Toward a Nonfiction Cinema of Audience Accountability

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt muses on the difference between responsibility and accountability in the context of nonfiction cinema’s impulse towards and history of speaking up and back to power. In keeping with his preference for poetic nonfiction over traditional documentary, he considers recent Latin American documentaries that fight against narrative rules in order ask more of their audience. He suggests that filmmakers such as Jonathan Perel, whose Corporate Accountability (2021) he discusses at length, extend this notion of accountability not only to their subjects but to their audience through untraditional approaches that force viewers to sit with their discomfort and actively engage with the images before them.