Art Press Editorial: Documentary Film as Truth-Telling

In an editorial for Art Press, Jacques Henric argues that documentary films, rather than novels, now best capture societal truths, citing Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah' and Daniel Karlin's 'Et si on parlait d'amour' as examples. Henric critiques contemporary fiction for abandoning its role of revealing reality, while praising documentary works that construct art from raw testimony. He draws a parallel between Lanzmann's approach in 'Shoah'—a film composed of survivor and perpetrator accounts of the Holocaust—and Karlin's method in his new film about love and sex, emphasizing a shared commitment to understanding, respect, and eliciting authentic speech. Henric notes that despite its title, Karlin's film focuses on sex in all its forms, presented directly and without pathos. The editorial also references Catherine Millet's 'La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M.' to challenge critics who dismissed its depictions as limited to a bourgeois intellectual milieu.