Cinema and society: The construction of a “fictional reality”

This paper deals with the special construction of reality made by films which acquire significant epistemological interest when we are dealing with documental cinema, where the confusion and the merge between the reality of images and the exterior “reality” that the camera faces are more fragrant and undeniable. So, it discusses the appearance of the documental cinema by means of analyzing its original variations – the documentary, the social documentary, and the ethnographic movie – in their relationships with the knowledge possibilities they offer, or the access to knowledge of the social reality they allude. This analysis criticizes the positivist foundations that organizes the first documental films and the positivist watch that audience gives to them, and to documental films in general until nowadays, fundamental for the misperception of a film as the “real” itself, inquiring their epistemological potentialities about what kind of information those images suggest. So, if we can think that these films bring information about what is shown by its images and sounds, we can also think that they bring a lot of more information about the values and valuations that institute the filmic narrative made by the film maker or director.