For the next year at least, I’m going to try something different in this space.

Notes From the Reel World has been around since 1991, well before this publication adopted its current name. It’s been a column where an IDA leader speaks from and to the world that the organization serves—the reel world (for those who enjoy word play), that is, the world to which films of the real belong.

Yet documentary practice draws on so much beyond its own world. It is distinctive in how it trades and allies with other spheres of culture: the essay, testimony, memoir, travelogue, archiving, visual anthropology, socially engaged art or “social practice” (which I now think of as documentary performance), public history, photography, and journalism. Doubtless, you can think of more places where the documentary impulse drives creativity.

Now, as so much of documentary practice shifts, when we might be on the threshold of fundamental change, those trading partners may have something to offer. What they’re doing, how they’re navigating the same world, the nature of the objects they make, might open up new questions and suggest new paths. Innovation almost always comes from outside.

For the next year, my spot in this magazine will become Notes From the Real—a short series that moves between documentary and other reality-based practices. Because that is the work of documentary: not so much to “speak the truth” as to disclose reality. Reality provides a broader base and firmer footing. Truth is about what can be verified, what can be checked. Sometimes that can be critical, yet reality is more than that, more open and ambiguous. We belong to what Erika Balsom (perhaps after Karl Rove) has called “the reality-based community,” we produce that community’s preeminent art form, and we need to get to know the other residents.*

Notes From the Real will step back from our habitual vocabularies. We’ll take a little distance from “story,” “impact,” ”community”—terms that we have overworked. Distance might open up new ways of asking about value. About what documentary is for. About what it does that nothing else does.

I am writing this on a train to Berlin for the festival and the European Film Market. One of the panels I’m on is about what data the field needs to support the “validation” of documentary films. Validation. The word folds together at least three things: the kind of value meant when talking about aesthetic worth; the soundness of an argument, its logical integrity; and something like certification or institutional approval. The question of value is asked in funding applications, impact assessments, and festival programmer meetings. It’s being asked right now, in various ways, across the field.

There may be another way to ask it. From outside. From the edges. From the real.

Dominic