Truth, performance and the close-up: paradoxical candour in Errol Morris's 'Interrotron' interviews

What happens when documentary films focus on human subjects, hoping to reveal their subjectivity via the cinematic gaze? One striking feature of documentary in recent years has been the use of both interviews and re-enactments to reveal—often via highly staged or stylized means—the ‘truth’ of documentary subjects even as they attempt to conceal, justify, or rationalize their attitudes or actions. Recent works by Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Joshua Oppenheimer expose what we might call the paradox of cinematic candour: the more a subject agrees to be filmed, the more he or she attempts to control an interview or sequence, the more the hidden ‘truth’ of the subject is unintentionally disclosed via subtle physical and emotional expression, the more ambiguous their display of intimate self-disclosure and attempts to control the narrative or account they are presenting begins to appear. Filmmakers like Morris and Oppenheimer exploit the dialectic between controlled self-disclosure and unintentional revelation, which makes for a fascinating interplay between performance, appearance, and imaginative engagement. How do we respond to such images, which both reveal and conceal a subject at once? Performative self-presentation, especially during documentary interview sequences, remains an overlooked aspect of contemporary film theory. Drawing on contemporary accounts of facial expression and the role of the close-up in cinematic presentation, I explore two of Errol Morris’s ‘Interrotron’ political documentaries, The Fog of War and The Unknown Known, examining how they exploit this paradoxical candour with remarkable ethico-political results.