Documentary Deception

Working from Nichol’s proposition that ‘every film is a documentary’ (Nichols 2001:1), two fairly recent films will illustrate the suggestion that truth, as expressed through the ontologically-ambiguous photographic image, is a rhetorical construct emerging from an ironic contradiction between intention and reception, between the represented and its representation. The two films being exploited for this paper are, themselves, simply a scaffold on which to hang some observations on the nature of deception in art, the complicity of the audience in the creation of meaning and the general operations of irony. The films in question are The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006).