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Kurt Cobain Documentary Essay

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‘Is It Possible To Accurately Represent Reality In Film?’

“...It matters very little what the facts are; what matters is what people believe. And when it comes to Cobain, most of what they believe is fabricated nonsense.”
-Buzz Osborne, Melvins

Documentaries are often assumed to be credible and filled with factual information; they do, after all, document reality. This is not always the case though. There are many factors that determine the reliability of documentaries: the editing, the director’s agenda, the film’s style, confirmation bias, and choice of interviewees, among other things. Documentaries are a representative medium, after all, and although they are able to give audiences insight into people and events that they were not able to experience first-hand, there is much ambiguity surrounding the truthfulness of non-fiction film. While it may be possible to inform and persuade people through film, it will never be able to accurately represent reality. By comparing two documentaries about Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, it will become apparent that there is still a blurred line between what is fiction and what is not.

Kurt Donald Cobain. Although his music was loved by some and hated by …show more content…

Although these types of conspiracies have been debunked in the past (Lincoln & Patten, 2015), the film is not to be discredited; it still holds convincing points based on interviews with people who knew Kurt as well as members from police, but mainly Tom Grant . Grant was the P.I. hired by Courtney Love to investigate Kurt’s actions and behaviour after he had escaped from rehab (Hunt, 2015). This documentary flows and feels like a crime-scene drama tv show (but due to the historical fidelity which is required by law in docudramas (as opposed to docufictions), the allegations made in the film must come from primary or secondary sources, or be backed up with factual evidence (Couch,

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