Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Both Crime Literature and Detective Films have gone through very diverse stages throughout history, but critics claim that they currently experience a golden age around the world. There are significant differences between the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the travails of Kurt Wallander and between the films of Henri-Georges Clouzot and those of Hirokazu Kore-Eda or the Dardenne Brothers. However, whether the criminal is an avenger or an evil murderer, fiction is always supposed to be able to reach the truth, while documentaries not necessarily. There is a recent emergence of so-called true crime documentaries that exhibit narratives and aesthetics that resemble those of contemporary crime fiction and are actually closer to fiction than to non-fiction. This paper explores the films The Staircase (Jean-Xavier de Lestrade; 2004, 2013, 2018) and Wormwood (Errol Morris; 2017), available on Netflix. We will try to answer the following sets of questions: 1. What do these films tell us about post-truth? What do they signal about current public trust in justice and institutions? How does true crime documentary relate to contemporary detective fiction? 2. How do we talk about documentaries in the context of the controversies around Netflix and Cannes? Some experts confine documentaries in Netflix to the realm of entertainment while those shown in art cinema festivals and more high-brow digital platforms are considered as author works, forms of knowledge and subjective yet honest approximations to the real. Can we describe true crime documentaries as post-documentaries or post-truth?