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Werner Herzog is a performer who often places himself front and center in his movies. The director, who shuttles between documentaries and fiction films such as the classic "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," makes epics in which he's as in focus as the subject is. In his acclaimed 2005 film "Grizzly Man," for example, Herzog narrates the story of Timothy Treadwell, an environmental activist devoured by one of the bears he had sworn to protect; the film's dramatic climax shows Herzog himself listening to an audio tape of Treadwell and his girlfriend being attacked.

Herzog's films tend to be metaphysical essays meant to crack open the viewer's mind. Wiseman aims for a clear, level gaze. Both men call their films documentaries.

But if their films come from the same family, they are distant cousins. Indeed, the word documentary just doesn't work anymore. Perhaps it never did: No single word is adequate to encompass a film genre splintering in dozens of directions.

Later this week, Herzog, Wiseman and a wildly diverse collection of their contemporaries and inheritors will be in the Berkshires for the Williams College conference "Extreme Documentary: Alternative Verite." (See page xx for a schedule.) The weekend-long session brings together filmmakers as globally minded as Hubert Sauper (whose Oscar-nominated "Darwin's Nightmare" examines globalism's dark side) and the pranksters known as the Yes Men to Jonathan Caouette, whose low-budget 2003 film "Tarnation" was a sort of psychedelic autobiography.

Polar opposites

Just as the novel is a form baggy enough to encompass works by Mark Twain and Albert Camus, documentaries are diverse enough to make room for both Herzog and Wiseman -- master craftsmen who practice their craft in radically different ways.

"They are completely different styles," said the 76-year-old Wiseman, a Williams graduate. "I'm obviously in my film because I make the decisions, but I'm not physically in my films. And I don't make up anything."

Herzog was unavailable for an interview: "I am leaving for Europe tomorrow, and from there to Panama," he said in a brief e-mail. "Unfortunately, there is no real chance to reach me over the phone, and written answers would take too much time at the moment." (Williams organizers set up a miniature festival devoted to Herzog's work last April after he mistakenly arrived for this coming weekend's conference a year ahead of schedule.)

These days, "documentary film" covers everything from Michael Moore's latest provocation to a History Channel's account of the Battle of Midway. It applies to films appearing in art houses or mall theaters, productions financed by major studios, independent houses, cable channels and even broadcast TV networks.

"There are lots of different ways to make film," Wiseman said. "I don't believe there has to be any orthodox way to making movies, or any rules. It's what works for the filmmaker, and, theoretically, the audience."

And if you wanted to count shows like "The Real World," you could. Reality TV is merely an offshoot of what we once considered a documentary. Manufactured? Sure. But so are some of the more high-minded documentary productions. Herzog has said that artists can manipulate or even manufacture "facts" as a means of getting to larger truth. The style called cinema verite (true film), he said in a 1999 speech, "is devoid of verite. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants."

Wiseman calls those kind of comments "self-serving bull----." Scenes and scenarios, he insists, can't be invented in a documentary, even if it's done in pursuit of the elusive Big T.

"I think they are fiction films," Wiseman said of any documentary that uses fabricated scenes. "I like to represent in my films that the events you see in my film would have taken place if I had not made the film."

Which is, of course, an artistic choice as well as a journalistic one. Do people really behave in front of a camera crew -- even a very quiet one -- the way they would in private?

Films tell stories

"Documentarians are storytellers who tell stories about the real world," said Shawn Rosenheim, a Williams literature and film professor and one of the event's organizers. "I think it's a dangerous mistake on viewers' part or a filmmaker's part to think it could ever be disinterested or objective. Documentarians are (like newspaper) columnists."

Wiseman understands how the form has grown to stretch the border of the single term documentary.

"I don't know if it was ever satisfactory," said Wiseman, whose influential docs also include "High School," "Hospital" and the recent "Domestic Violence." "Even before the current batch of documentary films, there were people working all sort of different styles."

The rules for what differentiates a documentary from a fictional drama are steadily being rewritten. Some believe it's simply a matter of whether a film includes actors as opposed to the actual subjects.

"This category is very elastic now," said Faye Ginsburg, director of the Center for Media Culture and History at New York University. "People are pushing the boundary of the documentary form, and ... what someone in the past might have done with the documentary."

Ginsburg has spent the past decade researching indigenous people who have taken up new media technologies to tell their stories, primarily in Australia. What she found was surprising: The Aborigines are using fictional accounts rather than straight journalistic documentary recitations to tell their "true" story for the first time on film. ("The Fast Runner," a 2001 art-house hit from Canada, dramatized an Inuit legend using the sort of inexpensive cameras and nonprofessional performers who could just as easily have turned up in a documentary about modern Inuit life.)

"Every person has their very own peculiar definition of truth," Ginsburg said. "It's very murky."

Even though documentaries already have skittered in myriad stylistic directions, Wiseman believes the genre will continue to evolve.

"Novels have been written for hundreds of years, and people keep inventing new forms," Wiseman said. "The documentary is relatively new -- filmmaking is relatively new.

"Not every form of the novel was invented in the first 110 years."

Mark McGuire can be reached at 454-5467 or by e-mail at mmcguire@timesunion.com.