The first semester of my MFA program, my first workshop featured an assignment to make a creative nonfiction documentary. It paired well with discussions of the genre, the unreliability of narrators, the slipperiness of truth, the ethics of asking people to present themselves accurately while subjecting them to authorial curation.

Lately, there’s been an embarrassment of riches for documentaries. Earlier in summer, I watched Steal This Story, Please. Later this month, I’ll inflict Musk on myself (and then maybe watch The Human Centipede 2 as a palate cleanser).

In less than a month, I’ve watched three new documentaries at my local independent theater: The History of Concrete, followed by You Can See Everything, and finally, on election night, NAZA.

That first semester, David Shields gave a craft talk about his controversial book Reality Hunger. Approximately half of the book-length manifesto is lifted verbatim from other source material without attribution, embedded throughout Shields’s own words. The book was an experiment in textual mixing to challenge the reader’s understanding of voice and authorship and ideation. For legal reasons, attribution was included at the very end, but Shields has long maintained that readers should tear those pages out before reading.

Phillip Lopate writes about it sardonically, describing the “notion going around these days that because nonfiction is a construct, it is a fiction. To quote David Shields’s Reality Hunger (which is not necessarily to quote David Shields, since he merrily appropriates authors’ words for his collaged text)…” and then he proceeds to quote (presumably) Shields’s critique of the fiction/nonfiction dichotomy (77). For most of my literary career, though, I’ve been spared this debate. Most of the fiction I read and write is genre fiction, anyway, and besides, what is autofiction if not just an essay that’s protected from legal repercussions?

I’m not interested in whether or not creative nonfiction should be classified as fiction (it shouldn’t) on the basis that it’s constructed because construct is not synonymous with artificial or fake. The imperative in creative nonfiction, I think, is the same imperative in documentary filmmaking, which is not to report the facts, but to make sense of them. The contrivance of a narrative structure necessarily means authors have to curate the facts in order to interpret them, and sometimes (see: David Shields) that can get nonfiction authors into trouble.

The History of Concrete follows John Wilson’s typical style from his HBO show (co-produced by Nathan Field), How To with John Wilson. Wilson narrates an experience alongside curated short clips of footage that match, sometimes ironically, what is being narrated. In one scene, Wilson describes signing an NDA for a concrete conference forbidding him from saying anything negative about the concrete industry based on his conference experience, and juxtaposes this with footage of ailing, crumbling concrete structures and evidence of the CO2 output from the production of concrete.

If you care about spoilers, skip ahead two paragraphs.

Nathan Fielder has a particular gimmick, which fed the marketing campaign for You Can See Everything. The premise is absurd: a month before going to jail for fraud, Elizabeth Holmes invited Fielder to record her and her boyfriend’s private life, presumably to show the world “their side” of the story. Fielder openly interrogates his subject on camera; once Holmes goes to prison, Fielder continues the documentary with her techbro boyfriend and employs the help of Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in a fictionalized TV series, to act out scenes that Fielder was unable to record but remembers, for the most part, from memory.

This has generated most of the film’s controversy (other than the gimmicky rating for graphic nudity, which was included for two seconds simply to earn that rating and therefore drive speculation and sell tickets), but to me, having an actress represent what the director readily admits is a potentially limited memory of events seems like a completely acceptable artistic choice in creative nonfiction. Once the author writes, “This is how I remembered it happening,” the audience is free to join in the speculation without a wholesale embrace of what is speculated.

NAZA is the outlier here. The film does not have a central narrator like the other two, but instead is a series of cuts from interviews that Yuval Abraham conducted anonymously with 24 IDF soldiers and technical engineers, all of them at night, on rooftops in Tel Aviv. Because the interviewees could face legal ramifications, their faces are never shown and their voices are digitally altered, and the filmmakers juxtapose their responses to Abraham’s questions with other high-rise apartments in the city, panning over black surfaces peppered with the occasional window where someone has left the lights on inside.

The title of the film is an IDF acronym for “collateral damage” that follows a number—15 NAZA instead of 15 children, for example—stemming from drone strikes on targets generated through artificial intelligence systems such as “Lavender” or “Where’s Daddy?” which was an AI program that recorded, for instance, children of a presumed target reacting to a parent’s arrival, thus making the child’s home a target for elimination, NAZA and all. Hauntingly, there is no music in the film, just the ambient sounds of traffic in a crowded urban district as anonymous soldiers passively compare the destruction of human life to a video game.

The History of Concrete is much more like the works of John McPhee or the New Journalists like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, a sprawling, meandering examination of a topic that spirals outward from a question and gradually pulls in more and more questions the more answers the essayist arrives at, not quite maximalism but density. John Wilson’s view of New York City isn’t that different from Didion’s view of California or, more recently, Hanif Abdurraqib’s view of Columbus, Ohio.

You Can See Everything most obviously correlates to true crime. Fielder isn’t exactly Truman Capote (except for their shared penchant for burning bridges, perhaps), but his relationship to Holmes is confrontational and interrogative. Leah Sottile’s short podcast series Bundyville features similarly disconcerting interviews with the subject of her story, paired with Sottile honestly confronting her own attitude toward the Bundy family.

Polyvocal creative nonfiction is usually sympathetic to those whose voices the author curates, like Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. I think that Valeria Luicelli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions performs a similar act of curation. NAZA is straightforwardly making an argument against the IDF’s use of force in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. The filmmakers render the anonymity artistic through juxtaposition, but it doesn’t pull off the kind of knife-to-the-gut cinematic trick that the Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds pulls when it interviews a veteran describing, in enthusiastically graphic detail, his combat experience, only for the camera to pull back and reveal that he has been conducting the interview the whole time from a wheelchair, having lost the use of both legs.

None of these films would likely be called avant-garde, but they do reflect the more contentious debates about how to classify avant-garde cinema. The word originally comes from the socialist tradition of a vanguard movement on the frontlines, treating artistic innovation as a literal frontier. One interpretation, according to Michael O’Pray, is that such films are “fundamentally different [from] their mainstream counterparts—no budget, intensively personal and using quite different distribution and exhibition circuits” (2), though O’Pray also cites the critic Clement Greenberg, “who divided the art world into the avant-garde and the kitsch, which included Hollywood films, and where aesthetic value attached to the former,” as another perspective. Probably because I’m so steeped in genre fiction, I disagree with the notion that entertainment and aesthetic value are antithetical, but the distinction between what a film prioritizes might be more helpful.

In creative nonfiction, structure is everything. As Kim Barnes told us in that first workshop, “memoir isn’t about what you remember but why you remember it the way you do.” If creative nonfiction is about making sense of the facts, then the curation of those facts—what is remembered paired with imagery, sound, and text in an intentional sequence—teaches the reader how to make sense of what they are reading about.

I was originally very critical of David Shields nine years ago. I still am, but I’ve softened on his arguably avant-garde approach to creative nonfiction. My own documentary that month was an extended interview with my father about his grandfather. My job as the curator meant I had the freedom to arrange images and sounds to tell a story I was responsible for, regardless of what my father said in response to my questions. Curation necessarily means taking responsibility for the story told. I’m once again a broken record on this point, but curation and care share the same root, and caring for a subject (a sprawling examination of a topic, a hostile interview, a polyvocal data sample) necessitates a kind of ownership. The story I tell as an essayist is mine, or my version at least, no matter how distant I might seem on the page. Agreeing about the facts is irrelevant; what matters is that my curation of those facts is my own declaration of why they matter.

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Lopate, Phillip. To Show and To Tell. Free Press, 2013

O’Pray, Michael. Avant-garde Film. Columbia University Press, 2003.