Re-enactments Do these compromise the veracity of documentary film?

Re-enactments Re-enactments / reconstructions are artificial scenes of an event which have been reconstructed and acted out on film based on information of the event. Reconstructions generally provide factual information, and give the viewer a sense of realism, as if the event really happened in front of them live. They often indicate that the footage is not real by using techniques such as blurring, distortion, lighting effects, changes in camera level, and colour enhancement within the footage.

Re-enactments To label a film a "documentary" is in one sense to burden it with the responsibility of veracity. The film needs to have an aura of verisimilitude, and what we see and hear is taken to be, if not quite truth, then at least seeking a “truth”. So are re-enactments acceptable?

Writer, producer, director Allie light, winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for In The Shadow Of The Stars says, about the use of reenactments in her films.director Allie light LIGHT: “A good reason for doing reenactments is that the past lives of most people are not documented, so very little material exists to tell the story. Film is a medium of action. If the documentary or non-fiction filmmaker relies only on the interview, the story is stagnant and becomes merely a retelling of the past. No matter how good the story is, it will bore the viewer and viewers are then a trapped audience with nothing to look at. - See more at: documentary#sthash.DPl6SP45.dpuf

Waltz with Bashir This film uses animation to allow the recreation of an otherwise visually inaccessible past. Does this compromise its veracity?

Although Waltz with Bashir relies on the interview structure, the filmmaker has not simply linked a character voiceover to existing footage but rather created images to perform this role. This creative flexibility explains why animation was always the intended format.

Waltz with Bashir Yoni Goodman the Director of Animation on Waltz with Bashir states: If Ari had done it like an ordinary documentary, it would have been another talking heads and archive footage movie. We wanted to recreate the actual events, and to do more; to give the sense of anxiety, of fear, to really bring out the horrors of war through nightmares and hallucinations, and animation is really the best, and in my opinion, the only way of telling the story as it should be told.

Waltz with Bashir In this desire to “recreate the actual events” many of the animated sequences take forms and depict events that are usually inaccessible to cameras – dream sequences, pans that move seamlessly from dialogue to aerial shots, shot reverse shots in a battle scene, and even a point of view shot of a RPG shell in the course of blowing up a tank. These filmically impossible shots are interspersed with typical documentary footage of social actors interviewed on location ‑ in a bar, office, gym, home, etc.