Shai Biderman

There is a century old tradition of defining documentary in philosophical terms. Yet, this tradition seems to miss the most intelligible (yet, conspicuously evasive) aspect of documentary praxis: its conceptual entanglement with philosophy itself. This entanglement is oddly mirrored in Plantinga’s characterization of the documentary as an “asserted veridical representation.” Such a characterization presupposes the conceptual and factual omnipotence of truth, and, accordingly, delineates documentary as a praxis of disclosure and exposure of a pre-existent reality, that serves as a sort of repository of truth for the documentarian to represent. Recognizing that a more authentic encounter with the dichotomy of the real and the virtual, the truthful and the fictional suggests otherwise, I will endorse a new view of documentary as a form of a philosophy that, quite literally, makes its own truth by blurring the border between reality and fiction in constructing, rather than representing, a truthful reality. I will do so by examining the role of the documentarian as a philosopher-through-film, by means of a critical analysis of film-segments from »The Unknown Known« (Errol Morris, 2013) and »The Fog of War« (Errol Morris, 2003).

Shai Biderman (Tel Aviv) received his PhD in Philosophy from Boston University in 2012, and teaches film and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and at Beit-Berl College, Israel. He is the co-editor of »The Philosophy of David Lynch« (UPK, 2011), and »Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image« (Wallflower/Columbia, 2016). He has published on philosophy of film, film analysis, and film-philosophy, in journals such as »Film and Philosophy and Cinema: journal of philosophy and the moving image«, and in edited volumes such as »Inter- Art Journey« (Sussex Academic Press, 2015), »The Philosophy of the Western« (UPK, 2010), »The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film« (UPK, 2008), »Lost and Philosophy« (Blackwell, 2008) and »Movies and the Meaning of Life« (Open Court, 2005).