[Frameworks] Hybrid Docs

[Dave Tetzlaff]

David Holtzman’s Diary isn’t a hybrid. It’s all “fake”.

OTOH, a lot of canonical docs made prior to 1960 were “hybrids" due to the limits of film technology to capture actualities as they happened — so they incorporated staged sequences with varying degrees of verisimilitude.

The Frank Capra “Why We Fight” films from WWII are classics examples of everything-including-the-kitchen-sink assembleges. Joris Ivens was the primary author of the  now-infamous “Know Your Eneemy: Japan”, which added some ‘experimental' touches to the Capra template — specifically a fairly long sequence based purely in visual montage w/o accompanying narration. 

To make a broader point, into the 1950s “experimental film” wasn’t a common rubric, and works we now categorize as such — e.g. Meshes, Fireworks, Blood of a Poet — were commonly thought of as “poetic film”, and — going back to Flaherty and Nanook — documentaries also had a strong ‘poetic’ streak, quite distinct from the popular entertainments produced by Hollywood. You can see this in the most celebrated films from John Grierson’s GPO film unit — “Night Mail” and the wartime films of Humphrey Jennings — especially “Listen to Britain”. 

While I imagine you have more contemporary examples in mind, a look back might provide some useful context for comparison and contrast. The context of any mixed-method non-fiction filmmaking has changed, and more recent ‘hybrids’ are likely self-consciously genre-benders, which certainly matters… for something….

There’s a good amount of scholarly literature relevant to the topic, though the only specific work coming to my mind at the moment is Bill Nichols book, _Blurred Boundaries_. It’s written with a fair amount of theory-speak, so not the most user-friendly, but could well be worth a look nevertheless.