The politics of fictionality in documentary form: The Act of Killing and The Ambassador
Abstract This essay sets out to do two related things: to investigate how the documentary films The Act of Killing and The Ambassador challenge the political and ideological ground of their audiences through radical experiments with documentarist strategies and fictional discourse. In order to carry out this investigation, the essay, secondly, presents and further elaborates a new way of approaching and making sense of fictional discourse using the concept of 'fictionality' an approach inspired by The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh and recently developed further by Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan and Walsh. One of the benefits of this new paradigm is that it offers productive ways of coming to terms with the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of cultural forms that are heavily invested in current political events and issues while at the same time employing experimental uses of fictional discourse.