically use screen narrative tools and techniques to form a pure triadic relationship between participants, audiences, and filmmakers.

Both Scorsese and Fielder demonstrate on screen an esteem for their participants, with whom they associate either from afar or up close, and strive to understand the basis of their worldviews. In some cases, the trust of contributors may have been hard won by the filmmakers. As mentioned, Fielder’s participant Kor Skeete reported some bafflement with the process of being documented for The Rehearsal and Bob Dylan has not publicly commented on Scorsese’s docufictional interpretations of his life and career. One must also consider that both Scorsese and Fielder had an established reputation as enfants terribles, but I argue that their negotiating presence on and off screen demonstrates that they were able to enrol their subjects in the process. This relationship is often revealed via ‘winks’ to the audience, moments of holding on a shot or a frame of a participant considering the director's question or proposition, or when an actor portraying a real person gives the smallest of knowing smiles. This transparency, deliberately included by the filmmakers, demonstrates the power of the participant, and invites the audience to read between the lines.

As novices, my students do not possess the famed mastery of Scorsese and Fielder, which would predispose many potential participants and viewers alike to ‘hang in there’ while the director’s objective becomes apparent. Still, many of my students have experimentally used the same hybridising strategies employed by Scorsese and Fielder in their own creative works to playfully explore absences in the historical record and raise questions in the minds of their audience. They have blended fictional and non-fictional elements to express their own interpretations of a situation, while remaining faithful to certain core facts that can determine not to be misinformation.

In the case of my students, the makers of the dramatised short documentary film Bustard Head (2021) were able to draw on the philosophies of German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, to realise a mysterious tragedy that occurred on the Queensland coast 150 years ago. In line with Brecht’s advice that sets should be evocative rather than realistic, and that only minimal props should be used (Hill 1975), my motivated students were meticulous in attending to the appropriate production design details. Voice over narration guided the viewer, and black-and-white animation visualised the remote location and late 1880s context of Australian colonial history (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Still from Bustard Head (Francillon 2021). Permission granted by copyright holders, Lucy Lakshman, Alex Binz, and Joshua Francillon.

Close up profile of old man with beard in a darkened space.

For Bustard Head the students consulted with the historical details available about the Bustard Head lighthouse to craft an emotional journey around a central character, lighthouse keeper Nils Gibson. Thus, the production was based on the factual accounts of a real person from the past, which the director and writer learned about from meeting an Australian maritime historian. However, details about Gibson were scant and the dreadful events at the lighthouse were enclosed in mystery which meant the students needed to speculate and improvise.

As the key participant had long passed, they needed to ponder on the mind of the lighthouse keeper at a remove. Martin Scorsese similarly consulted the Dylan archive, which was somewhat incomplete, to determine the psyche of the songwriter. I encouraged the students to use their imagination to recreate a scenario that captured the spirit of the man as they perceived it and determine what they wanted to say about human nature and trauma. In this way, they sought to depict the protagonist’s confrontation with his personal demons imaginatively and authentically. Possibly Nathan Fielder, in The Rehearsal, reflected on his divorce in a similar way, as a source of pain and confusion on which to draw.

Together the students and I continued to develop the main character’s narrative arc. With some encouragement, the students eventually supposed that Nils Gibson had stayed on alone at the lighthouse long after the death of his wife and daughter due to his misguided sense of duty and sacrifice, which eventually led to Gibson’s self-obliteration. Once these themes were determined, the students chose not to give the players any dialogue. Instead, they expressed Gibson’s mental decay through his actions, subtle nuances in the actor's portrayal of the person and the symbolic potency of the all-seeing eye of the lighthouse and the restless and cruel ocean. Audiences understood these resonances and experienced Gibson's emotional journey through the filmmakers’ thoughtful manipulation of sound and vision, which resulted in the production winning an ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Award for Best Tertiary Documentary in 2022.

Conclusion

The decision filmmakers make to merge fiction and non-fiction signals an appetite for creative risk and uncertainty. Although many techniques used in films that blend fiction and non-fiction harken back to documentary practices established many decades ago, the political stakes of disruptive narratives have changed due to the global proliferation of misinformation by the world wide web. However, the filmmakers discussed in this paper, be they students or seasoned veterans, do not seek to proliferate misinformation by obscurification. For each, the processes reveal a triadic relationship and a spirited dialogue between the participant/s of the film, the audience, and the documentary filmmaker.

This dialogue discovers absences, which require a thoughtful re-imagining on screen or good-humoured challenges to the accepted chronologies. Often, the commonplace is privileged over the extraordinary, and in a media sphere where there is widespread sophistication and inter-connectivity, everyone is in on the joke. In the examples of Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) and The Rehearsal (2022), the filmmakers have creatively manipulated recorded vision and audio to fashion unique aesthetic and affective impacts. Both hybridised documentary film and television series contain a measure of good humour in a post-pandemic environment. They tell disruptive narratives the world-weary are eager to hear. Moreover, they are useful tools with which to illuminate a trust relationship between all parties that speak to a rigorous engagement with the topic in the contemporary milieu. These examples, I argue, help students of creative documentary gain the confidence to improvise and give their own disruptive experiments in hybridised filmmaking a go.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sue Cake, Glenda Hambly, Anna Dzenis, Sean Maher, and Felicity Collins for their comments on this paper, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Phoebe Hart

Phoebe Hart is a “pracademic” who is a successful documentary filmmaker based in Brisbane, Australia, as well as a widely published screen researcher and associate professor at the Queensland University of Queensland. She has written, directed, and produced non-fiction films for more than twenty years for various broadcasters and streamers such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Special Broadcasting Station, Stan, OutTV, Showtime and ARTE. Hart has received multiple awards and honours for her autobiographical documentary Orchids, My Intersex Adventure and an academic commendation for her thesis entitled “Orchids: Intersex and Identity in Documentary”.