The sense of authenticity generated by performances in a documentary is less a reflection of its performers than a mediated negotiation of culturally coded and historically informed conventions as to what counts as an authentic performance. As Elizabeth Cowie notes, "Social actors will appear unrealistic if they do not conform to the expectations of the viewers. The poor, for example, must appear properly poor in whatever way an audience may correctly recognize poverty." But just as the authenticity of social actors in documentary depends on culturally familiar codes for authority, those same codes provide the means to challenge that authority. What might be the value of offering performances that point to discrepancies between performers and roles? This dissertation considers this question, looking at the possibilities afforded when documentarians solicit and manage performances that undermine a performer's authority to a role - performances that I call "deauthorized performances." In such cases, performances indicate that the people giving them are not, at least in part, what they or others say they are and a degree of uncertainty over the "true" identity of performers and the meaning of their performances is introduced.

Deauthorized performances rely on specific production techniques for their effect. The filmmakers examined in this dissertation often mislead or deceive their subjects. These techniques are radically incompatible with the commitments to honesty, objectivity and nonintervention that characterize the documentary tradition. By extending scholarship from the interdisciplinary field of performance studies onto the terrain of documentary theory, however, I examine how these techniques and the performances engendered by them provide insight on aspects of social reality that would otherwise escape scrutiny and suggest alternative possibilities for the ways documentaries are produced and understood.