Taken together, three recent films provoke a profound questioning of how and why we guard the border walls separating documentaries from dramatic features. These movies sabotage genre purity; the modes which are supposed to stay apart—as a matter of ethics, as a matter of aesthetics, as a matter of awards business—touch and pollute each other. The first is “The Zone of Interest,” the English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s study of the ritualistic domesticity of the Nazi administrative class.
In the film’s complex coda, Glazer steps away from the realm of historical fiction, a leave he takes violently. A bureaucrat retches, the setting dissolves, and we find ourselves in a famous museum that solemnizes the former death camps. The bureaucracy we now face is that of history-making—an impotence, we might feel, in comparison to the system of extermination it is meant to memorialize—as we watch a cleaning worker maintain the floors.
The second feature is “Dahomey,” by the French Senegalese director Mati Diop, streaming in the States as of mid-December, which complicates genre in the other direction. Documentary as a descriptor feels terse. Diop has made a talismanic movie about the “ impossibility of return, ” as she told my colleague Julian Lucas in a recent profile.
“Dahomey,” a process film, follows the journey of twenty-six Beninese art works, repatriated from the looting French back to Benin, in West Africa. The observational shots are complicated by a.
