The Case for the Ethical Use of Reenactment in Documentaries

Last weekend I saw Paranormal Activity which sparked my intrigue about the assumptions of a documentary. The entire movie is filmed with a hand camera and unfolds like a documentary but the film is, unlike real documentaries, not the actuality or approximation of real life, but rather, its imitator. Documentaries filmed with a hand camera consistently insist upon their truthfulness as the audience has access to such a mean of film but does not readily recognize the possibility for manipulation. The grit and grain of the hand camera and its seemingly untrained and unprofessional "guerrilla" hand directing its movements assumes honesty rather than a 35mm camera shot placed and pointed by a director with a shot in mind. It seems interesting to me when movies posing as documentaries use the mostly inherent and innocuous assumptions of truthfulness to convey a sense of realism while documentaries borrow from film's expected use of reenactment to convey that same sense of realism when first hand footage is not available. It seems that if films of all types are attempting in different ways to capture the same sense of true immersion and truthfulness, and no single technique alone can always bring the sense of truthfulness that the creator is seeking, then techniques such as reenactments in documentaries should not undermine the effect or "ethics" of a documentary so long as these techniques are employed with the intent of achieving the film's attunement to such a reality.