Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1923143
Annabelle Honess Roe
ABSTRACT This article refines previously made claims that evocative animated documentaries enable us to gain knowledge about unfamiliar states of mind and mental experiences through prompting our imagination. Building on recent scholarship in philosophy of mind, cognitive film theory and film and animation studies, I argue that it is evocative animated documentaries that do not, counterintuitively, invite audiences to identify or empathise with individual characters or documentary subjects that effectively prompt knowledge-through-imagination. This is because these films elicit a primarily epistemological rather than emotional response. The films in question, which include the Animated Minds films (2003–ongoing) and An Eyeful of Sound (Samantha Moore, 2010), feature documentary subjects that stand in for a mental health condition or psychological state that we are invited to primarily understand rather than feel. It is in this way that these evocative animated documentaries are less like fiction than their live-action documentary counterparts, despite their animated form. Applying philosophical ideas on the relationship between imagination and knowledge to a new filmic context, this article offers a way of understanding how these films work and how they are effective as documentaries of subjective, psychological experience
{"title":"Evocative animated documentaries, imagination and knowledge","authors":"Annabelle Honess Roe","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923143","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article refines previously made claims that evocative animated documentaries enable us to gain knowledge about unfamiliar states of mind and mental experiences through prompting our imagination. Building on recent scholarship in philosophy of mind, cognitive film theory and film and animation studies, I argue that it is evocative animated documentaries that do not, counterintuitively, invite audiences to identify or empathise with individual characters or documentary subjects that effectively prompt knowledge-through-imagination. This is because these films elicit a primarily epistemological rather than emotional response. The films in question, which include the Animated Minds films (2003–ongoing) and An Eyeful of Sound (Samantha Moore, 2010), feature documentary subjects that stand in for a mental health condition or psychological state that we are invited to primarily understand rather than feel. It is in this way that these evocative animated documentaries are less like fiction than their live-action documentary counterparts, despite their animated form. Applying philosophical ideas on the relationship between imagination and knowledge to a new filmic context, this article offers a way of understanding how these films work and how they are effective as documentaries of subjective, psychological experience","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"127 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923143","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41551174","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 : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142
Mario Slugan
ABSTRACT This article critiques existing textualist and extratextualist (intentionalist and reception-driven) approaches to capturing the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in philosophical and film scholarship on documentary and offers an alternative extratextualist approach dubbed institutionalism. I argue that textualist attempts fail because no textual element (presentational strategy, misrepresentation, staging, or indexicality) is necessarily either fictive or nonfictive. Intentionalism falls short because films can change their non/fictional status over time (e.g. phantom rides). Finally, reception-driven approaches confuse personal categorizations for public ones. The proposed institutionalism, by contrast, combines the strengths of moderate textualism and reception-driven theories (allowing for the changing status of documentary and nonfiction) with those of intentionalism (denying that some textual elements are necessarily fictive and others nonfictive) to capture the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction.
{"title":"Textualism, extratextualism, and the fiction/nonfiction distinction in documentary studies","authors":"Mario Slugan","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article critiques existing textualist and extratextualist (intentionalist and reception-driven) approaches to capturing the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in philosophical and film scholarship on documentary and offers an alternative extratextualist approach dubbed institutionalism. I argue that textualist attempts fail because no textual element (presentational strategy, misrepresentation, staging, or indexicality) is necessarily either fictive or nonfictive. Intentionalism falls short because films can change their non/fictional status over time (e.g. phantom rides). Finally, reception-driven approaches confuse personal categorizations for public ones. The proposed institutionalism, by contrast, combines the strengths of moderate textualism and reception-driven theories (allowing for the changing status of documentary and nonfiction) with those of intentionalism (denying that some textual elements are necessarily fictive and others nonfictive) to capture the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"114 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59978052","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 : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1923141
Mario Slugan, E. Terrone
Theories of documentary film oftentimes devote their opening pages to the distinction between fiction and documentary. In its earlier more radical instances, documentary theorists have claimed that discursivity itself i.e. the use of film tropes, introduces fictive elements into all films, documentaries included (Renov 1993). Later accounts have been more moderate in arguing that it is not discursivity in general but specific textual features such as the degree of fabrication that constitute fiction (Nichols 2017). But the fact remains that the current consensus in documentary studies is that the documentary/fiction distinction is a matter of degree rather than that of a firm boundary. Analytic aesthetics has also had a fruitful tradition of discussing the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Here, by contrast, earlier classic works (Currie 1990; Walton 1990) have established a firm boundary where fiction essentially involves imagining whereas nonfiction essentially involves believing. More recent authors like Stacie Friend (2012) and Derek Matravers (2014), however, have put this strict divide under pressure and the border appears more fluid than it was 30 years ago. Presently, then, documentary studies and analytic aesthetics appear to be closer than ever in their views on the fiction/nonfiction distinction, yet little dialogue exists between the two. This special issue aims to bolster the disciplines’ common ground as a step in that direction. In the case of analytic aesthetics, the debate has mostly focused on the fiction/nonfiction distinction in literary texts. Given that the latest accounts of documentaries have been developed some twenty years ago (Carroll 1997; Currie 1999; Plantinga 2005) this is a significant opportunity for analytic aesthetics to address documentaries as a paradigmatic case of nonfiction, and to engage with the latest scholarship in documentary studies. Reciprocally, documentary studies gain to benefit from engaging findings in analytic aesthetics, especially the claim that whether something is true or not is independent from whether something is fiction or not. This special issue has grown from the second Analytic Aesthetics and Film Studies in Conversation conference titled ‘Documentaries and the Fiction/Nonfiction Divide’ held at Queen Mary University of London, 15–16 November 2019 and sponsored by the British Society for Aesthetics. The issue brings together 3 documentary film scholars and 3 analytic aestheticians in conversation. Mario Slugan opens the issue with an
{"title":"The Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: Documentary Studies and Analytic Aesthetics in Conversation","authors":"Mario Slugan, E. Terrone","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923141","url":null,"abstract":"Theories of documentary film oftentimes devote their opening pages to the distinction between fiction and documentary. In its earlier more radical instances, documentary theorists have claimed that discursivity itself i.e. the use of film tropes, introduces fictive elements into all films, documentaries included (Renov 1993). Later accounts have been more moderate in arguing that it is not discursivity in general but specific textual features such as the degree of fabrication that constitute fiction (Nichols 2017). But the fact remains that the current consensus in documentary studies is that the documentary/fiction distinction is a matter of degree rather than that of a firm boundary. Analytic aesthetics has also had a fruitful tradition of discussing the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Here, by contrast, earlier classic works (Currie 1990; Walton 1990) have established a firm boundary where fiction essentially involves imagining whereas nonfiction essentially involves believing. More recent authors like Stacie Friend (2012) and Derek Matravers (2014), however, have put this strict divide under pressure and the border appears more fluid than it was 30 years ago. Presently, then, documentary studies and analytic aesthetics appear to be closer than ever in their views on the fiction/nonfiction distinction, yet little dialogue exists between the two. This special issue aims to bolster the disciplines’ common ground as a step in that direction. In the case of analytic aesthetics, the debate has mostly focused on the fiction/nonfiction distinction in literary texts. Given that the latest accounts of documentaries have been developed some twenty years ago (Carroll 1997; Currie 1999; Plantinga 2005) this is a significant opportunity for analytic aesthetics to address documentaries as a paradigmatic case of nonfiction, and to engage with the latest scholarship in documentary studies. Reciprocally, documentary studies gain to benefit from engaging findings in analytic aesthetics, especially the claim that whether something is true or not is independent from whether something is fiction or not. This special issue has grown from the second Analytic Aesthetics and Film Studies in Conversation conference titled ‘Documentaries and the Fiction/Nonfiction Divide’ held at Queen Mary University of London, 15–16 November 2019 and sponsored by the British Society for Aesthetics. The issue brings together 3 documentary film scholars and 3 analytic aestheticians in conversation. Mario Slugan opens the issue with an","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"107 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923141","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41477579","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 : 2021-04-16DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1913839
S. Venkatesan, R. James
ABSTRACT Although documentary filmmaking in India has a long tradition, one rarely sees any serious engagement with LGBTIQ issues. However, in the recent times, a new body of LGBTIQ documentaries either by heterosexual directors or by filmmakers who identify themselves as LGBTIQ, using a variety of formalistic styles, foreground intimate and multiple expressions of LGBTIQ subjectivities in their films. As a filmmaker who approaches LGBTIQ issues from inside out, Debalina Majumdar belongs to such a group of distinguished LGBTIQ filmmakers who documents homophobic violence, queer desires and forgotten queer histories. Her documentary films celebrate queer lives, emphasizes LGBTIQ rights and imagines queer futures through forging a nonconformist visual politics and through a range of poetic articulations. For her, filmmaking is a practice of reclaiming suppressed LGBTIQ desires as well as a mode of institutionalizing LGBTIQ identities. Debalina Majumdar in the present interview with Rajesh James and Sathyaraj Venkatesan discusses her filmic self, her engagement with LGBTIQ resistance movements in India and her documentary practices.
{"title":"Queering Indian documentary: an interview with Debalina Majumdar","authors":"S. Venkatesan, R. James","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1913839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1913839","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Although documentary filmmaking in India has a long tradition, one rarely sees any serious engagement with LGBTIQ issues. However, in the recent times, a new body of LGBTIQ documentaries either by heterosexual directors or by filmmakers who identify themselves as LGBTIQ, using a variety of formalistic styles, foreground intimate and multiple expressions of LGBTIQ subjectivities in their films. As a filmmaker who approaches LGBTIQ issues from inside out, Debalina Majumdar belongs to such a group of distinguished LGBTIQ filmmakers who documents homophobic violence, queer desires and forgotten queer histories. Her documentary films celebrate queer lives, emphasizes LGBTIQ rights and imagines queer futures through forging a nonconformist visual politics and through a range of poetic articulations. For her, filmmaking is a practice of reclaiming suppressed LGBTIQ desires as well as a mode of institutionalizing LGBTIQ identities. Debalina Majumdar in the present interview with Rajesh James and Sathyaraj Venkatesan discusses her filmic self, her engagement with LGBTIQ resistance movements in India and her documentary practices.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"271 - 280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1913839","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46744988","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 : 2021-03-30DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1908932
Miren Gutiérrez
ABSTRACT Data activism –or data-centered campaigning, mobilization, and research– is a hybrid, shifting endeavor. Data activist organizations are currently exploring new tools and languages to communicate findings and influence judicial and political processes. However, it is the method of turning data into a film that sets Forensic Architecture (FA) apart from other data activist endeavors. This article employs ideas from social movement and documentary studies to examine six films produced and disseminated by FA. These documentaries expose official corruption relating to abuse and killings in Burundi, Israel and Palestine, Syria, and the Mediterranean. The analysis employs the lenses of data activism and the meta-documentary to think about how FA uses participatory strategies, involves victims and human rights organizations, places science and technology at the center of its narratives, generates counter-stories implicating new data agents and methods, and uses a new fora to influence court cases and change the status quo. Ultimately, it illustrates the potential for impact offered by hybrid forms of data activism.
{"title":"Data activism and meta-documentary in six films by Forensic Architecture","authors":"Miren Gutiérrez","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1908932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1908932","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Data activism –or data-centered campaigning, mobilization, and research– is a hybrid, shifting endeavor. Data activist organizations are currently exploring new tools and languages to communicate findings and influence judicial and political processes. However, it is the method of turning data into a film that sets Forensic Architecture (FA) apart from other data activist endeavors. This article employs ideas from social movement and documentary studies to examine six films produced and disseminated by FA. These documentaries expose official corruption relating to abuse and killings in Burundi, Israel and Palestine, Syria, and the Mediterranean. The analysis employs the lenses of data activism and the meta-documentary to think about how FA uses participatory strategies, involves victims and human rights organizations, places science and technology at the center of its narratives, generates counter-stories implicating new data agents and methods, and uses a new fora to influence court cases and change the status quo. Ultimately, it illustrates the potential for impact offered by hybrid forms of data activism.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"32 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1908932","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43768631","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 : 2021-02-28DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1887989
S. Kishore
ABSTRACT What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities adapt documentary filmmaking to revise their historical conditions? The use of documentary filmmaking by Indian media collective Chalchitra Abhiyan responds to three historical circumstances: socially marginalised groups’ under-representation in media industries, their misrepresentation in mainstream media products and the systematic deployment of mainstream traditional and new media forms to promote religion-based constructions of Indian national identity. In this media ecology, community use of documentary functions for social transformation, through representation and the relationships, methods and practices defined by the needs and goals of otherwise marginalised communities (such as Dalits and Muslims) who use media for functions of visibility and counter-representation. Examining media production and circulation together with the arena of social relations, I contend that ‘embedded aesthetics’ of documentary in this setting involves a representational focus on the collective in agentive processes that use documentary to recognise, deconstruct and reinterpret an accepted victimhood into a form of resistance (Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. ‘Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.’ Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 365–82). Critiquing individualist social relations of mainstream media, concrete documentary practices re-organise digital and physical modes of media production and circulation by reference social and cultural functions, connecting filmmaking to lived histories of discrimination and possibilities of collective resistance.
{"title":"Re-framing documentary’s victims: documentary and collective victimhood at Indian media collective Chalchitra Abhiyan","authors":"S. Kishore","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1887989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1887989","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities adapt documentary filmmaking to revise their historical conditions? The use of documentary filmmaking by Indian media collective Chalchitra Abhiyan responds to three historical circumstances: socially marginalised groups’ under-representation in media industries, their misrepresentation in mainstream media products and the systematic deployment of mainstream traditional and new media forms to promote religion-based constructions of Indian national identity. In this media ecology, community use of documentary functions for social transformation, through representation and the relationships, methods and practices defined by the needs and goals of otherwise marginalised communities (such as Dalits and Muslims) who use media for functions of visibility and counter-representation. Examining media production and circulation together with the arena of social relations, I contend that ‘embedded aesthetics’ of documentary in this setting involves a representational focus on the collective in agentive processes that use documentary to recognise, deconstruct and reinterpret an accepted victimhood into a form of resistance (Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. ‘Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.’ Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 365–82). Critiquing individualist social relations of mainstream media, concrete documentary practices re-organise digital and physical modes of media production and circulation by reference social and cultural functions, connecting filmmaking to lived histories of discrimination and possibilities of collective resistance.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"14 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1887989","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47759360","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 : 2021-02-23DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1877525
Bill Nichols
ABSTRACT This article examines how documentary films begin. Narrative theory has identified the opening sequences of a narrative as where a lack calls for a response which then propels the hero to undertake various tasks to resolve problems posed by the lack. This often involves a quest and the construction of a complex course laden with obstacles and graced with assistance that allow the narrative to conclude by resolving the original lack. Attention, though, has focused both on narrative fiction and on the central portion of the narrative, where issues of gender, on the one hand, and focalization or voice, on the other, have received much attention. The beginning has received relatively slight scrutiny, especially in documentary. This paper addresses two primary questions: how exactly the beginning scenes in documentaries launch a narrative trajectory by altering our sense of time, and how these beginnings stress different narrative qualities from identifying a problem to establishing a mood. The article stresses the centrality of narrative to documentary and the vital role of the beginning plays to draw the viewer into a particular perspective on the historical world.
{"title":"In the beginning","authors":"Bill Nichols","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1877525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1877525","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines how documentary films begin. Narrative theory has identified the opening sequences of a narrative as where a lack calls for a response which then propels the hero to undertake various tasks to resolve problems posed by the lack. This often involves a quest and the construction of a complex course laden with obstacles and graced with assistance that allow the narrative to conclude by resolving the original lack. Attention, though, has focused both on narrative fiction and on the central portion of the narrative, where issues of gender, on the one hand, and focalization or voice, on the other, have received much attention. The beginning has received relatively slight scrutiny, especially in documentary. This paper addresses two primary questions: how exactly the beginning scenes in documentaries launch a narrative trajectory by altering our sense of time, and how these beginnings stress different narrative qualities from identifying a problem to establishing a mood. The article stresses the centrality of narrative to documentary and the vital role of the beginning plays to draw the viewer into a particular perspective on the historical world.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"34 1","pages":"83 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1877525","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59977621","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 : 2021-02-08DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1874236
Rachelle McCabe
ABSTRACT Joe Berlinger’s docu-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) explores the violence, victims, and social context of Ted Bundy’s crimes. The documentary critiques the ‘handsome genius’ image created by the media and recognizes the power of privilege within Bundy’s story. However, website reviews suggest conflicting readings of the documentary. They reveal that some viewer responses come from a reading of the text that relies more on their ingrained responses to the genre conventions of the documentary than the nuance Berlinger builds into the straight-forward narrative. In the process, these reviews show the potentially fraught emotional capability of the documentary, particularly when content focuses on well-known cases like Bundy’s. In addition, they expose the capability of true crime documentaries to produce necessary emotional responses in order to reframe established narratives.
{"title":"Conversations with a killer: the Ted Bundy tapes and affective responses to the true crime documentary","authors":"Rachelle McCabe","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1874236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1874236","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Joe Berlinger’s docu-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) explores the violence, victims, and social context of Ted Bundy’s crimes. The documentary critiques the ‘handsome genius’ image created by the media and recognizes the power of privilege within Bundy’s story. However, website reviews suggest conflicting readings of the documentary. They reveal that some viewer responses come from a reading of the text that relies more on their ingrained responses to the genre conventions of the documentary than the nuance Berlinger builds into the straight-forward narrative. In the process, these reviews show the potentially fraught emotional capability of the documentary, particularly when content focuses on well-known cases like Bundy’s. In addition, they expose the capability of true crime documentaries to produce necessary emotional responses in order to reframe established narratives.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"16 1","pages":"38 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1874236","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44493086","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 : 2021-02-08DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1883223
Dara Waldron
ABSTRACT This article explores Dónal Foreman’s 2018 essay film The Image You Missed through a trip-partite lens: sense, speculation and knowledge. Foreman navigates a life long relationship with a largely absent father, the deceased documentary filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, using a dialogic framework; an essay in the form of a conversation between Foreman and MacCaig. He turns to the essay to explore the paternal relationship as a conduit for others: sense and knowledge, documentary and reportage, speculation and fact. By exploring these in their various guises, this article argues that an aesthetically rendered image of MacCaig manifests (through audio interviews and texts that maintain the illusion of the father’s presence) as a residual haunting in the film: an affect of the archive. It is not Foreman’s aim, the article asserts, to cultivate a verifiably true image of his father from seen and unseen footage, but to ethically manufacture a dialogical conversation that involves thinking through the relationship itself. The article develops recent scholarship on the thinking of the essay film to explore the disjunctive relationship between sense and knowledge considered formative to the essay form.
{"title":"Sense-value and the essay film: the speculative dimension of Dónal Foreman’s The Image You Missed (2018)","authors":"Dara Waldron","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1883223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1883223","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores Dónal Foreman’s 2018 essay film The Image You Missed through a trip-partite lens: sense, speculation and knowledge. Foreman navigates a life long relationship with a largely absent father, the deceased documentary filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, using a dialogic framework; an essay in the form of a conversation between Foreman and MacCaig. He turns to the essay to explore the paternal relationship as a conduit for others: sense and knowledge, documentary and reportage, speculation and fact. By exploring these in their various guises, this article argues that an aesthetically rendered image of MacCaig manifests (through audio interviews and texts that maintain the illusion of the father’s presence) as a residual haunting in the film: an affect of the archive. It is not Foreman’s aim, the article asserts, to cultivate a verifiably true image of his father from seen and unseen footage, but to ethically manufacture a dialogical conversation that involves thinking through the relationship itself. The article develops recent scholarship on the thinking of the essay film to explore the disjunctive relationship between sense and knowledge considered formative to the essay form.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"1 - 13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1883223","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43766429","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 : 2021-01-27DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1877388
Roberto Arnau Roselló
ABSTRACT Interpretations of the past in audiovisual texts have increased exponentially in recent years, giving rise to the need to analyse a context saturated by visual representations of history that are replacing oral storytelling and traditional narratives. This article offers a reflection on the visual uses of memory and the representation of the past, focusing on documentary cinema at three different historical moments, based on the analysis of representative films from each period: first, the WWII propaganda documentary as the basis for propaganda film rhetoric in the transmission of history; second, the contemporary non-fiction film, in its self-reflexive, subjective essay form; and third, the web documentary as a more recent manifestation of a hybrid multimedia format that is essentially interpretative.
{"title":"Why remember? Representations of the past in non-fiction films: fabrication, re-construction and interpretation of the collective memory(s)","authors":"Roberto Arnau Roselló","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1877388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1877388","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Interpretations of the past in audiovisual texts have increased exponentially in recent years, giving rise to the need to analyse a context saturated by visual representations of history that are replacing oral storytelling and traditional narratives. This article offers a reflection on the visual uses of memory and the representation of the past, focusing on documentary cinema at three different historical moments, based on the analysis of representative films from each period: first, the WWII propaganda documentary as the basis for propaganda film rhetoric in the transmission of history; second, the contemporary non-fiction film, in its self-reflexive, subjective essay form; and third, the web documentary as a more recent manifestation of a hybrid multimedia format that is essentially interpretative.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"16 1","pages":"55 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1877388","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49594074","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}
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