Abstract:
This thesis, entitled, "Where's Albania? Staking Out the Politics of the Real and
Reality in Documentary Cinema," charts the documentary tradition's path from its first
incarnations, as filmed travelogue or ethnographic study, for example, right through to its
development as a form acting as an objective observer, reflexive commentator, and
finally, as a postmodern hybrid. This thesis begins by locating the documentary
tradition's origins in realism. Foregrounding documentary cinema as a realist style is
important in that it is a contention that spans this entire study. After working through the
numerous modes of documentary as outlined by Bill Nichols, I suggest the documentary
is often best understood as a hybrid form drawing on numerous modes and conventions.
This argument permits my study to make a shift into postmodern theory, wherein I
examine postmodernism's relationship to the documentary both as being influenced by it,
but also as subsequently forcing documentary cinema to look back at itself and reevaluate
the claims it has made in the past, and how postmodernism has drawn these
claims to the surface of debate. My thesis concludes with a study of the mockumentary.
This analysis confirms the link between postmodernism and documentary, but perhaps
more importantly, this analysis investigates postmodemism's critique of the image and
representation in general, two elements historically linked to documentary cinema's
success as "truth teller."
