Fiction in Documentary Film

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by Bruce Eadie

Type

Studies

Subject

Sociology

Keywords

psychoanalysis, documentary, trauma

Publishing date

2026 (September 22, 2026)

Publisher

Routledge

Collection

The Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture Series

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 230 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-04-110868-9

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Book Presentation:
Fiction in Documentary Film explores the use of fictional elements in contemporary documentaries about personal trauma.

Bruce Eadie argues that the documentary-making process can be a dynamic, therapeutic process, which bears comparison to the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Traumas rooted in the past are reactivated in on-screen relationships, and fictions bring representational content to otherwise unrepresented aspects of traumatic experience. With reference to Freud, Winnicott, Bion and especially post-Lacanian French psychoanalytic thinkers, Eadie emphasises the theatrical, enacted, bodily and affective aspects of trauma and documentary. This book includes detailed case studies of The Act of Killing (2012) and The Blonds (2003).

Fiction in Documentary Film will be of great interest to academics and students of film, media and television, trauma and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, as well as those interested in the application of psychoanalytic ideas both inside and outside the clinic.

About the Author:
Bruce Eadie spent much of his career in television, making documentary films on challenging subjects often involving state-sanctioned violence, from forced sterilisation, to the death penalty, to French complicity in the Holocaust. In 1996, he won an EMMY for his film Nuremberg on the Nuremberg Trials. In recent years, he has returned to academic work, writing about museum cultures and documentary film. He is the film section editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Press Reviews:
"This is a vital and important work. Facing traumatic experiences directly is often unbearable, and sometimes must be approached sideways, through fiction. In Fiction in documentary film, Bruce Eadie offers a sensitive and wide-ranging psychoanalytic interrogation of the way fiction and nonfiction intertwine in recent documentary films to make the representation and working-through of personal and historical trauma possible. This incisive and humane book challenges simplistic renderings of trauma, demonstrating the complexity of human struggles as they appear in film, fiction and ‘real’ lives."

Stephen Frosh, author of Those Who Come After and How to be Real. Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London.

"Fiction in documentary film: a psychoanalytic exploration is a highly original contribution to documentary studies. Drawing on Shakespeare’s device of the play-within-the-play, Eadie argues that fiction sequences in documentary films about trauma can reveal truths that more conventional documentary devices cannot reveal. Referring to a very wide range of psychoanalytical material, and an equally wide range of writing on documentary film, Eadie demonstrates the role that can be played by fictional elements in documentary. Through his close analysis of key films, and drawing on a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma and affect, he presents a very significant new way of thinking about documentary’s "fictionings" and about the role of such fictionings as a therapeutic tool."

Elizabeth Cowie, Professor Emeritus, Film Studies at the University of Kent

See the publisher website: Routledge