Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1720086
Zhen Zhang
ABSTRACT This article highlights pioneering dancer, choreographer, and multi-media artist Wen Hui's unique contribution to Chinese independent cinema and first person documentary by analyzing her two films made with her ‘forgotten’ third grandmother. The close reading is grounded in her explorations in intermedia performance and documentary theater centered on body as archive of memory and women's experience. I argue that Listening to Third Grandmother and Dancing with the Third Grandma experiment with an intimate-public camera for constructing a female kinship outside the patriarchal family tree and re-writing women's history through oral storytelling and choreography of the everyday.
{"title":"Staging the intimate-public camera: Wen Hui’s documentary practice with her third grandmother","authors":"Zhen Zhang","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1720086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720086","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article highlights pioneering dancer, choreographer, and multi-media artist Wen Hui's unique contribution to Chinese independent cinema and first person documentary by analyzing her two films made with her ‘forgotten’ third grandmother. The close reading is grounded in her explorations in intermedia performance and documentary theater centered on body as archive of memory and women's experience. I argue that Listening to Third Grandmother and Dancing with the Third Grandma experiment with an intimate-public camera for constructing a female kinship outside the patriarchal family tree and re-writing women's history through oral storytelling and choreography of the everyday.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"20 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720086","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47386771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1720091
J. Anderson
ABSTRACT An Asian woman filmmaker whose work is celebrated and financed in Europe yet produced in her hometown of Nara, Japan, Kawase Naomi's creative trajectory is often made to trace an economy of ‘world cinema’ sketching constructions of gender, race and nation in uneasy relation to actual patterns of reception and production. While her early self-documentary shorts are described according to artistic vision, her later arthouse features are judged for their circulation on the international film festival circuit. Yet these impulses toward aesthetic and institutional analysis are seldom integrated into a critical appreciation of the breadth of Kawase's work. This article examines a transitional period of the director's filmography in which scenes of home birth repeat across her dramatic and documentary work, placing them in context with discourses of self-documentary and personal filmmaking that aestheticize birth and sex to interrogate the act of self-expression, and challenge gendered constructions of the artist and formation of a ‘natural’ life against a cultural mainstream. While her work is criticized as narcissistically apolitical by a masculinist domestic film culture, approaching Kawase's material and institutional self-inscription reveals a feminist mediation in productive tension with neoliberal globalization's cinema of regional consumption.
{"title":"Home birth, world cinema: Kawase Naomi's films in circulation","authors":"J. Anderson","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1720091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720091","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT An Asian woman filmmaker whose work is celebrated and financed in Europe yet produced in her hometown of Nara, Japan, Kawase Naomi's creative trajectory is often made to trace an economy of ‘world cinema’ sketching constructions of gender, race and nation in uneasy relation to actual patterns of reception and production. While her early self-documentary shorts are described according to artistic vision, her later arthouse features are judged for their circulation on the international film festival circuit. Yet these impulses toward aesthetic and institutional analysis are seldom integrated into a critical appreciation of the breadth of Kawase's work. This article examines a transitional period of the director's filmography in which scenes of home birth repeat across her dramatic and documentary work, placing them in context with discourses of self-documentary and personal filmmaking that aestheticize birth and sex to interrogate the act of self-expression, and challenge gendered constructions of the artist and formation of a ‘natural’ life against a cultural mainstream. While her work is criticized as narcissistically apolitical by a masculinist domestic film culture, approaching Kawase's material and institutional self-inscription reveals a feminist mediation in productive tension with neoliberal globalization's cinema of regional consumption.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"50 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720091","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45357006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1720090
G. Marchetti
ABSTRACT Hooligan Sparrow (2016) serves as a first-person account of the director Nanfu Wang's struggle to produce a film deemed politically sensitive in mainland China, including her encounters with various official and undercover security forces attempting to suppress feminist activist Ye Haiyan (Hooligan Sparrow)'s quest for justice for underage victims of sexual abuse in China. This article explores the roots of Wang's approach to feminist, first-person documentary practice, its value for understanding women's activism in China and the implications of Wang's decision to address her audience in English rather than Chinese. The significance of the nature of the first-person address to a viewership outside of China becomes an integral part of this examination of the encounter between personal filmmaking and transnational feminist activism. The construction of the woman filmmaker as a protagonist in feminist documentary practice intersects with the role of first-person narration within ‘accented’ and diasporic filmmaking traditions in Hooligan Sparrow. The political implications of including the filmmaker as a narrator in telling the stories of others and the ways in which transnational feminist connections arise through stories told by women within and outside the People's Republic of China complicate the politics of first-person documentary filmmaking for women in Asia.
{"title":"Feminist activism in the first person: an analysis of Nanfu Wang's Hooligan Sparrow (2016)","authors":"G. Marchetti","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1720090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720090","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Hooligan Sparrow (2016) serves as a first-person account of the director Nanfu Wang's struggle to produce a film deemed politically sensitive in mainland China, including her encounters with various official and undercover security forces attempting to suppress feminist activist Ye Haiyan (Hooligan Sparrow)'s quest for justice for underage victims of sexual abuse in China. This article explores the roots of Wang's approach to feminist, first-person documentary practice, its value for understanding women's activism in China and the implications of Wang's decision to address her audience in English rather than Chinese. The significance of the nature of the first-person address to a viewership outside of China becomes an integral part of this examination of the encounter between personal filmmaking and transnational feminist activism. The construction of the woman filmmaker as a protagonist in feminist documentary practice intersects with the role of first-person narration within ‘accented’ and diasporic filmmaking traditions in Hooligan Sparrow. The political implications of including the filmmaker as a narrator in telling the stories of others and the ways in which transnational feminist connections arise through stories told by women within and outside the People's Republic of China complicate the politics of first-person documentary filmmaking for women in Asia.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"30 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720090","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59977481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1720093
Tze-lan Sang
ABSTRACT Touted as a representative of the ‘Me’ generation of documentary makers in twenty-first-century Taiwan, Wuna Wu has appeared as both filmmaker and social actor in her documentaries. Even when the ostensible subject matter of the film is not Wu, she has often inserted herself into the story and the frame. This raises questions of why she elects to be visible to the documentary viewer, what her visibility and performativity in front of the camera allows her to achieve, and what she gains by using a first-person voiceover narration. This essay examines Wu’s first-person positioning in three prize-winning documentaries: Happy or Not (2002), Farewell 1999 (2003) and Let’s Fall in Love (2008) and argues that she has experimented with a wide variety of first-person positionings, ranging from that which renders her vulnerable to that which self-empowers. Her diverse first-person approaches underscore the question of documentary ethics, the importance of mediation for self-identity, and the opportunities for building sociality and community through documentary. Her first-person films bring out the interconnectedness between self and other, providing a window on the residual effects, in modern Taiwan, of the Confucian concept of the self as relationally defined.
{"title":"The many ways of speaking as ‘I’: Wuna Wu’s first-person documentaries from Taiwan","authors":"Tze-lan Sang","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1720093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720093","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Touted as a representative of the ‘Me’ generation of documentary makers in twenty-first-century Taiwan, Wuna Wu has appeared as both filmmaker and social actor in her documentaries. Even when the ostensible subject matter of the film is not Wu, she has often inserted herself into the story and the frame. This raises questions of why she elects to be visible to the documentary viewer, what her visibility and performativity in front of the camera allows her to achieve, and what she gains by using a first-person voiceover narration. This essay examines Wu’s first-person positioning in three prize-winning documentaries: Happy or Not (2002), Farewell 1999 (2003) and Let’s Fall in Love (2008) and argues that she has experimented with a wide variety of first-person positionings, ranging from that which renders her vulnerable to that which self-empowers. Her diverse first-person approaches underscore the question of documentary ethics, the importance of mediation for self-identity, and the opportunities for building sociality and community through documentary. Her first-person films bring out the interconnectedness between self and other, providing a window on the residual effects, in modern Taiwan, of the Confucian concept of the self as relationally defined.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"63 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720093","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49460606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1720085
K. Yu, Alisa Lebow
This Special Issue of Studies in Documentary Film focuses on a specific practice in nonwestern documentary cinema, women’s first person documentary from East Asia. Investigating this exciting area with aesthetically innovative, and socially challenging practices, it aims to contribute to our knowledge of the ways in which women filmmakers use their cameras to access both intimate and public spaces, and how first person filmmaking practices help us understand what it means to be a feminist, a filmmaker, and most of all, a woman, in this region. With academic literature on first person documentary practice and personal cinema developing at a rapid rate, current studies have contributed significantly to understanding the motivations, patterns, and the construction of self in this practice. While the majority of studies have in large part focused on Western cultural expression (Renov 1996, 2004, 2008; Lebow 2008; Rascaroli 2009, 2017), there have been some notable exceptions. In Rachel Gabara’s monograph From Split to Screened Selves (2006), Francophone North and West African first person works, including films, are examined in conversation with those made by French-born writers and filmmakers, all read through a post-colonial lens. An influential volume in the field, Alisa Lebow’s edited collection The Cinema of Me (2012) includes studies of first person films from India, Brazil, Argentina and Palestine, among other places. Theorising under China’s individualisation process, Kiki Tianqi Yu’s groundbreaking monograph ‘My’ Self on Camera (2019a) explores contemporary first person documentary practice in mainland China. Analysing how filmmakers make socially and culturally rooted ethical and aesthetic choices, it argues that the Confucian concept of the relational self still largely underpins how individuals understand the self. Yu continues to explore the aesthetics of first person expression in recent ‘image writing’ practice, investigating what the essayistic means through the Chinese literary tradition (2019b). Lebow’s recent work on the outpouring of first person films from postrevolution Egypt, (2018, 2020), is another example of this impulse to expand the field of inquiry well beyond limited Western paradigms. This special issue represents the continuation of this desire to explore articulations of the first person in film specifically by women filmmakers, working in the geographical regions of East Asia, primarily mainland China, Taiwan and Japan. Taking this as its site of focus, this volume explores the multiple social practices and productive forces that inhere in the filmic production of the individuated – female – subject in nonwestern, specifically East Asian, cultures.
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Pub Date : 2019-12-17DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1696146
Joscelyn Jurich
ABSTRACT Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary ‘Haunted’ (2014) follows nine individuals’ experiences of home, including a couple in Damascus that remain trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian of Palestinian descent who fled from Syria to Lebanon and a Syrian refugee family temporarily inhabiting a former prison. Similar to a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117), Yazji guides viewers through multiple digital, geographical and affective spaces. This article demonstrates Yazji’s documentary as concerned with longstanding anthropological questions about possession, kinship, remains, the everyday and the temporal and as a work of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press) that emerges from the filmmaker’s personal experience of displacement and migration, and focuses on journeying, home-seeking, homelessness, rootedness and dislocation. It argues her film’s ethnographic way of seeing and sensing problematizes categories of poetic documentary and visual and sensory ethnography. The article explains its importance for scholars of forced migration, conflict and the after-effects of violence and for problematizing the definition of ethnographic film and its power in conveying the plurality of the world (Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press), one currently largely inaccessible to ethnographers, filmmakers and journalists.
{"title":"Poetic documentary as visual ethnography: Liwaa Yazji’s Haunted (Maskoon) (2014)","authors":"Joscelyn Jurich","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1696146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1696146","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary ‘Haunted’ (2014) follows nine individuals’ experiences of home, including a couple in Damascus that remain trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian of Palestinian descent who fled from Syria to Lebanon and a Syrian refugee family temporarily inhabiting a former prison. Similar to a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117), Yazji guides viewers through multiple digital, geographical and affective spaces. This article demonstrates Yazji’s documentary as concerned with longstanding anthropological questions about possession, kinship, remains, the everyday and the temporal and as a work of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press) that emerges from the filmmaker’s personal experience of displacement and migration, and focuses on journeying, home-seeking, homelessness, rootedness and dislocation. It argues her film’s ethnographic way of seeing and sensing problematizes categories of poetic documentary and visual and sensory ethnography. The article explains its importance for scholars of forced migration, conflict and the after-effects of violence and for problematizing the definition of ethnographic film and its power in conveying the plurality of the world (Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press), one currently largely inaccessible to ethnographers, filmmakers and journalists.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"41 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1696146","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48311123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-27DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1696147
Kornelia Boczkowska
ABSTRACT The emergence of post-media aesthetics and hybrid media culture marked by media convergence as well as diachronic and synchronic hybridization has resulted in an ongoing re-evaluation, re-contextualization and re-mobilization of the city symphony film’s practices, which offer novel cinematic experiences by abandoning the genre’s traditional narrative trajectory or editing patterns and replacing them with new digital forms. Following this trend, I analyze the ways in which Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill and Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake operate within the post-digital sublime and database documentary framework, and consequently play with or critique the standard city symphony format and message centered around the concept of decay or kino-eye. Particularly, both works oppose the genre’s traditional montage and postmodern aesthetics by means of database and interactive storytelling, and instead rely on the mutability of the digital image and image-altering software, which seemingly lacks or merely imitates the sublime. To counteract this effect, the post-digital sublime takes a participatory form and is based on enquiry and discovery (Tracing) or novelty, invention and surprise (The Global Remake) rather than boredom and repetition traditionally associated with an unbounded potential of technology and the banal.
{"title":"From master narratives to DIY stories: on the post-digital sublime and database documentary in two city symphony films","authors":"Kornelia Boczkowska","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1696147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1696147","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The emergence of post-media aesthetics and hybrid media culture marked by media convergence as well as diachronic and synchronic hybridization has resulted in an ongoing re-evaluation, re-contextualization and re-mobilization of the city symphony film’s practices, which offer novel cinematic experiences by abandoning the genre’s traditional narrative trajectory or editing patterns and replacing them with new digital forms. Following this trend, I analyze the ways in which Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill and Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake operate within the post-digital sublime and database documentary framework, and consequently play with or critique the standard city symphony format and message centered around the concept of decay or kino-eye. Particularly, both works oppose the genre’s traditional montage and postmodern aesthetics by means of database and interactive storytelling, and instead rely on the mutability of the digital image and image-altering software, which seemingly lacks or merely imitates the sublime. To counteract this effect, the post-digital sublime takes a participatory form and is based on enquiry and discovery (Tracing) or novelty, invention and surprise (The Global Remake) rather than boredom and repetition traditionally associated with an unbounded potential of technology and the banal.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"59 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1696147","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48735279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-14DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1678562
Ana Catarina Pereira
ABSTRACT Rhoma Acans and Batrachian’s Ballad are the only two short feature films directed by Leonor Teles. In 2018, she premiers Terra Franca in Festival Cinema du Réel, in Paris. Nevertheless, at the age of 23 she was already the youngest filmmaker to be awarded in Berlin. Rejecting labels and the burden of a representation, she devotes her attention in films to a community to which she does not belong, but which is part of her identity. Despite her Romany paternal ancestry, Leonor Teles didn't receive a gypsy education, but her documentary curiosity made her question what her life would have been if her mother had also been a gypsy, debating gender and feminist issues. On the other hand, a dissertation around two films, one made in an academic context, and the other in a premature stage of her career, is an attempt of keeping the balance between the expectations that the awards are creating and the destructive criticism towards such a young artist. In structural terms, after a contextual approach, we will try to analyse her second film in a dialogue between the issues and the treatment of memory as the product of an inherent and artistic subjectivity.
{"title":"And then the frog became a bear … a golden bearLeonor Teles, or the story of a young filmmaker who was awarded in Berlin","authors":"Ana Catarina Pereira","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1678562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678562","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Rhoma Acans and Batrachian’s Ballad are the only two short feature films directed by Leonor Teles. In 2018, she premiers Terra Franca in Festival Cinema du Réel, in Paris. Nevertheless, at the age of 23 she was already the youngest filmmaker to be awarded in Berlin. Rejecting labels and the burden of a representation, she devotes her attention in films to a community to which she does not belong, but which is part of her identity. Despite her Romany paternal ancestry, Leonor Teles didn't receive a gypsy education, but her documentary curiosity made her question what her life would have been if her mother had also been a gypsy, debating gender and feminist issues. On the other hand, a dissertation around two films, one made in an academic context, and the other in a premature stage of her career, is an attempt of keeping the balance between the expectations that the awards are creating and the destructive criticism towards such a young artist. In structural terms, after a contextual approach, we will try to analyse her second film in a dialogue between the issues and the treatment of memory as the product of an inherent and artistic subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"246 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678562","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48773764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-22DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1663718
Nea Ehrlich
ABSTRACT This article explores the relation between the rise of animation in digital culture to shifting notions of realism in animated documentaries. Realism is addressed as a representational choice as well as a political goal and is defined as the believable articulation of reality. By placing issues of credibility and the viewer’s role as arbiter of the work’s truth value in relation to contemporary notions of ‘truthiness’ (that are based on the viewer’s belief system rather than on fact) the article analyzes animated documentaries in the wider atmosphere of post-truth. I focus on two conflicting theorizations of realism: realism as the familiar and easily read vs. realism as de-familiarization. Whereas only a decade ago animated documentaries were deemed oxymoronic by many, as the sub-genre of animated documentaries proliferates it risks losing its critical potential and becoming an easy way to promote misinformation for viewers who cease to question the representation that becomes ‘invisible’ due to common use. That said, animated documentaries that creatively combine varied visual styles and intentionally disrupt viewing have the potential to de-familiarize by accentuating the representational choices made, which is crucial for engaging, critically evaluating information and creating counter narratives in a post-truth era.
{"title":"Conflicting realisms: animated documentaries in the post-truth era","authors":"Nea Ehrlich","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1663718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1663718","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the relation between the rise of animation in digital culture to shifting notions of realism in animated documentaries. Realism is addressed as a representational choice as well as a political goal and is defined as the believable articulation of reality. By placing issues of credibility and the viewer’s role as arbiter of the work’s truth value in relation to contemporary notions of ‘truthiness’ (that are based on the viewer’s belief system rather than on fact) the article analyzes animated documentaries in the wider atmosphere of post-truth. I focus on two conflicting theorizations of realism: realism as the familiar and easily read vs. realism as de-familiarization. Whereas only a decade ago animated documentaries were deemed oxymoronic by many, as the sub-genre of animated documentaries proliferates it risks losing its critical potential and becoming an easy way to promote misinformation for viewers who cease to question the representation that becomes ‘invisible’ due to common use. That said, animated documentaries that creatively combine varied visual styles and intentionally disrupt viewing have the potential to de-familiarize by accentuating the representational choices made, which is crucial for engaging, critically evaluating information and creating counter narratives in a post-truth era.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"20 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1663718","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47543705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-09DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1663589
Renan Paiva Chaves, Gabriel Kitofi Tonelo, Deane Williams
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the autobiographical documentaries My Survival as an Aboriginal (1978) and My life as I live it (1993), by Essie Coffey. We aim to localize Coffey’s work historiographically and theoretically in relation to American, European, Australian and Latin American documentary traditions, pointing out aspects of racial and gender identity and class alterity. Our analysis of these films indicates innovative methodological and thematic intersections between autobiographical narratives and social and race issues as well as highlighting the potential autobiographical narratives have to update both personal issues and issues of collectivity.
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