Documentary Film in Media

New documental forms in a differentiated media system Nowadays, we encounter innumerable documentary forms in cinema, television or even on the web; a barrage of material that calls into ques-tion every conventional definition of the documentary. Since the 1990s in particular, we have seen an unprecedented boom in documentary films, sophisticated news features and reports, magazine programs and »docu-soaps « on German television, particularly reality TV or pseudo documentaries. And we must also consider special practices such as those of industrial films, scientific documentaries in medical contexts, or the practice of recording witness testimonials, for example by the Shoah Foundation. Furthermore, we are submerged by a rising tide of docu-mentary material on web platforms such as YouTube. Given all this, it has become somewhat problematic to find a common denominator for all these different forms of documentary expression.2 1 Translation by Rebecca M. Stuart. 2 In German academic discourse, there exists a threefold differentiation of the notion of »documentary. « I use the terms employed in the following senses: Firstly, »documentary « is used in the sense of the documentary film (Der Dokumentarfilm), i.e. a certain type of well-known film mostly shown in the cinema, or on late-night TV. Secondly, the term »docu-mentary film « is employed to describe films which are not necessarily documentaries per se, but possess some strong documentary features do-kumentarische Filme). And, thirdly, what I label »documental«—a more ab-stract notion which includes all gestures and procedures of documenta-tion (das Dokumentarische), i.e. a certain mode of expression