Good article by Xan Brooks on documentaries and truth, with particular reference to Clio Barnard’s The Arbor:

This, it transpires, is what Barnard intended. “If you examine any documentary, you see how shaped it is, and how similar the narrative structure is to that of a fiction film,” she says. “The lip-synching allows the actor to look directly down the lens at the audience: to acknowledge the illusion and break the fourth wall.”

The negotiation between fiction and reality, she adds, is always tricky. “Drawing attention to that negotiation is a more honest way forward than relying on the technique to do the job and smooth out the tensions.”

via Can ‘fake’ documentaries still tell the truth? | Film | The Guardian.

As a contrast with the previous Kermode post, David Cox is less impressed with The Arbor:

Documentary confines you to literal fact and lets you present real people recounting their own versions of real experience in real surroundings. Yet the resulting impression of unvarnished veracity masks artifice of a different kind. It’s you who chooses what to shoot, what to select from what’s shot and how to assemble what’s selected. It will be you who’s shaped the resulting artefact, and its claim to verisimilitude can be seen as more deceptive than that of its straightforwardly fictionalised counterpart.

He wonders why the film maker decided to replace the interview subjects’ faces with actors:

The expropriation of the real participants’ faces by those of sleeker performers begins to seem like an insult. If people’s speech is not to be trifled with, why should their appearance be? The logic of cinema surely implies that if anything, things should be the other way around. The archive images remind us of what’s to be gained from seeing what people really look like. This becomes a further distraction from what’s actually being said.

via Clio Barnard’s The Arbor is out of lip-synch with reality | Film | guardian.co.uk.