Performance, emotion, and persuasion in The Ground Truth

While politically conscious documentaries have become increasingly popular in recent years, some scholars have questioned the extent to which these texts are able to promote actual socio-political change. As a means of investigating this issue, this paper looks to the motivational potential of one recent radical documentary: Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth (USA, 2006). By examining the film's performances through the lens offered by the psychological literature on emotion-elicitation, I illustrate that nonfiction texts do indeed have the potential to stimulate real-world behavior in some cases and contexts. In concert with other formal elements, The Ground Truth's performers invite a complex mix of spectatorial emotions that work together to make political action reasonably likely. This action, however, might not always be of the sort promoted by the text itself.