Pub Date : 2020-05-13DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1762318
Wakae Nakane
In what capacity does the documentary engage in public dialogue for creating social change? Conditioned by the broadly shared ontological understanding of documentary's indexicality to the lived wo...
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Pub Date : 2020-05-12DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1762319
B. Winston
George Stony, pioneer of interactive media-making, felt that he had spent his life filming documentaries about other people that they should have made for themselves. Perhaps this regret applies no...
{"title":"Beyond observation: A history of authorship in ethnographic film","authors":"B. Winston","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1762319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1762319","url":null,"abstract":"George Stony, pioneer of interactive media-making, felt that he had spent his life filming documentaries about other people that they should have made for themselves. Perhaps this regret applies no...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"280 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1762319","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49475116","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 : 2020-05-03DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1678561
Dale Hudson
ABSTRACT Examining four interactive documentaries, this article analyzes how performance and mediation can encourage curosity, empathy, and accountability in relation to complex issues and perspectives that cannot be always represented with any pretense of objectivity or ethics in conventional analogue practices. They can foreground emotional and affective registers as meaningful – sometimes more meaningful than the empirical and rational registers typically prioritized in analogue media. They model a critical engagement with digital evidence, tactile interfaces, and locative experiences to navigate a postcolonial/transnational United States and allow for potentially multi-perspectival understandings of issues. Documentary studies historically focused on visible or audible evidence. It has paid less attention to invisible and inaudible evidence. By activating invisible geographies, interactive documentaries facilitate new ways of imagining relationships and new ways of enacting collaborative solutions to problems that are larger than any one of us. They can instruct in ways to navigate larger processes, such as forced migration and global warming. Rather than the universalizing revolutions of past centuries – industrial revolutions, anticolonial revolutions – the current moment demands micro-revolutions and micro-assemblies. In addition to devoting our intellectual energies and financial resources in 360° VR as a new mode for documentary presentation, we can focus on less expensive technologies that allow underrepresented perspectives to affect audiences.
{"title":"Interactive documentary at the intersection of performance and mediation: navigating ‘invisible’ histories and ‘inaudible’ stories in the United States","authors":"Dale Hudson","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1678561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678561","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Examining four interactive documentaries, this article analyzes how performance and mediation can encourage curosity, empathy, and accountability in relation to complex issues and perspectives that cannot be always represented with any pretense of objectivity or ethics in conventional analogue practices. They can foreground emotional and affective registers as meaningful – sometimes more meaningful than the empirical and rational registers typically prioritized in analogue media. They model a critical engagement with digital evidence, tactile interfaces, and locative experiences to navigate a postcolonial/transnational United States and allow for potentially multi-perspectival understandings of issues. Documentary studies historically focused on visible or audible evidence. It has paid less attention to invisible and inaudible evidence. By activating invisible geographies, interactive documentaries facilitate new ways of imagining relationships and new ways of enacting collaborative solutions to problems that are larger than any one of us. They can instruct in ways to navigate larger processes, such as forced migration and global warming. Rather than the universalizing revolutions of past centuries – industrial revolutions, anticolonial revolutions – the current moment demands micro-revolutions and micro-assemblies. In addition to devoting our intellectual energies and financial resources in 360° VR as a new mode for documentary presentation, we can focus on less expensive technologies that allow underrepresented perspectives to affect audiences.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"128 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678561","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44288117","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 : 2020-05-03DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1614269
Liat Savin Ben Shoshan
ABSTRACT This article examines documentary diary and essay films made in Israel/Palestine from 1973–2009, where windows play a central role as architectural elements, cinematic frames and embodiments of the relations between the private and public spheres. The films represent personal, artistic and political turning points: David Perlov's Diary, made in 1973–1977, began with the transformative event of the 1973 war, the film was a turning point in Israeli filmmaking which had until then consisted primarily of Zionist social realist documentaries and popular dramas; Michel Khleifi's Fertile Memory (1980), the director's feature documentary debut, it marked the beginning of a new period in Palestinian filmmaking, by its focus on personal rather than collective. The third example is Anat Even's Closure (2009), a camera positioned on a window reflects on death, loss and transformations in urban history. In all films, the window is both a physical and a symbolic space, mediating private and political, constituting a new material awareness of their interrelations, which is eliminated in contemporary technology based communication. The encounter between camera, window, and viewer reflects and facilitates the act of observing and engaging with conflicts, arguing that it is an opportunity for both self-reflection and political critique.
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Pub Date : 2020-05-03DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1678560
M. Hofmann
ABSTRACT Contemporary documentary films are faced with the challenge of an oversaturation of certain images that have lost all power. One strategy to address this issue is the employment of artifice, the obvious and unconcealed manipulation of images. Films of what I call Indirect Cinema escalate this strategy by avoiding direct representation altogether. One example of this development is the film Kurz davor ist es passiert (2006) by Anja Salomonowitz about human trafficking in Austria. The film showcases stories of different instances of human trafficking that are not told by the victims themselves; instead, random Austrians recite their statements verbatim while carrying out their everyday tasks. The artifice of the scenes disrupts the reception by emotionally distancing the viewer from the suffering of the victim. Transferring the statements from one medium, and from one body, to another avoids an overwhelming emotional response. The forced dislocation of the viewer allows a space of critical awareness to emerge in which one can reflect upon the politics and boundaries of representation. After a brief overview of Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité as a point of departure, I give a close analysis of Kurz davor as a paradigmatic example of Indirect Cinema.
摘要当代纪录片面临着某些图像过度饱和的挑战，这些图像已经失去了所有的力量。解决这一问题的一个策略是使用技巧，即对图像的明显和毫不掩饰的操纵。我称之为间接电影的电影通过完全避免直接代表来升级这一策略。这一发展的一个例子是Anja Salomonwitz关于奥地利人口贩运的电影《Kurz davor ist es passiert》（2006）。这部电影展示了受害者自己没有讲述的不同人口贩运事件的故事；相反，随机的奥地利人在执行日常任务时逐字逐句地背诵他们的陈述。这些场景的手法在情感上使观众远离受害者的痛苦，从而扰乱了观众的接受。将陈述从一种媒介，从一个身体转移到另一个身体，可以避免压倒性的情绪反应。观众的被迫错位允许出现一个批判性意识的空间，在这个空间里，人们可以反思政治和表现的界限。在简要概述了直接电影和电影Vérité作为出发点之后，我对Kurz davor作为间接电影的典型例子进行了仔细的分析。
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Pub Date : 2020-05-03DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2019.1663717
Laia Quílez
ABSTRACT Although the concept of postmemory emerged from reflections on the representation and transmission of the Holocaust, the term has come to describe a group of works produced in other geographical contexts that invoke equally traumatic pasts. Over the last two decades in Spain, a considerable number of documentaries has been produced by the generation following those who were victims of repression under the Franco regime. These are works of documentarians who approximate a past they do not remember but that they nonetheless must interrogate in order to define themselves as political subjects. The following article reviews one of the earliest, the documentary Entre el dictador y yo (Between the Dictator and Me) (2005), a collective project undertaken on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Franco’s death. I analyze this film through the lens of memory and postmemory studies of Spain’s traumatic past; this approach intends to offer a critical and comparative reading of the six shorts that make up the documentary, each directed by documentarians born during the transition to democracy. Largely subjective in nature, these documentaries present themselves as exercises of political, social, and family memory about Spain’s recent history, while at the same time they evidence the coexistence of multiple memories of the past.
虽然后记忆的概念源于对大屠杀再现和传播的反思，但该术语已用于描述在其他地理背景下创作的一组作品，这些作品唤起了同样痛苦的过去。在过去的二十年里，在佛朗哥政权下遭受镇压的那一代人制作了相当多的纪录片。这些都是纪录片导演的作品，他们描绘了一个他们不记得的过去，但为了将自己定义为政治主体，他们必须对过去进行讯问。下面这篇文章回顾了最早的纪录片之一，纪录片Entre el dictador y yo (Between The Dictator and Me)(2005)，这是一个为纪念佛朗哥逝世30周年而进行的集体项目。我通过对西班牙创伤过去的记忆和后记忆研究来分析这部电影;这种方法旨在对组成这部纪录片的六部短片进行批判性和比较性的解读，每一部短片都是由出生于民主转型时期的纪录片导演执导的。这些纪录片在很大程度上是主观的，它们表现为对西班牙近代史的政治、社会和家庭记忆的练习，同时它们也证明了过去多重记忆的共存。
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Pub Date : 2020-02-12DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1725995
S. Troon
ABSTRACT This article critiques the representation of sea level rise in environmental documentaries, positioning Briar March’s There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho (2010) as an essential rejoinder to more prominent representations of oceanic climate change, exemplified in An Inconvenient Truth (2006). An array of recent documentary productions, seeking to draw attention to rising seas and other anthropogenic disasters, turn to the Pacific Ocean utilising a wide range of mediatic regimes and visual apparatuses – from cinematic long takes to satellite imagery and digital animation. Among these films There Once was an Island offers a crucial perspective in its representation of the Takuu atoll, where residents faced with rising seas consider migrating en masse, prioritising subjectivity and physical reality as it foregrounds the cultural, material, and personal specificities of the atoll and its inhabitants. It offers a powerful counterpoint to dominant techniques for visualising climate disaster, which are characterised by spectacular imagery and logics of global mastery. By counterposing the perspectives offered in divergent documentary tendencies and examining their resonance with other cinematic strategies for representing catastrophe, from Hollywood CGI to post-war Italian neorealism, this article works through some ethical considerations for this growing subgenre of eco-cinema.
摘要本文批评了环境纪录片中海平面上升的表现，将Briar March的《从前有一座岛：Te Henua e Nnoho》（2010）定位为对海洋气候变化更突出表现的重要回应，如《难以忽视的真相》（2006）。最近的一系列纪录片试图引起人们对海平面上升和其他人为灾害的关注，它们利用了广泛的中介机制和视觉设备——从电影长片到卫星图像和数字动画——来关注太平洋。在这些电影中，《从前有一个岛》为其对塔库环礁的描绘提供了一个至关重要的视角，在那里，面临海平面上升的居民考虑集体移民，在突出环礁及其居民的文化、物质和个人特点时，优先考虑主体性和物理现实。它与气候灾难可视化的主流技术形成了强有力的对比，这些技术的特点是壮观的图像和全球掌握的逻辑。通过反驳不同纪录片趋势中提供的视角，并考察它们与其他表现灾难的电影策略的共鸣，从好莱坞CGI到战后的意大利新现实主义，本文对生态电影这一日益增长的子类别进行了一些伦理考虑。
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Pub Date : 2020-02-10DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1725994
A. Elsner
ABSTRACT This article examines representations of nature and dying in the Swiss documentary Die weisse Arche (2016) through the lens of Jane Bennett’s critique of Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment. I establish a specific relationship between Edwin Beeler’s film and Bennett’s claim that enchantment is foundational to the ethical life, stressing that Die weisse Arche posits an ethics of end-of-life care motivated by moments of enchantment that emanate from the mythical, religious, and local belief systems of the characters Beeler portrays. The film is situated within the recent proliferation of documentaries on dying, marked as they are by a focus upon a single terminal patient and a refusal to film the actual moment of death. Close analysis brings to the fore the film's distinctive poetic style and narrative structure, highlighting in particular how Beeler juxtaposes natural and religious imagery alongside images of dying and care. Drawing upon a methodological framework that brings together philosophy and film studies, this article claims that Die weisse Arche, through its marked absence of medical images in a twenty-first century film about dying, allows us to question the role and place of medicine in contemporary end-of-life care.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-10DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2020.1725996
George S. Larke-Walsh
ABSTRACT This article discusses Southwest of Salem: the story of the San Antonio four (2016, Deborah Esquinazi) as a feature-length example of the injustice narrative documentary. It studies links between its narrative strategies and emotional engagement using the principles of cognitive theory to explain the diverse ways such a film can be received by viewers. Despite its long history and popularity in journalism, literature, film and television, the true crime genre and its subcategories have rarely earned critical praise or value. The intention here is to discuss how we can value this documentary and others for the ways they encourage emotional engagement, not as a strategy designed merely for entertainment, but to encourage critical debate on the infallibilities of institutional discourses, especially the manipulation of emotion in the legal system. As a consequence, this article will argue injustice narrative documentaries are not simply cliched and voyeuristic sensationalism, but instead have a valid social purpose.
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