Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2023.2185921
Aténé Mendelyté
ABSTRACT Seeing documentary film as an object for remembering and resurrecting the past is a complex issue touching upon questions pertaining to the ontology of photographic capturing, its ways of becoming an index, means of reinventing/fabricating the past through narrative and how such shared, cultural conventions impinge on the personal sphere, i.e. the singularity and authenticity of the experience preserved. While some past and present key media theorists regard such cinematization of memory as either a reduced or falsified form of pastness, I argue, employing Edward S. Casey’s influential phenomenological study of mnemonic modes and taking Aslaug Holm’s (auto)biographical documentary Brothers (Brødre, 2015) as an outstanding example, that documentary as an object perceived by a specific (not abstracted) consciousness is multiple and functions as a virtual reservoir for potential complex acts of memory to occur – it enlivens, not reduces one’s engagement with the past. Brothers is seen as both a form of reminiscence vehicle and commemoration vehicle. I furthermore identify a new mode of memory manifest in the film, not discussed by Casey, and its related object – anterior reminding and memento mori – which preserves the past and alludes to the future, this way determining what that past shall have been.
{"title":"Documentary film as memory/memento mori in Aslaug Holm’s Brothers (Brødre)","authors":"Aténé Mendelyté","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2185921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2185921","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Seeing documentary film as an object for remembering and resurrecting the past is a complex issue touching upon questions pertaining to the ontology of photographic capturing, its ways of becoming an index, means of reinventing/fabricating the past through narrative and how such shared, cultural conventions impinge on the personal sphere, i.e. the singularity and authenticity of the experience preserved. While some past and present key media theorists regard such cinematization of memory as either a reduced or falsified form of pastness, I argue, employing Edward S. Casey’s influential phenomenological study of mnemonic modes and taking Aslaug Holm’s (auto)biographical documentary Brothers (Brødre, 2015) as an outstanding example, that documentary as an object perceived by a specific (not abstracted) consciousness is multiple and functions as a virtual reservoir for potential complex acts of memory to occur – it enlivens, not reduces one’s engagement with the past. Brothers is seen as both a form of reminiscence vehicle and commemoration vehicle. I furthermore identify a new mode of memory manifest in the film, not discussed by Casey, and its related object – anterior reminding and memento mori – which preserves the past and alludes to the future, this way determining what that past shall have been.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"269 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42828503","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 : 2023-03-11DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2023.2185922
Andrew Simon Tucker, M. Kiss
ABSTRACT Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has brought forward numerous linearly structured 360° documentaries that maintain a close link to traditional documentary modes. More recently, we have observed a shift from the relatively passive 360° cinema towards more open-world, non-linear, game-like interactive experiences that challenge traditional definitions of the documentary genre. Volumetric world-building techniques provide nonfiction creators with additional tools that afford ‘viewer-users’ spatial and interactive agency, leading to a heightened autopoietic realisation of the storyworld. VRNF creators have the potential to allow their viewer-users enhanced control over framing, temporal ordering of the plot and spatial unfolding of the diegetic world, thus inviting them to become actual co-creators of a deeply personal and personalized experience. This article addresses how VRNF may go beyond the mere ‘documentation’ of people, places or past events that existed in a pre-filmic reality and provide viewer-users through augmented agency a unique present-tense autopoietic experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional 2D documentary.
{"title":"Autopoiesis through agency in virtual reality nonfiction","authors":"Andrew Simon Tucker, M. Kiss","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2185922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2185922","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has brought forward numerous linearly structured 360° documentaries that maintain a close link to traditional documentary modes. More recently, we have observed a shift from the relatively passive 360° cinema towards more open-world, non-linear, game-like interactive experiences that challenge traditional definitions of the documentary genre. Volumetric world-building techniques provide nonfiction creators with additional tools that afford ‘viewer-users’ spatial and interactive agency, leading to a heightened autopoietic realisation of the storyworld. VRNF creators have the potential to allow their viewer-users enhanced control over framing, temporal ordering of the plot and spatial unfolding of the diegetic world, thus inviting them to become actual co-creators of a deeply personal and personalized experience. This article addresses how VRNF may go beyond the mere ‘documentation’ of people, places or past events that existed in a pre-filmic reality and provide viewer-users through augmented agency a unique present-tense autopoietic experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional 2D documentary.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"285 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45935635","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 : 2023-02-15DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2023.2178609
R. Yosef
ABSTRACT This article explores the role of the affective experience of shame in Tomer Heymann’s documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life (2018) about internationally successful Israeli gay porn star Jonathan Agassi. It argues that by emphasizing shame as constitutive of Agassi’s queer identity, the film subverts the hypermasculine, Israeli, militarized image of his star persona. The film thus refuses to support the conservative trend of Israel’s LGBT community that aims to remove stigmas from gay identities within a logic of homonormative and homonational sexual politics of ‘pride.’ In this film, shame becomes a refuge, a site of solidarity and belonging for Agassi as well as for Heymann, the filmmaker. Both resist mainstream Israeli gay politics and refuse to adopt the sexual and national identity that this normative logic demands. The question of queer identity in the film is organized around the formative experience of shame and based on the relation to others. Thus, the film, in effect, produces a queer sociability and ethics in shame.
摘要本文探讨了羞耻的情感体验在Tomer Heymann的纪录片《Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life》(2018)中的作用,该纪录片讲述了国际上成功的以色列同性恋色情明星Jonathan Agasi。它认为,通过强调羞耻是阿加西酷儿身份的组成部分,这部电影颠覆了他明星形象中的超男性化、以色列化和军事化形象。因此,这部电影拒绝支持以色列LGBT群体的保守趋势,该趋势旨在在“骄傲”的同音同音性政治逻辑中消除同性恋身份的污名在这部电影中,羞耻感成为阿加西和电影制作人海曼的避难所,一个团结和归属的地方。两者都抵制以色列主流的同性恋政治,拒绝接受这种规范逻辑所要求的性和国家认同。电影中的酷儿身份问题是围绕着羞耻的形成经历组织起来的,并基于与他人的关系。因此,这部电影实际上产生了一种奇怪的社交能力和羞耻感。
{"title":"From homonationalism to shame in the Israeli documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life","authors":"R. Yosef","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2178609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2178609","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the role of the affective experience of shame in Tomer Heymann’s documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life (2018) about internationally successful Israeli gay porn star Jonathan Agassi. It argues that by emphasizing shame as constitutive of Agassi’s queer identity, the film subverts the hypermasculine, Israeli, militarized image of his star persona. The film thus refuses to support the conservative trend of Israel’s LGBT community that aims to remove stigmas from gay identities within a logic of homonormative and homonational sexual politics of ‘pride.’ In this film, shame becomes a refuge, a site of solidarity and belonging for Agassi as well as for Heymann, the filmmaker. Both resist mainstream Israeli gay politics and refuse to adopt the sexual and national identity that this normative logic demands. The question of queer identity in the film is organized around the formative experience of shame and based on the relation to others. Thus, the film, in effect, produces a queer sociability and ethics in shame.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"255 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42479870","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 : 2023-02-02DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2023.2167063
S. Kishore
ABSTRACT How can documentary film overcome ‘engagement at a distance' to perceptively express urban experience? In this article, I examine modes of sensory mode of spectatorial engagement in Cities of Sleep (Dir: Shaunak Sen, 2015) to foreground the place of the body and lived experience in portraying homelessness in Delhi. Drawing upon the concept of social aesthetics that recognises the perception of culturally patterned responses produced in socio-cultural environments as a form of knowledge about the world, I make two arguments. A corporeal focus on the sensuous body conveys urbanisms translated into effect, sensation, and behaviour that invite bodily connections with the documentary's traditional outsiders and victims. Next, by revealing individual negotiations with subjectivity, the film dismantles the notion of unified on-screen subjectivities to challenge audience expectations of a stable self in documentary representation. Instead, subjectivities are shown to respond to social experience, and everyday encounters, revealing a terrain of power relations experienced corporeally and emotionally. Political meaning, therefore, I contend derives not so much from the verifiable value of evidence or documentary transparency but from the act of feeling, sensing and perceiving which attempts to collapse our distance from a represented subject and world ‘out there’.
{"title":"Social aesthetics and an unreliable narrator: engaging with homelessness in Cities of Sleep","authors":"S. Kishore","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2167063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2167063","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How can documentary film overcome ‘engagement at a distance' to perceptively express urban experience? In this article, I examine modes of sensory mode of spectatorial engagement in Cities of Sleep (Dir: Shaunak Sen, 2015) to foreground the place of the body and lived experience in portraying homelessness in Delhi. Drawing upon the concept of social aesthetics that recognises the perception of culturally patterned responses produced in socio-cultural environments as a form of knowledge about the world, I make two arguments. A corporeal focus on the sensuous body conveys urbanisms translated into effect, sensation, and behaviour that invite bodily connections with the documentary's traditional outsiders and victims. Next, by revealing individual negotiations with subjectivity, the film dismantles the notion of unified on-screen subjectivities to challenge audience expectations of a stable self in documentary representation. Instead, subjectivities are shown to respond to social experience, and everyday encounters, revealing a terrain of power relations experienced corporeally and emotionally. Political meaning, therefore, I contend derives not so much from the verifiable value of evidence or documentary transparency but from the act of feeling, sensing and perceiving which attempts to collapse our distance from a represented subject and world ‘out there’.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"226 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43259772","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 : 2023-01-30DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2023.2169605
Xi W. Liu
ABSTRACT This article develops a non-representational queer approach to the analysis of first-person queer documentary. I suggest that a change of the view from investigating queer representations to exploring queer sensation may release the desire and repression that are both hidden and maintained with images of queerness. Queer sensation in this article refers to the existence of a complex relationship between queer and familial kinship, which affectively infiltrates the queer documentary. To chart queer sensation, I propose the notion of non-representational queer reading that foregrounds the approach of charting queer sensation rather than defining it. Non-representational queer reading comprises affect-based non-representational theory and the idea of queer reading. Non-representational queer reading queers the way of analysing queer documentary that follows the idea of mobility and flexibility as the essence of queerness. Utilising Wu Hao’s All in My Family (2019) as an example, I argue that Wu’s documentary sheds light on a complex queer sensation which not only overflows from the film but also pervades within the heterosexual-dominated Chinese society outside the screen.
{"title":"Queer sensation and non-representational queer reading: a case study of Wu Hao’s All in My Family","authors":"Xi W. Liu","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2169605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2169605","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article develops a non-representational queer approach to the analysis of first-person queer documentary. I suggest that a change of the view from investigating queer representations to exploring queer sensation may release the desire and repression that are both hidden and maintained with images of queerness. Queer sensation in this article refers to the existence of a complex relationship between queer and familial kinship, which affectively infiltrates the queer documentary. To chart queer sensation, I propose the notion of non-representational queer reading that foregrounds the approach of charting queer sensation rather than defining it. Non-representational queer reading comprises affect-based non-representational theory and the idea of queer reading. Non-representational queer reading queers the way of analysing queer documentary that follows the idea of mobility and flexibility as the essence of queerness. Utilising Wu Hao’s All in My Family (2019) as an example, I argue that Wu’s documentary sheds light on a complex queer sensation which not only overflows from the film but also pervades within the heterosexual-dominated Chinese society outside the screen.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"240 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48505076","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 : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2023.2170726
Pablo Alvarez
{"title":"Filming history from below: microhistorical documentaries","authors":"Pablo Alvarez","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2170726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2170726","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"97 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41619742","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2022.2140369
Kornelia Boczkowska
ABSTRACT Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from researchers, there are no accounts on how it links to experimental documentary film and avant-doc storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on cycling to discuss the rider’s embodied experience of travel in a few short and stylistically distinct works, Chuck Hudina’s Bicycle (1975), Jon Behrens’ Girl and a Bicycle (1995), Vanessa Renwick’s The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Ken Paul Rosenthal’s I My Bike (2002), Tomonari Nishikawa’s Into the Mass (2007) and Tony Hill’s Bike (2013). Despite a different format and narrative focus, which questions the genderedness of cycling, explores it in a trance and dreamlike state or turns it into the sheer spectacle of motion, all films echo the recent phenomenological turn in film studies and present cycling as a multisensorial, kinesthetic practice, demonstrating how the rider-bicycle hybrid assemblage relates to both cycling mobilities and the riding environment. Compared to narrative and fiction film, experimental documentary film looks at the bicycle identity as a distinctive subject of inquiry and maps cycling not so much through its traditional connotations as through the actual lived experience, one that is not necessarily already pre-determined, mediated and ideological.
{"title":"From naked bike rides to spectacles of motion: cycling and the rider-bicycle in experimental documentary film","authors":"Kornelia Boczkowska","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2022.2140369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2022.2140369","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from researchers, there are no accounts on how it links to experimental documentary film and avant-doc storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on cycling to discuss the rider’s embodied experience of travel in a few short and stylistically distinct works, Chuck Hudina’s Bicycle (1975), Jon Behrens’ Girl and a Bicycle (1995), Vanessa Renwick’s The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Ken Paul Rosenthal’s I My Bike (2002), Tomonari Nishikawa’s Into the Mass (2007) and Tony Hill’s Bike (2013). Despite a different format and narrative focus, which questions the genderedness of cycling, explores it in a trance and dreamlike state or turns it into the sheer spectacle of motion, all films echo the recent phenomenological turn in film studies and present cycling as a multisensorial, kinesthetic practice, demonstrating how the rider-bicycle hybrid assemblage relates to both cycling mobilities and the riding environment. Compared to narrative and fiction film, experimental documentary film looks at the bicycle identity as a distinctive subject of inquiry and maps cycling not so much through its traditional connotations as through the actual lived experience, one that is not necessarily already pre-determined, mediated and ideological.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"209 - 225"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45340302","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 : 2022-10-14DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2022.2135166
Kim Munro, Katy Morrison
ABSTRACT This article discusses a selection of interactive and immersive works from the past twenty years in Australia and argues that these have emerged from a specific cultural and geographical perspective in relation to space and place. In the context of settler colonial or migrant Australians, who have fraught and unresolved relationships to place, technologies that intervene with and implicate the audience can further expand documentary's capacity to frame, interpret and challenge these relationships. In this article, we discuss five specific interactive and immersive Australian documentary works. Each of these projects re-frames an encounter with space and place through the methods by which the participant-as-audience is situated in relation to the subject matter and virtual environment. The article explores the controversial asylum-seeker documentary game, Escape From Woomera ([2003]. Australia: EFW Collective); Lynette Wallworth's Collisions which recounts the atomic bomb testing in the desert (2012); Oscar Raby's examination of history, identity and witnessing, Assent (2013); Joan Ross's examination of the colonial relationship to the environment in Did you ask the river? (2019) and Tyson Mowarin's VR of the Ngarluma people of North Western Australia and the threats to their culture and land in the VR work Thalu: Dreamtime is Now (2018).
本文讨论了过去二十年来澳大利亚的互动和沉浸式作品,并认为这些作品是从与空间和地点有关的特定文化和地理角度出现的。在澳大利亚殖民者或移民的背景下,他们有令人担忧和未解决的关系,干预和暗示观众的技术可以进一步扩大纪录片的能力,以框架,解释和挑战这些关系。在这篇文章中,我们讨论了五个具体的互动和沉浸式澳大利亚纪录片作品。这些项目中的每一个都通过参与者作为观众与主题和虚拟环境的关系所处的方法,重新构建了与空间和地点的相遇。本文探讨了备受争议的寻求庇护者纪录片游戏《Escape From Woomera》([2003])。澳大利亚:EFW集团);Lynette Wallworth的《碰撞》(collision)讲述了沙漠中的原子弹试验(2012);奥斯卡·拉比对历史、身份和见证的审视,《同意》(2013);琼·罗斯在《你问河吗?(2019)和Tyson Mowarin在VR作品《Thalu: Dreamtime is Now》(2018)中讲述了澳大利亚西北部的Ngarluma人的VR以及他们的文化和土地所面临的威胁。
{"title":"Bodies in space: XR documentary in Australia","authors":"Kim Munro, Katy Morrison","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2022.2135166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2022.2135166","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses a selection of interactive and immersive works from the past twenty years in Australia and argues that these have emerged from a specific cultural and geographical perspective in relation to space and place. In the context of settler colonial or migrant Australians, who have fraught and unresolved relationships to place, technologies that intervene with and implicate the audience can further expand documentary's capacity to frame, interpret and challenge these relationships. In this article, we discuss five specific interactive and immersive Australian documentary works. Each of these projects re-frames an encounter with space and place through the methods by which the participant-as-audience is situated in relation to the subject matter and virtual environment. The article explores the controversial asylum-seeker documentary game, Escape From Woomera ([2003]. Australia: EFW Collective); Lynette Wallworth's Collisions which recounts the atomic bomb testing in the desert (2012); Oscar Raby's examination of history, identity and witnessing, Assent (2013); Joan Ross's examination of the colonial relationship to the environment in Did you ask the river? (2019) and Tyson Mowarin's VR of the Ngarluma people of North Western Australia and the threats to their culture and land in the VR work Thalu: Dreamtime is Now (2018).","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"190 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48094121","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 : 2022-09-23DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2022.2120380
Norman Zafra
ABSTRACT This research is a creative exploration of transmedia’s ability to offer up a model of distribution and audience engagement for political documentary. Transmedia, as is well known, is a fluid concept. It is not restricted to the activities of the entertainment industry and its principles also reverberate in the practice of political and activist documentary projects. This practice-led research draws on data derived from the production and circulation of Obrero, an independent transmedia documentary. The project explores the conditions and context of the Filipino rebuild workers who migrated to Christchurch, New Zealand after the earthquake in 2011. Obrero began as a film festival documentary that co-exists with two other new media iterations, each reaching its respective target audience: a web documentary, and a Facebook-native documentary. This study argues that relocating the documentary across new media spaces not only expands the narrative but also extends the fieldwork and investigation, forms like-minded publics, and affords the creation of an organised hub of information for researchers, academics and the general public. Treating documentary as research can represent a novel pathway to knowledge generation and the present case study, overall, provides an innovative model for future scholarship.
{"title":"From film to Web 2.0: transmedia as a distribution model for political documentary","authors":"Norman Zafra","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2022.2120380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2022.2120380","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This research is a creative exploration of transmedia’s ability to offer up a model of distribution and audience engagement for political documentary. Transmedia, as is well known, is a fluid concept. It is not restricted to the activities of the entertainment industry and its principles also reverberate in the practice of political and activist documentary projects. This practice-led research draws on data derived from the production and circulation of Obrero, an independent transmedia documentary. The project explores the conditions and context of the Filipino rebuild workers who migrated to Christchurch, New Zealand after the earthquake in 2011. Obrero began as a film festival documentary that co-exists with two other new media iterations, each reaching its respective target audience: a web documentary, and a Facebook-native documentary. This study argues that relocating the documentary across new media spaces not only expands the narrative but also extends the fieldwork and investigation, forms like-minded publics, and affords the creation of an organised hub of information for researchers, academics and the general public. Treating documentary as research can represent a novel pathway to knowledge generation and the present case study, overall, provides an innovative model for future scholarship.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"172 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42448532","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}