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The Totalizing Quest of Meaning
... When putting these three lenses together, I am able to interrogate storytelling in teacher communities as racialized, gendered, and classed instances of professional learning and meaning-making that are inextricable from the social context of the teacher community, the school, and the teachers' identities as middle-class White women. I take this approach because when storytellers are people in power who do not recognize or reflect on their power, stories are told and have the potential to be heard as unremarkable truth, loaded with ideologies of racial supremacy and social class hierarchy (Dyer, 1997;Minh-ha, 1993Minh-ha, /2004Morrison, 1992;Yoon, 2012). The unrecognized power of the storyteller over the character is problematized here because "power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person" (Adichie, 2009). ...
... It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult" (Adichie, 2009). People in the stories become symbols that, by implicit comparison, reify the invisible superiority of middle-class White norms and ideologies (Dyer, 1997;Minh-ha, 1993Minh-ha, /2004. ...
Background/Context
Collaboration is increasingly part of teachers’ professional learning and continuous improvement of teaching practice. However, there is little exploration of how teachers’ racial, gender, and social class identities influence their collaboration with colleagues and, in turn, their teaching and professional learning.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study
This study examines shared meanings that are constructed through storytelling by middle-class White women teachers who work in a racially and socioeconomically diverse elementary school I call Fields Elementary. I ask: What narrative tropes do middle-class White women teachers draw upon to create common understanding about what it means to teach at their school? In what ways does a normative middle-class White culture, specifically related to White womanhood, achieve ideological projects through teachers’ participation in collective storytelling in professional communities? The article proposes conceptual connections across whiteness, intersectionality, professional learning, and collective storytelling, and provides an empirical example of how the integration of perspectives illuminates this type of complex interaction.
Research Design
Utilizing ethnographic methods of data collection, I spent 5 months at Fields Elementary, dividing my time between two focal teachers, both middle-class White women. I followed these teachers across settings and responsibilities. The data in this critical discourse analysis are drawn from this larger study and come from a conversation in one teacher community (the second-grade team). On completion of preliminary data analysis, focal teachers reflected on findings to enrich interpretations.
Findings/Results
Findings indicate that this teacher community co-constructed narratives reproducing social locations as middle-class White women. Their professional knowledge reflected ambiguity in their efficacy to teach for equitable outcomes. In addition, their professional knowledge was tied to their identities as mothers; narratives reflected middle-class White social distance from students and families, which included asserting teachers’ moral superiority in parenting.
Conclusions/Recommendations
This study provides a model for conceptualizing collective storytelling and professional learning among teachers from an intersectionality perspective on whiteness. Empirical findings suggest that institutional constraints of teaching may require interventions at multiple levels: teachers’ and leaders’ learning how to facilitate professional conversations; home visits intended for “funds of knowledge” professional learning opportunities; hiring and placement of diverse faculty and school leaders to extend construction of professional knowledge; and policy changes. These considerations have implications for teachers’ professionalization and for schooling experiences that dehumanize students of color and students living in poverty.
... La espacialidad ambigua y flexible de la isla replica aquella de los afectos y de la subjetividad de una cultura otra. Trinh T. Minh-ha (1993) sostiene que si el documental debe hacer preguntas y presentar múltiples formas de conocimiento, debe resistir su "búsqueda totalizadora" a favor de textos más abiertos que desafían el conocimiento didáctico singular a pesar de su forma finita y cerrada. Para trascender la división entre un nosotros observadores y un otro objeto de conocimiento, es necesaria una concepción más fluida de la realidad, donde el significado no esté "cerrado", sino que rehúya y eluda la representación. ...
... 24) with respect to a film's voice. This controlling position has subsequently been considered as an inevitable, if problematic, aspect of documentary practice (Minh-ha 1993;Nichols 1991;Ruby 1992;Winston 2000). ...
This chapter describes how screenwriters think about their writing voice, how initial ideas and intentions are formulated through decisions and choices during screenwriting practice and how such voices reflect the aesthetic and personal sensibilities of the screenwriter who has created the dramatic design and artistic values of the text.1 It focuses on research (Ferrell 2017a) of the process by which an existing screenplay, Cashflow (Ferrell 1996), whose first draft was described by an Australian reader as having an American voice, was rewritten to have an Australian voice. Voice is defined here as the 'pervasive authorial presence' (Abrams 1993; Abrams and Harpham 2015) of the screenwriter. However, voice was opened up to the interrogation of cultural formations when, in this instance, I, an Australian writer, wrote an American-voiced screenplay.
... Our aim was to be "deliberately transformative" and to inspire people to both reflect and move to action, to "change our social interactions" (FINLAY, 2014, p.531). However, moving beyond an un-critical "aesthetic of objectivity" (DENZIN, 2003, p.72) where it is assumed scientific research findings will be linearly translated into a performance for audience access (see also GRAY & KONTOS, 2015;MINH-HA, 1993; SNYDER-YOUNG, 2010), we additionally align our work with an arts-humanities-oriented "researchcreation" in that we generated new knowledge through artistic processes (as aesthetic exploration and drawing on dramaturgy and theatricality to shape the production), including resultant insights and understandings. Our experiences of creatively engaging or playing with data, as "embodied enactment," alongside critical reflection, became an integral knowledge generation process as part of the development of Cracked (LINDS, 2006). ...
In this article, we provide an example of a performance-research project to advance understandings of the ways artistic and scientific processes work in conversation. Drawing on the research-informed play Cracked: New Light on Dementia, we consider the interrelationship among cultural narratives (including the perpetuation of oppressive narratives of marginalized people), aesthetic and artistic exploration (sensory and emotional exploration together with dramaturgy and theatricality), and social critique for the purposes of broader social change. By explicating three interrelated "acts" of our process, including preparation, execution and exhibition (THOMPSON, 2015), we share the ways artistic practices were flexibly used to generate new cultural knowledge about the ways we think, feel, and sense about dementia to mobilize social good. With our work we criticize institutional and research structures that deny arts processes the status of "research," as well as challenge traditional modes of knowledge and knowledge production.
... La espacialidad ambigua y flexible de la isla replica aquella de los afectos y de la subjetividad de una cultura otra. Trinh T. Minh-ha (1993) sostiene que si el documental debe hacer preguntas y presentar múltiples formas de conocimiento, debe resistir su "búsqueda totalizadora" a favor de textos más abiertos que desafían el conocimiento didáctico singular a pesar de su forma finita y cerrada. Para trascender la división entre un nosotros observadores y un otro objeto de conocimiento, es necesaria una concepción más fluida de la realidad, donde el significado no esté "cerrado", sino que rehúya y eluda la representación. ...
Geografías afectivas. Desplazamientos, prácticas espaciales y formas de estar juntos en el cine contemporáneo de Argentina, Chile y Brasil (2001-2017), investiga los vínculos entre espacio y afectividad en películas argentinas, brasileñas y chilenas de la última década que se desplazan al “espacio abierto”. El estudio atiende a las diversas y originales relaciones que las películas establecen entre paisaje, mapa e itinerario. El trabajo se nutre de una perspectiva teórica interdisciplinaria atenta a la riqueza misma del cine en su potencialidad no de pasivamente “representar” espacios físicos reales, sino de reconfigurar nuevas formas de pensar y habitar geografías de los espacios abiertos en el mundo contemporáneo desde una perspectiva atenta a la dimensión de los afectos. El libro se inserta dentro de los estudios comparativos de cine ya que considera el diálogo entre filmes de tres países diferentes y el modo en que el lenguaje cinematográfico lidia con la relación que establecemos con el espacio como vía de entrada a otras problemáticas de índole histórico. A su vez, el libro desarrolla un abordaje que considera las dimenisiones audiovisuales y una particular “estética de los afectos” como forma también de pensar y actuar en el mundo.
... Despite the growing evidence about the efficacy of arts-based research with audiences, particularly in the health sciences, there is a concerning lack of understanding of the "art-part" of arts-based research as well as the relationship between "art" and "efficacy" (Boydell, Gladstone, Volpe, Allemang, & Stasiulis, 2012;Kontos et al., 2012;Lafrenière & Cox, 2013;Mitchell et al., 2011). This lack of understanding of arts-based research broadly, and research-informed theater specifically, is rooted in the dominance of an "aesthetic of objectivity," as an assumed linear or neutral translation of research findings into performance (Denzin, 2003;Gray & Kontos, 2015;Minh-Ha, 1993;Snyder-Young, 2010). Sociologist Norman Denzin (2003), working in the area of performance ethnography, warns of how an aesthetic of objectivity projects a "socalled real world," which discourages a dialogic or curious approach to the work by audiences (p. ...
Through this paper, I consider how we might be aesthetically and relationally accountable in creating research-informed theatre through the conceptual frame of an aesthetic of relationality, and in-depth considerations of the theoretical notions embodiment, imagination and foolishness (as vulnerability-bravery). Through the example of Cracked: new light on dementia, of which I am the playwright and director, I consider the ways artist-researchers foolishly and imaginatively engage in exploration from the starting point their own bodies, as socially, culturally and historically situated. I additionally extend these considerations towards a vision for how we might engage with persons with dementia beyond the tragic.
... Despite the growing evidence about the efficacy of arts-based research with audiences, particularly in the health sciences, there is a concerning lack of understanding of the "art-part" of arts-based research as well as the relationship between "art" and "efficacy" (Boydell, Gladstone, Volpe, Allemang, & Stasiulis, 2012;Kontos et al., 2012;Lafrenière & Cox, 2013;Mitchell et al., 2011). This lack of understanding of arts-based research broadly, and research-informed theater specifically, is rooted in the dominance of an "aesthetic of objectivity," as an assumed linear or neutral translation of research findings into performance (Denzin, 2003;Gray & Kontos, 2015;Minh-Ha, 1993;Snyder-Young, 2010). Sociologist Norman Denzin (2003), working in the area of performance ethnography, warns of how an aesthetic of objectivity projects a "socalled real world," which discourages a dialogic or curious approach to the work by audiences (p. ...
Research-informed theater is often informed by an assumed linear trajectory between research findings and performance, overlooking the multiple embodied perspectives that are implicated in the development of research-informed theater. To challenge this assumption, we explore how artist-researchers draw on their own embodiment and imagination as ways to understand the research findings, how they conceptualize the intended audience, and how those understandings shape the creative process of the research-informed play. Using the case study of the research-informed play Cracked: New Light on Dementia, we focus on three interrelated modes of practice: playful extending, foolish disrupting, and inventive disrupting. We argue that these modes of practice create an aesthetic of relationality, what we define as an aesthetic space within which the embodied interpretive work of artist-researchers is extended into spatial, relational contexts. We discuss implications of this theoretical framework for a new critical inquiry.
... Habermas echa mano del «actuar comunicacional» 10. Entendiendo esto como todo razonamiento obnubilado con una explicación positiva de los fenómenos que estudia o, como indica Trinh T. Minh-ha (1993), en relación con los dualismos binarios: «The setting up of practice against theory, and vice versa, is at best a tool for reciprocal challenge, but like all binary oppositions, it is caught in the net of positivist thinking whose impetus is to supply answers at all costs, thereby limiting both theory and practice to a process of totalization» (Minh-ha, 1993: 92). 11. ...
A raíz de algunos de los procesos urbanos acontecidos en la ciudad contemporánea, el espacio público se ha convertido en un concepto de uso común. Sin embargo, la inflación discursiva suscitada se desarrolló en paralelo a la desestabilización de su conceptualización geográfica. El agotamiento de unas maneras de hacer, heredadas del pensamiento moderno, demasiado encorsetadas en una previsible y aburrida red de oposiciones binarias, dificultaba descubrir y describir nada que no estuviese de alguna manera prescrito. Junto a esto, la aparición de unas epistemologías más creativas y experimentales, instigadas por un inusitado debate ontológico, llevará a considerar que cualquier investigación sobre el espacio público deba abordarse desde la perspectiva de una multiplicidad relacional que niega su condición de realidad dada y cuestiona sus aproximaciones más normativas.
After a critique of top-down colonizing attributes of water projects in the Arts and Humanities, the essay dwells on the communitarian, environmental, and aesthetic value of a short creative documentary about the raised marshland mire behind the ancient seaside village of Borth on the Mid-West Welsh coast. In a mode of theorized autobiography, it then divagates upon the metaphor of water in the author's recurring dreams about this childhood holiday resort and its complex relations with his home in the English Midlands, an area supplied by Welsh water and that supplies many of Borth's holiday-makers.
Previous studies have highlighted the communicative limitations of artistic visualizations, which are often too conceptual or interpretive to enhance public understanding of (and volition to act upon) scientific climate information. This seems to suggest a need for greater factuality/concreteness in artistic visualization projects, which may indeed be the case. However, in this paper, we synthesize insights from environmental psychology, the psychology of art, and intermediate disciplines like eco-aesthetics, to argue that artworks—defined by their counterfactual qualities—can be effective for stimulating elements of environmental consciousness. We also argue that different artworks may yield different effects depending on how they combine counter/factual strategies. In so doing, we assert that effective artistic perceptualization—here expressed as affectivization—exceeds the faithful translation of facts from one mode to another, and cannot be encapsulated in a single example of un/successful art.
Calls for participatory nonfiction are not new, particularly from the ethnographic film movement. However, the Internet has given them new momentum. User-generated content (UGC) and its online distribution through social media have created a largely untapped resource for producers of co-created nonfiction. Resultant opportunities and challenges exist on three interpenetrating continua: firstly, sourcing content; secondly, structure and form; and thirdly, distribution. I will propose a typology with examples of recent projects. Some co-created projects claim to be documentaries. Their relationship to that form depends on whether a coherent ‘voice’ rises above the database of multivocal elements such projects contain. Online co-created nonfiction projects may be more participatory, but participation may come at the cost of received ideas of documentary practice (for example, those of Grierson 1946; Renov 2004 and Nichols 1983). The opportunities of UGC and co-creation suggest that a new space is being excavated in nonfiction – one concerned with community and niche cultures rather than addressing an external audience looking for recognisable encounters with documentary practice. The creators of these hybrid projects must develop a more sophisticated understanding of documentary practice if they wish to appeal to a wider audience. Meanwhile, scholars should be wary of including all co-created nonfiction within the scope of documentary practice, as this move threatens to render that term meaningless.
Filmmaking has become an increasing focus of interest within geography, the geohumanities, and related fields. The use of film ranges from enhanced forms of ethnographic fieldwork to the production of feature-length documentaries shown at international festivals. The making of documentaries has become an increasingly significant research method in itself that has the potential to become a widely recognized type of interdisciplinary research output. How should we interpret the role of film in relation to wider epistemological debates over the production of knowledge? How can we contextualize the methodological turn toward film within the broader historiography of filmmaking and the cinematic apparatus? This article argues that documentary film has a distinctive role to play in expanding the research imagination, enhancing pedagogic practice, reaching new audiences, and producing unique cultural artifacts. At the same time, however, the use of film is also entrained in complex debates concerning the verisimilitude of representational practices and the wider institutional context for the production and evaluation of knowledge.
This paper presents a diachronic discussion of the use of audio visual tools in anthropological work. It also analyzes shared and collaborative ethnographic cinema, the main goal of which is collaborative knowledge-building by the filmmaker and their actors, democratizing research and creative processes, generat ing reciprocation and horizontality, and reasserting cultural traditions, self-esteem and the communal identity. Finally, the methodology of the collaborative camera is discussed.
Aesthetic choices and the experiences they create are fundamental to how documentary works establish their credentials and address their audiences.This paper focuses on the overlap between documentary and video art practice to explore the rhetorical possibilities of aesthetic experience. Applying a critical aesthetic practice, evident within artistic contexts, has the potential to encourage greater diversity in the stories that are told in documentaries, how they are told and how they might be heard. Through examination of the two-channel video installation, Disorient by Fiona Tan, the paper analyses how aesthetic choices operate as elements of a rhetorical strategy where the work is realised as an experience in itself, existing in the space of encounter between art object and spectator. I argue that the critical aesthetic practice evident in Disorient produces a circumstance where the audience encounters the rhetorical moves as much through the direct experience of the work as they do through puzzling over the indexical references that Tan raises and combines. As a two-channel video projection that is at a one-step remove from the form of cinematic documentary, Disorient is instructive in what may be possible when these strategies are applied to an artistically inclined, expanded documentary practice.
This essay focuses on the epistolary enunciation of recent works by two contemporary American filmmakers, Jem Cohen and James Benning, arguing for the stakes of viewing their films through an epistolary lens rather than the lenses of literary forms like the essay and the diary more commonly deployed to describe films that hug the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. Looking specifically at Cohen’s Chain (2004) and Counting (2015) and Benning’s Stemple Pass (2013) and his installation Two Cabins (2011), I show how it is the epistolary enunciation of Benning’s and Cohen’s recent work that allows them to properly explore and depict the displacement of late capitalism’s subject in an increasingly globalized world. I go on to show that through epistolary enunciation both filmmakers also tap into American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist notions of individualism and selfhood that resist the homogenizing nature of late capitalism.
Race, war, and geography remain unmarked domains within the historiography of sexuality. This article analyzes the work of Joseph M. Carrier, a seminal figure who helped develop the study of homosexuality. In this article, we examine the ways Carrier incorporated studies of various populations from the Global South, from Vietnamese refugees to Mexican MSM (men who have sex with men). In his attempt to collect knowledge about subaltern groups—first as a RAND Corporation researcher and later as an anthropologist and epidemiologist—Carrier shows us that the genealogy of homosexuality studies is not clear-cut. It is situated across multiple spaces of (inter)disciplinary power and knowledge. By comparing these trans-regional areas of study, we examine the ways in which Western social scientists can draw research from one social context into another.
Creative practice methodology encourages a playful space in which art experimentation can occur within the PhD. There is a debate within the methodology about whether explication needs to take place in an accompanying text, or if it can be implicit in the artwork. A new approach is emerging where art practice and academic explication combine, most notably in audio and audio-visual media. The art medium can be used, rather than text, as a way of communicating the research findings. In my case, I am a documentarian, and using audio-visual media allows for what was considered implicit – body language, visuals, voice tone – to become explicit. It allows for a different type of knowledge transfer where multiple congruent interpretations of the ‘text’ are encouraged, and where the viewer completes the formation of meaning through their act of viewing. Using my artform as the method of communication encourages an iterative process where the digital papers and the experimental films I create influence each other and even influence the research questions being posed.
Over the past few decades film theory, major scholars and acclaimed filmmakers have established that documentary just like fiction must resort to ambiguous and subjective rhetorical figures in order to represent the world. This has led some scholars to conclude that documentary as a term referring to itself as being non-fictional might be disregarding its inevitable fictional elements. This may imply that both documentary and fiction use the same strategies and obtain the same results when representing the world: ficitionalize reality.
If we accept this claim as true we need to ask whether terms such as fiction and non-fiction or documentary make sense when discussing representing reality. Does this mean that cinema can only fictionalize reality and therefore we should erradicate from this discussion tems such as non-fiction or documentary due to their associated “truth” claim?
Can we understand or discuss representing reality without referring to those terms? Can the term fiction exists in fact without refferring to the term non-fiction or documentary?
The questions that this paper intends to answer are:
What roles do documentary and fiction play in representing the historical world?
Are these terms necessary to comunicate and understand representing reality?
This paper has established that fiction and documentary are necessary terms that emerge in cinema narration as means to mirror human experience’s needs to organize, communicate and understand reality.
With our focus on an “ethno‐graphic novel” on the Sri Lankan civil war and the forcible displacement and migration of Tamil survivors, we make two main propositions while reflecting on the “graphic narrative turn” that has emerged in anthropology in recent years. First, we inscribe drawing into the “writing of cultures” where words have held a superior status in ethnographic representations. Rather than seeing drawings as perceptive tools for recording scenes in fieldwork alone, we extend them to a representational practice where they can have a deep, intricate, and equivalent entanglement with words to create synchronous affective intensities among a larger audience. Our second proposal follows Jean Rouch on cinéma vérité to interrogate assumptions about truth and fiction as portrayed by film representations. We propose a theory and practice for graphic novel production that we have termed vérités graphiques (literally, graphic realities). This describes the collaborative and interactive engagement with people's contributions and views, and their distillation and fictionalization through the ethno‐graphic form. We diverge from cinéma vérité, however, by highlighting a truth‐fiction spectrum that further challenges the presumed objectivity of what is seen, experienced, co‐created, and revealed.
ENGLISCH This dissertation explores the cultural phenomenon of film activism in the context of democratization and Islamization in post-Suharto Indonesia. Focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) cultural producers, namely the organizers of Asia’s largest queer film festival, the Q! Film Festival, and the directors of the collaborative film anthology Anak-Anak Srikandi, it aims to illuminate an aesthetic movement that has played an active part in the construction of the new Indonesian nation since the political reformation in 1998. By demonstrating how film activists in contemporary Indonesia generate new forms of queer knowledge and enable community and alliance building based on affinity, I challenge and ask for the extension of existing notions of the political in LGBT rights activism. I argue that film activism creates inclusive critical sites of resistance where oppressive heteronormative discourses can be subverted and reconfigured in liberatory ways. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork at the Q! Film Festival, interviews with key participants, close ethnographic analysis of Anak-Anak Srikandi and of my own involvement in the film’s production, this work contributes to the study and practice of anthropological filmmaking, to the emerging field of film festival studies, and also to interdisciplinary studies of non-Western media. DEUTSCH Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht das kulturelle Phänomen des Filmaktivismus im Kontext von Demokratisierung und Islamisierung im post-autoritären Indonesien. Die Analyse fokussiert sich dabei auf queere Kulturproduzenten, insbesondere den Organisator_innen des Q! Film Festivals in Jakarta, dem größten schwul-lesbischen Filmfestival in Asien, und den Regisseur_innen des kollaborativen Filmprojekts Anak- Anak Srikandi. Ziel der ethnographischen Arbeit ist es eine bisher wenig betrachtete junge künstlerische Bewegung, die eine wichtige Rolle in der Neugestaltung der indonesischen Gesellschaft seit der politischen Reform im Jahr 1998 gespielt hat, zu beleuchten. Es wird aufgezeigt wie Filmaktivist_innen neue Formen queeren Wissens generieren und die Bildung von Gemeinschaften und Allianzen basierend auf Affinitäten fördern. Die Praktiken der indonesischen queeren Kulturproduzent_innen hinterfragen bestehende Auffassungen darüber welche Strategien in der schwul-lesbischen Bewegungen gemeinhin als politisch betrachtet werden. Auf der Grundlage dieser Erkenntnis wird gezeigt wie durch Filmaktivismus inkludierende politische Orte des Widerstands gegen vorherrschende heteronormative Diskurse geschaffen werden. Die praxisbasierte Arbeit stützt sich auf mehrmonatigen anthropologischen Feldforschungsphasen, auf Experteninterviews und auf die kollektive Produktion des Films Anak-Anak Srikandi. Die Forschung leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Theorie und Praxis ethnographischen Filmemachens, dem noch jungen Forschungsfeld der Film Festival Studies und zur interdisziplinären Erforschung außereuropäischer Medien.
Documentary studies as textual analysis is often predicated on providing ways of looking at and thinking about documentary practice. Filmmaking as research can be conceptualised as a petri-dish: rich with possibility; it can afford a consideration of documentary practice in a way that intersects with issues around pedagogy, sites for knowledge-making as writing and filmmaking as ways of thinking through theory. However, while filmmaking as research can redefine and reframe practice, it can feel laboured in terms of a constant concern for theoretically positioning the artefact and the making processes. In such instances, this can stymie the unselfconscious nature of making and raise the question of whether the production of a film artefact is at odds with a process-driven methodology.
In exploring this relationship, this article takes the form of a dialogue where we discuss our respective documentary practices as sites for complex tensions and negotiations within an academic context. In particular, we discuss our shift from an independent practice-based paradigm which prioritised the production of an artefact to a practice which is knowledge-based. We discuss a selection of our respective film projects; some of which were made as research and others which were theoretically ‘retro-fitted’ as practice-based research.
Much of traditional documentary has been concerned with matters of voice and visibility. However, to speak is to occupy a position of power, and the act of listening has long been overlooked. This chapter explores the importance of listening as a critical and ethical turn in documentary through the discussion of the following non-linear works: Natalie Bookchin’s Now he’s out in public and everyone can see (2012 and 2017) and Long Story Short (2016), Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill’s Empire: The Unintended Consequences of Dutch Colonialism (2012–2014) and Rosemarie Lerner and Maria Court’s Quipu Project (2015). I claim that a documentary practice that foregrounds listening as both a methodological process and an audience experience creates critical distance which can destabilize traditional binaries and implicate the practitioner and audience in the documentary project as an ecology of relationships, multiple perspectives, and complexity.
This chapter frames ‘documentary’ and ‘place’ as unstable and evolving phenomena. Implicating spatiotemporal reflections, Brett highlights how the ‘lieu factice’ unzips the fixity of ‘place’ in representational and locational terms, and is useful in understanding the performance of ‘place’. The chapter works through two key debates in arguing for the plurality of ‘place’: the potentially restrictive ‘performative’ documentary utterance and the application of ‘queer’ in universal contexts where indifference predominates. The artifice of ‘place’ as performance is framed as a post-queer doing, which loosens the mandate of ‘identity’ in wholesome terms where this is not so easily recognized. Agency as gestural and mobile is foregrounded then as a way of understanding queer realities in their complex negotiation of ‘space’.
The theme of the inquiry is to investigate, through a collaborative arts-based research investigation, how sense of belonging and not-belonging manifest among a group of migrating Faroese people through a storytelling process.
In spring 2018, the artist-researcher collaborated with seven Faroese persons who have past or present experiences in living in Denmark. The thesis inquiry is a multi-method arts-based research investigation that utilises a method devised collaboratively through a guided auto-ethnographic inquiry in dialogue with the facilitating artist-researcher. The co-researchers engage in a 3-part-storytelling process through which they inquire their knowledge and lived experiences using a variety of expressive approaches. The collaborators share their lived experiences as people deriving from a small island nation situated in the midst of the North Atlantic Ocean, but also as people who are a part of the larger realm of the Danish Kingdom.
The theoretical trajectories in the inquiry engage theories on representation and meaning-making, critical pedagogy, as well as collaborative and dialogic art practices, and as an undercurrent, postcolonial theories situated within the Nordic context. The theoretical trajectories provide a framework for critical self-reflection for the artist-researcher throughout the entire research process. This theoretical framework also raises essential ethical questions that inform how the collaboration between the artist-researcher and the collaborators is formulated and carried out. The theoretical trajectories lead towards an ethical approach in which the collaborating people are seen as co-creators of knowledge, as co-researchers and as the creators of their own narratives.
In this collaborative research inquiry, the facilitating artist-researcher applies many roles and becomes for example a mentor, a curator and a sparring partner, who gently guides but does not direct, to keep the co-researchers engaged in a demanding 3-part storytelling process. In addition to the many roles in the inquiry, the artist-researcher becomes a storyteller in order to open up and bring the co-researchers’ complex and rich stories that they have shared with her during the collaboration further for a larger audience of readers. The aim is to crystallise, to make the entangling set of rich and complex stories from the co-researchers’ varied perspectives visible as a collaborative narrative.
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This part of the book sets out with two aims: to explore the aesthetic challenges to the history of ideas that has shaped the conception of Turkish migrant presence in Germany within nonfiction film, and to reassess the implications of the documentary form as a creative practice and artistic activity that can be singular, nonrepresentational and potentially antithetical to knowledge.
This article explores a filmmaking practice at the borders of fiction and non-fiction; a practice that goes by different names, including cinema of in-between-ness. It looks closely at the filmmaking practice of Thai filmmaker Uruphong Raksasad and the second film in his Rice Trilogy, Agrarian Utopia (Sawan Baan Na, 2009). This film challenges categorisation as observational documentary, ethnographic film or fictional narrative. The article demonstrates that Raksasad's practice is linked to the earlier practices of Dziga Vertov and Jean Rouch. In their films, Vertov and Rouch demonstrate a commitment to the real as the fount of cinema, to the detailed observation and careful recording of life that passes before the camera. But they also insist on treating the real with cinematic inventiveness and experimentation. The article discusses Vertov, Rouch and Raksasad's attitudes to in-betweeness and how it impacts their practice.
As creators of media works defined by a close relationship with the real, a significant question for documentary practitioners is how to respond to the complexity of reality. Theories of spectator embodiment suggest opportunities to address these conditions through both the content and form of documentary work. Building on Epstein’s photogénie and Marks’s tactile epistemologies, this chapter examines a poetic approach to documentary production as one way to activate diverse knowledges that go beyond what can be expressed verbally. Using examples from the production of the short documentary, How Many Ways to Say You? this chapter suggests that the intersectional methodology of an open, poetic approach to documentary can provoke diverse knowledges for makers and spectators that may address our fragile and changeful context.
This chapter addresses the tensions between liberating and oppressive forces that arise in the context of contemporary interactive and participatory image-based practices. Exploring the field of iDocs (also known as interactive documentaries), it opens with an introduction to this visual form. Suggesting that iDocs signal, among other things, a search for universal human qualities, the chapter proceeds to analyze this terrain through the lens of the politics of late capitalism. Building mainly, but not exclusively, on the work of Negri, Hardt and Virno (and on the notion of “multitude”), it explores the extent to which iDocs mirror the principles that define the production modes of this historical phase. iDocs, the chapter suggests, constitute a precious window for understanding the paradoxes of contemporary late capitalism.
This paper examines Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir (2008) and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2007) to elucidate how artists, distributors, and audiences shape and define the porous boundaries of the documentary genre, and how such perceptions are shaped within a digital context. By analyzing how each film represents reality, that is, how documentaries attempt to represent the real world, this paper explores the elements of performativity within animated documentary as a reflection of both the growing fluidity of the documentary genre and the instability of the indexical in a digital age. In our digital context, where the "real" can be manufactured at an increasing rate, stronger skepticism and cynicism push the documentary genre towards more subjective explorations, with animated documentaries serving as a key example of how genre distinctions have fluctuated in response.
Based on the author’s own experience in using idocs within a variety of different settings the present paper sets off with the idea of exploring the potentiality of this audio-visual form as a tool for teaching and conducting visual ethnographies. It proposes, therefore, a shift away from conventional reflections on the potentiality of idocs as communication tools exploring instead the extent to which idocs can be considered as proper tools for producing ethnographic evidence. This chapter offers concrete examples on how to engage with idocs based on my own practice and discuss also the possible integration of other emerging technologies. The overarching provocation of this chapter lies in its defence of “thin descriptions”.
The discourse of ‘the white man’s burden’ that originated in the nineteenth century with missionaries and colonialism still underpins much of the development ideology towards Africa today. The overwhelming assumption that rich Western countries can and should address ‘underdevelopment’ through aid only stigmatizes African reality, framing it to mirror the worldview of the international donors who fund most non-profit interventionist documentaries.
In the ‘parachute filmmaking’ style that results, facilitated by financial resources and reflecting the self-serving intentions of the donors, the non-profit filmmaker functions simply as an agent of meaning rather than authentic author of the text. Challenged by limited production schedules and lacking in cultural understanding most donor-sponsored films fall back on an ethnocentric one-size-fits-all template of an ‘inferior other’ who needs to be ‘helped’. This study sets out to challenge the ‘donor gaze’ in documentary films which ‘speak about’ Africa, arguing instead for a more inclusive style of filmmaking that gives voice to its subjects by ‘speaking with’ them. The special focus is on black African women whose images are used to signify helplessness, vulnerability and ignorance, particularly in donor-funded documentaries addressing HIV/AIDS. Through case studies of four films this study asks:
1. How do documentary films reinforce the donor gaze? (how is the film speaking and why?)
2. Can the donor gaze be challenged? (should intentionality always override subjectivity of the filmed subjects?)
Film studies approach the gaze psychoanalytically (e.g. Mulvey 1975) but this study focuses on the conscious gaze of filmmakers because they reinforce or challenge ‘the pictures in our heads.’ Sight is an architect of meaning. Gaze orders reality but the documentary gaze can re-order it. The study argues that in Africa, the ‘donor gaze’ constructs meaning by ‘speaking about’ reality and calls instead for a new approach for documentary to ‘speak with’ reality.
Asymmetrical power relations, imposition and hierarchy characterize much of the field of development. Design and decisions are often dominated by the few as programs determine what is best for the local communities they seek to assist (Cooke & Kothari, 2001). The multiply wounded nation of Nicaragua is no exception to the norm, and the country has a long history of outside intervention by non-governmental and governmental organizations seeking to distribute materials or empower communities. Originally founded through a partnership between the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and a Nicaragua Corporate Social Responsibility Division, the Digital Seeds Program strives to push against the common impositional and assistencialist approaches to development through a collaborative, relational and holistic approach. Relational trust and authentic dialogue are centerpieces of what the Program calls accompaniment, or the direct, personalized support of educational actors inside and outside the classroom, and it is within these interpersonal encounters that Digital Seeds' facilitators join teachers in their daily lives. Informed by over six years of participant-observation and insider-outsider evaluation of the Program from its inception in 2009, this participatory action research project seeks to understand how participants make meaning of Digital Seeds as they understand the nature and role of trust and dialogue in thee iterative construction of the Program. It is my contention that a core group of emotionally intelligent and professionally gifted staff embody this deeply relational and dialogic accompaniment model, and their example serves to show the possibilities of reciprocal vulnerability and mutual trust in cultivating respectful partnerships.
The flmmaker's engagement with the subject was an important element in Robert J. Flaherty's flm documenting the life of Nanook and his family, the legendary Nanook of the North (1922), and of course it continues to be relevant in contemporary documentaries, such as the flm Foreign Parts (2010), directed by French director Verena Paravel and US flmmaker J. P. Sniadecki. In these flms, the approach to the reality of the subjects is documented from an ethnographic perspective, where the main objective is to examine how they live. To this end, the flmmaker has to spend hours and hours living alongside the subjects, establishing a relationship with them that is documented by the camera. To identify how this translates onto the screen is the main purpose of this article. To do this, I will adopt the approach to character engagement taken by cognitive flm theory, since as I want to demonstrate this perspective is very useful for explaining the relationship established between flmmaker and subject in this kind of flm. Especially useful to this explanation is the 'structure of sympathy' posited by Murray Smith (2004), which involves three concepts: recognition, alignment, and allegiance.
This chapter turns to projects that think about and through the digital structures of data and databases, and the mobility of digital cameras. These projects explore how digital media disrupts conventional structures by prompting a rethinking of the concept of documenting that foregrounds spatiality over temporality, relationality over causality, and automated functions over auteurist choice. We draw on Christiane Paul’s description of a shift “from ‘mapping’ to ‘tagging’ as the new paradigm of dynamic classification, context creation, and meaning production” in digital media.1 Digital technologies not only map our anatomy, they tag our identity. We are becoming digital through biometrics (e.g., dates of birth, shoe sizes) in state and corporate databases and digital profiles in social media. Our digital identities exist as data in databases, which suggests that we can document ourselves or be documented by someone else, including an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled bot, without ever having to appear on camera. Comparably, mobile cameras and sensors also allow movements that are not constrained to human perspectives or abilities. More profound than a majestic crane-shot in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, mobile cameras can be harnessed to document spatial relations for further analysis.
Given that Mad Hot Ballroom (20 05) is a documentary that takes ballroom dance as its subject, it is somewhat surprising that its director, Marilyn Agrelo, should suggest that the film is not about the dance. Mad Hot Ballroom focuses on a ballroom dance programme, initiated by a ballroom teacher, Pierre Dulaine, in 1994, for fifth grade children from New York City schools. Over 60 schools from Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens participated in the ten-week course, which was taught by instructors from the American Ballroom Theater (ABrT). The film follows the children from three schools: Public School (PS) 112 in Bensonhurst, which is a predominantly Italian and Asian area; PS115 in Washington Heights, uptown Manhattan, which has a large Dominican population and where reputedly 97 per cent of the community live below the poverty line; and PS150 in TriBeCa, an affluent part of downtown Manhattan (www.imdb). Mad Hot Ballroom charts the children’s progress from the very first lesson through to a final, city-wide competition held at the Winter Gardens of the World Financial Center in which the best teams compete for the coveted Challenge Trophy.
To learn about the changes taking place in the historical documentary production community in the United States during a particular moment defined by the downsizing of the NEH, I spoke with community members. After conversing with nearly fifty individuals associated with this “art world” (including documentarians, historians, funders, legislators and spectators—called “stakeholders” in my study) certain overall patterns emerged. It became clear that decisions regarding historical documentary production are always negotiated within a social context. My central argument is that this extended community resembles a cultural ecology in the sense that its members are interconnected. Using this ecology metaphor, I argue that stakeholders inevitably structure each other's choices (directly or indirectly), though these spheres of influence are not always openly discussed. For example, historians advise documentarians, who react to suggestions by funders, who are constrained by legislators, who must answer to spectators, and so on; all stakeholders participate in this ecology and no one is fully in charge. Historical truth is therefore a political matter, negotiated among many interested parties. As a researcher, I am also a member of this ecology, and thus conceive of this project as an ecological narrative illuminating and participating in the process of making history.
Campbell explores the relationship between science, documentary and factual entertainment, discussing the conceptual and analytical framework that can be used to analyse contemporary factual entertainment television programmes. The chapter shows how factual programmes’ claims to the scientific and also documentary, are problematic, highlighting questions around the rise of so-called subjunctive documentary, linked to the use of CGI. The chapter will then focus on the use of animation and CGI in documentary. Campbell argues that a holistic analytical framework is needed that addresses these techniques used in factual television depictions of science, and that rather than as vehicles for the simple transmission of scientific knowledge, analysis shows how they often represent science as spectacular, awe-inspiring and sublime.
O campo de estudo do cinema documental é fervilhante de aproximações científicas para um objeto que, por excelência, é fugidio, uma vez que o filme documental geralmente se propõe a apreender a realidade tal qual ela se apresenta, sem re-encenações, assumindo assim como compromisso ético, formal e estilístico, um parâmetro indexical. O cinema documental gira, eminentemente, em torno de um discurso ou argumento construído sobre o mundo material. Dito isto, o filme As Estações (Vremena Goda, 1975), do cineasta armênio Artavazd Peleshian, foi escolhido para análise por apresentar especificidades que o tornam bastante peculiar, a saber, o fato de aparentar ser mais propriamente um registro de uma sensibilidade extrapolando o registro de fatos sociais. Para tanto, será utilizada uma metodologia de análise interna – imanente – da obra fílmica, vinculada a uma breve análise do contexto de produção, que, juntas, devem favorecer a análise final com solidez metodológica. A partir do filme e dentro do campo de estudos do documentário cinematográfico, o presente artigo objetiva entender melhor o funcionamento de um texto fílmico que busca, dentro um regime estético, se debruçar sobre o registro documental de uma realidade específica.
This essay deals with the role of postcolonial cinema in articulating and visualizing issues of migration, uprooting and alienation, with specific relation to Europe and the Southern Mediterranean shore. Cinema as a transnational medium is particularly suitable for conveying denunciation and social critique. Yet this must be combined with an understanding of how the different cinematic traditions and genres contribute, in specific aesthetic and ethical ways, towards conveying the message and impact on the audiences. The scope of this essay is to theorize migration in the context of postcolonial cinema and to discuss the space occupied by the documentary (genre/form) within the framework of postcolonial cinema that deals with migration. This will be done through the close reading of two migrant films produced in Spain and Italy, respectively: 14 Kilómetros (2007) and A Sud di Lampedusa (2006), both of which are concerned with the question of border crossing and African migrants’ attempts to reach the southern shore of Europe, following very different visual registers. This raises questions about the political and cultural contextualization of migration to Europe from Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, in which the Mediterranean assumes a new protagonist role that reconfigures our ideas about the porosity of Europe and the liquidity of cinema.
In the last two decades there has been an international resurgence of realistic films, i.e., films directed by filmmakers who believe in the ontological power of reality and, at the same time, in the capacity of the medium’s expressive scope for building a story without undermining the viewer’s impression of reality. On the one hand, this new movement is a rehabilitation of the cinematic Realism that throughout the history of film has touted cinema as an open window to the real world, a view particularly exemplified by Italian Neo-Realism. On the other hand, this new trend has given new life to the Realist film theories championed mainly by André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. Bazin defines the Realist style as “all narratives means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen” (1971, 27). In the article titled Neo-Neo Realism (2009), A. O. Scott discusses a number of filmmakers whom he categorizes within the new Realist trend in contemporary American independent cinema. Among these is Ramin Bahrani, director of the film Chop Shop (2007). Bahrani is a USborn filmmaker of Iranian origin, based in New York. Abbas Kiarostami is one of his main points of reference. Kiarostami, as Scott notes, “refined the old Neorealist spirit through the 1990s and into the next decade.” Bahrani himself acknowledges this influence with his desire to make “an Iranianstyle movie here in New York.”
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