P.S.1’s new group exhibition, “Reprocessing Reality,” is founded on a cumbersome observation. Documentary film, increasingly important in its own right, is also being used, now, as an element in fictional works. The relevance of this notion to contemporary art is indisputable.

The exhibition occupies a large gallery on the museum’s third floor, but similar artworks can be found throughout the building. For example, on the second floor, “Magical World” (2005), an entrancing, redemptive film by Johanna Billing, masquerades as a documentary of a children’s music class. It is staged specifically for Ms. Billing’s film, however: She uses the form and logic of documentary film to shape her otherwise formless fiction. Elsewhere, Kon Trubkovich’s fuzzy gray drawings are based on photographs of the graveyard around Little Big Horn, and even some of the photographs in the Wolfgang Tillmans show – I’m thinking of the “Empire” series – have been reprocessed, passed through scanners and fax machines, so that they resemble the grainy images of historical archives. These works seem to try on the tattered mantle of historical footage, and not just for political reasons. In fact, they seem to enjoy the aesthetic of documentary footage.

What about the works in the current show? They can be divided into three groups.The first recycles old documentary footage. The second includes documentaries that have no point except as art. The third and most interesting uses the logic of documentary for fictional ends – making documentaries, in other words, that are not quite true.

In the category of recycled footage, the exhibition’s curator, Claudia Spinelli, and her partners at the Swiss international film festival Visions du Reel turn to images of the Third World. Remy Markowitsch takes photographs from Claude Levi-Strauss’s memoir, “Tristes Tropiques,” refiguring them as tinted prints that look like postcards. In the next room, an installation by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi (2002-04) features four screens showing footage of tribesmen and white people at play. The tribesman are blurry; the white people are in sharper focus. Perhaps this is a comment on the quality of portable cameras in the field, in the early years of documentary.

Though these installations reuse old footage, they do not quote the footage as evidence toward some further statement. Rather, they inevitably dwell on the formal fact of documentary footage. In short, they are pedantic.

Far more interesting are the documentaries that have no point except as art. Willie Doherty’s “Blackspot” (1997) shows an almost static video of what looks like a nice London suburb at sunset. Surprisingly, the neighborhood is filmed from a high vantage point, far above the peaked roofs of the close-packed two-story houses. As a result, the frame seems to show a map, static except for the occasional car coming home from work. As the sun goes down, the neighborhood fades from blue to a black, accented by yellow streetlights and windows. The effect is tranquil. The camera feels not like a surveillance device but, perhaps because of the neatly framed houses, like a benevolent sentry.

In the same room, Christoph Buchel’s “AC-130 Gunship Targeting Video (Afghanistan 12/6/2002)” (2004) strikes a different tone. It is exactly what it says it is. Though intensely interesting – not least for the audible radio chatter – Mr. Buchel’s piece adds little to the exhibition’s conversation about documentary.

Several original works use the logic of documentary without actually documenting anything. Christoph Draeger’s absorbing series of photographs, “Voyages Apocalyptiques” (1994-2006), is easily the most valuable political art in the exhibition. Mr. Draeger’s photographs show the site of a disaster after the fact. We see a small Swiss town amid verdant summertime slopes, but read that this was the site of a terrible avalanche. Images of Hiroshima in 1995, or Halifax decades after an accidental explosion destroyed half the city, are similarly affecting. Haunting is not the word for these photos; though they testify to the ubiquity of disaster, these photos also give evidence of the resiliency of nature and commerce, in spite of memory. Mr. Draeger’s work shares some of Mr. Doherty’s abiding peacefulness.

The show’s most succinct statement, Ingrid Wildi’s video “Si c’est elle” (2000), is also the most purely fictional. Using the documentary convention of the talking head, Ms. Wildi interpolates interviews with three men, each of whom is describing a woman. Though the three seem to be talking about different women, the viewer can’t help but think they’re arguing with each other – “Yes, it is she,” each seems to claim. Their evocative way of describing “she” comes straight from the documentary tradition. Ms. Wildi is the only artist in the exhibition who uses that tradition for ends that are purely her own.

All these artworks appeal to the idea of truth without claiming to be true. If something looks grainy, then to us it looks real. If a dialogue is conducted like an interview, rather than like a scripted play, then we pay a different kind of attention. However meta they may be, do these techniques really differ in purpose from the discovery of perspective, or any other realist technique? This art just wants to be real.

Until May 29 (22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue, Queens, 718-784-2084).