| Abstract: | This article proposes to extend the work of law and film scholars, such as Carol Clover and Jennifer Mnookin, by looking at how juridically themed documentary films use the legal trial as both a platform and a structuring device to contest the evidentiary value of testimony, bear witness to the performance of law in our culture and engage in a social debate about flaws in contemporary jurisprudence. Because non-fiction film – with its presumed indexical relationship to reality and its attendant claims to authenticity – is often seen as having a privileged relationship to truth, the ethical and epistemological stakes of these visual representations are heightened. Consequently, the expectations we bring to the juridical documentary (in terms of its truth-telling responsibilities) make it a particularly loaded space for analysing the ethical and epistemological responsibilities of documentary representation as well as for revealing truths about the legal process and the ordering of a just society. Thinking through the ways in which contemporary trial documentaries differently approach the question of their subjects' guilt allows us to reflect on how the juridical documentary refracts the legal trial's own truth claims. These documentary films demonstrate that, while the documentary and the legal trial might share an epistemological affinity based on shared principles of evidence, narrative and argument, the way in which the trial itself is thematized as both a discourse and a practical purveyor of justice in documentary influences how we come to understand the law in action. |
