Documentary filmmakers have ethical responsibilities to the subjects of their films. Specifically, they have an ethical responsibility to prevent harm to their subjects if they are in a position to do so, even harm not directly related to being in the film. Justification for this comes from documentary's status as a practice of a social institution and can be supported by Utilitarian and Kantian considerations, as well as the Aristotelian discussion of practices. Three films, The Thin Blue Line, (...) Dope Sick Love , and Born Into Brothels , are used as examples for the requirement to prevent harm to subjects. These examples cover several different possibilities of how documentary filmmakers behave concerning the welfare of their subjects and are evaluated in light of ethical considerations offered. (shrink)

Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the "pedigree of the real" and the "pornography of the real," (...) they fail to activate their viewers' engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an "us-watching-them" mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption. In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a "postrealist" cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Buñuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films. (shrink)

Documentary as Exorcism is an interdisciplinary study that builds upon the insights of postcolonial studies, critical race theory, theological and religious studies and media and film studies to showcase the role of documentary film as a system of signifying capable of registering complex theological ideas while pursuing the authentic aims of documentary filmmaking. Robert Beckford marries the concepts of ‘theology as visual practice' and ‘theology as political engagement' to develop a new mode of documentary (...) class='Hi'>filmmaking that embeds emancipation from oppression in its aesthetic. In various documentaries made for Channel 4 and the BBC, Beckford narrates the complicit relationship of Christianity with European expansion, slavery, and colonialism as a historic manifestation of evil. In light of the cannibalistic practices of colonialism that devoured black life, and the church's role in the subjugation and theological legitimation of black bodies, Beckford characterises this form of historic Christian faith as ‘colonial Christianity' and its malevolent or ‘occult' practices as a form of ‘bewitchment' that must be ‘exorcised'. He identifies and exorcises the evil practices of colonialism and their present impact upon African Caribbean Christian communities in Britain in films such as Britain's Slave Trade and Empire Pays Back through a deliberate process of encoding/decoding. The emancipatory impact of this form of documentary filmmaking is demonstrated by its ability to bring issues such as reparations to the public square for debate, and its capacity to change a corporation's trade policies for the good of Africans. (shrink)

The arrival of the digital technology in the documentary has changed the existing modes of production, distribution and reception. Some film scholars see the digital as a threat to indexically-­based photographic realism and believe that this feature is neglected or lost in the digital image. New media and technological changes have always been quickly embraced by documentary filmmakers from the early days till today since they provide more possibilities in filmmaking and also invite the users to be (...) more active. New media documentary comes out as a result of the interplay of different media and new technologies, but that does not necessarily lead to the crisis of representation, and the use of digital technologies is less radical and threatening to the nature of cinema than it was first voiced in scholarship. (shrink)

This distinctively interdisciplinary approach to the subject encompasses filmmaking, psychoanalysis, philosophy and popular culture and offers a unique insight into documentary film practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. At the heart of the enquiry is belief that ‘transference-love’ is present in the documentary encounter. With a focus on testimony-driven film and a foreword by Michael Renov, who calls this book 'a radical and compelling account', _Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film _covers a range of topics including: Four (...) fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis and documentary film A review of documentary film practice A personal account of the author’s relationship with a subject of her own work A thorough interrogation of the ethics of documentary Ideal for film studies scholars, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically engaged professionals, as well as filmmakers, culture studies students and anyone interested in the process of documentary-making and contemporary culture, this work offers a unique approach. (shrink)

Documentary film, in the words of Bill Nichols, is one of the "discourses of sobriety" that include science, economics, politics, and history-discourses that claim to describe the "real," to tell the truth. Yet documentary film, in more obvious ways than does history, straddles the categories of fact and fiction, art and document, entertainment and knowledge. And the visual languages with which it operates have quite different effects than does the written text. In the following interview conducted during the (...) winter of 1997, historian Ann-Louise Shapiro raises questions about genre-the relationship of form to content and meaning-with documentary filmmaker Jill Godmilow.In order to explore the possibilities and constraints of non-fiction film as a medium for representing history, Godmilow was asked: What are the strategies and techniques by which documentary films make meaning? In representing historical events, how does a non-fiction filmmaker think about accuracy? authenticity? invention? What are the criteria you have in mind when you call a film like The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl "dishonest"? How does the tension between making art and making history affect documentary filmmaking? Should documentary filmmakers think of themselves, in the phrase of Ken Burns, as "tribal storytellers"? What kind of historical consciousness is produced by documentary film? (shrink)

During the mid 1980s, the renowned American documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman produced a four-part series of films that sought to record the operations of institutions in Talladega, Alabama, devoted to the care and training of people with disabilities. These films—designated as the Multi-handicapped Series—have received much less attention than Wiseman's earlier work, as if films about disability mark a drastic departure from his previous award-winning productions, such as Titicut Follies (1965) and Hospital (1970). The Multi-handicapped Series takes up general (...) categories of disabled populations as discrete documentary topics, Deaf (1986), Blind (1986), Multi-handicapped (1986) and Adjustment & Work (1986) as opposed to a specific location as in his earlier films. As a result, the latter series of films identify social and interpersonal structures developed in the name of specific conditions. Like Foucault's research on disciplinary tactics, Wiseman's films seek out many of the segregated social spaces typically occupied by persons classified as deviant: prisons, hospitals, charity networks, sheltered workshops, resident facilities, and vocational training structures. The Multi-handicapped Series focuses on the activities of professions and practitioners in education, administration, and therapy, as well as the institutional roles designed for bodies marked as disabled. Unlike its 19th century predecessor classification, feebleminded, the latter twentieth century U.S. policy answer has been waged as a matter of dividing disabilities into a binary structure of orthopedic or cognitive categories. Such a development has left many crossover bodies in a diagnostic no-body's-land. To analyze the history of these developments, this essay recognizes the formation of today's disability category as an effect of new regimes of power; a form of domination based upon the application of particularized diagnostic pathologies that provide the basis for cordoning off bodies which fail to fit neatly within the cognitive/orthopedic binary. As documents of the social spaces that are occupied by disabled people, Wiseman's films offer a rare contemplation of institutional practices and their application to populations viewed as nonnormative. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTraditionally, the objective of documentary filmmaking is to look and to teach—to add perspective on, by way of building knowledge about, issues of public concern. Cinema and media studies...

Documentary film, in the words of Bill Nichols, is one of the "discourses of sobriety" that include science, economics, politics, and history-discourses that claim to describe the "real," to tell the truth. Yet documentary film, in more obvious ways than does history, straddles the categories of fact and fiction, art and document, entertainment and knowledge. And the visual languages with which it operates have quite different effects than does the written text. In the following interview conducted during the (...) winter of 1997, historian Ann-Louise Shapiro raises questions about genre-the relationship of form to content and meaning-with documentary filmmaker Jill Godmilow.In order to explore the possibilities and constraints of non-fiction film as a medium for representing history, Godmilow was asked: What are the strategies and techniques by which documentary films make meaning? In representing historical events, how does a non-fiction filmmaker think about accuracy? authenticity? invention? What are the criteria you have in mind when you call a film like The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl "dishonest"? How does the tension between making art and making history affect documentary filmmaking? Should documentary filmmakers think of themselves, in the phrase of Ken Burns, as "tribal storytellers"? What kind of historical consciousness is produced by documentary film? (shrink)

Although there has been an extensive debate about whether films can actually do philosophy, this chapter bypasses that debate in order to examine a number of different ways in which philosophy has been done by contemporary filmmakers. Using a variety of different films from different genres—including Anomalisa, an animated film; Amour, a narrative fiction film; and The Act of Killing, a documentary—the chapter explores some of the central ways that philosophy has been done on film—such as providing a counterexample (...) to a philosophical thesis, providing evidence to support a philosophical claim, and presenting an argument in support of a philosophical view. (shrink)

In Selfless Cinema?, Sarah Cooper maps out the power relations of making, and viewing, documentaries in ethical terms. The ethics of filmmaking are often examined in largely legalistic terms, dominated by issues of consent, responsibility, and participantse(tm) or film-makerse(tm) rights, but Cooper approaches four representative French film-makers e" Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Raymond Depardon, and Agns Varda e" in a far less juridical way, drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. She argues that, in spite of Levinase(tm)s iconoclastic, (...) anti-ocular thinking, his concept of visage is richly applicable to film, and especially to documentary. (shrink)

This article discusses the artist, filmmaker, and writer Lana Lin’s “revisioning” of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) to consider how the poetic encounter between two artists from different generations exemplifies the relational praxis that Lorde pursued throughout her life. In revealing the ways in which Lorde opens acoustic sensory spaces for contemporary readers and listeners of her work, I specifically focus on the political and aesthetic dynamic of recitation in Lin’s experimental documentary The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018). I (...) trace how recitation becomes a coalitional practice of feminist chorus through which readers and listeners embody the sonorous space they co-create through and with Lorde. The article further looks into the ways Lin pairs recitation performance with visceral images of body parts on the screen to argue that the film’s visuals dwell in and extend the form of the chorus; which is to say, the film expands the meaning and practice of chorus beyond the realm of the sonic. The bodies on the screen extend the chorus, immersing the audience in a participatory rethinking of the experience of cancer (particularly breast cancer) not merely as an individual misfortune or an aesthetic concern. In adjoining textual, visual, and acoustic elements, Lin’s film provides a powerful transformative sensory environment, reverberating through the reciters and the audience. (shrink)

Confronted by the multiscaled ecological crisis, many experience so-called ecological emotions such as ecological grief and eco-anxiety. Visual media can channel and contribute to creating and nurturing ecological emotions. Specifically, eco-documentaries are one of the triggers of ecological emotions. This paper explores the role of images in the generation of emotions regarding the environmental crisis through a case study of five contemporary Swiss eco-documentaries: It All Begins, Citizen Nobel, Lynx, Taming the Garden and The Mushroom Speaks. It analyses the ecological (...) emotions expressed by the characters or the filmmakers, or the expected emotions of the viewers, with regard to the types of images and their framing, editing, narrative and attractiveness. Finally, drawing on interdisciplinary literature from environmental humanities, this paper discusses the variety and intertwinement of ecological emotions and their interrelations to knowledge of the ecological crisis and pro-environmental actions. (shrink)

Documentarians certainly have different ethical standards than their journalist counterparts, yet filmmakers also adhere to ethical constructs such as truth telling and privacy. The decision by Morgan Neville to recreate Bourdain’s voice in Roadrunner, and ethical issues including truth telling and privacy that the decision created, are not outweighed by the news value or impact of that inclusion.

Indigenous communities have always cultivated social studies learning that is interactive, dynamic, and integrated with traditional knowledges. To confront the assimilative and deculturalizing education that accompanied European settlement of the Americas, Montana has adopted Indian Education for All (IEFA). This case study evaluates the Digital Storywork Partnership (DSP), which strives to advance the goals of IEFA within and beyond the social studies classroom through community-centered research and filmmaking. Results demonstrate the potential for DSP projects to advance culturally revitalizing education, (...) community connectedness, and identity-development. The DSP offers a model for social studies education that is not only culturally affirming and revitalizing for Indigenous communities, but also holds potential for use in all communities. We conclude with recommendations for educators, scholars, and community members engaged in similar efforts. (shrink)

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. (...) A Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible. (shrink)

Academics have increasingly used video and other electronic methods to collect data and capture reflections from participants. But, until recently, it’s been less common to use film as way of disseminating the results of research. That’s beginning to change. Film can be a powerful way to share research findings with a broad audience. This is particularly true when academics are combining) the traditions of ethnography, documentary filmmaking, and storytelling. -/- Film and cinema are increasingly being used in environmental (...) humanities to complement – or challenge – text-based research. The filmmakers in the arts, sciences and humanities see potential in using the moving images within political philosophy, environmental politics, postcolonial studies, human geography, urban ecology, postcolonial studies, design and literature. An example of this is the film One Table Two Elephants. It is a cinematic ethnography created by two Swedish researchers and filmmakers Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. Based on years of research in Cape Town, it was filmed in 2015 as part of a longer-term research and film-project . The documentary deals with race, nature and knowledge politics in Cape Town as part of the ways of knowing urban ecologies research project. -/- . (shrink)

United States Air Force planes fly across mountains of green forest; behind them, fine white streams of chemical spray fill the sky. The planes fly alone or in formation covering wide swaths of the entire landscape. These images of the herbicide spraying during the United States-Vietnam War are ubiquitous in media material about Agent Orange, the most heavily used of the fifteen herbicides sprayed during the war. This representation of the war does not include guns, grenades, tanks, bombs, or dead (...) bodies. Instead, contemporary documentary filmmakers offer images of airplanes and chemical barrels to provide evidence of another weapon of war, pan dead and leafless forests in an otherwise lush landscape of green, and zero in on children’s deformed bodies to show the lasting environmental and health effects of Agent Orange. In this essay I share preliminary thoughts from my new project on Agent Orange and film in the United States and Vietnam. The bulk of social science writing on Agent Orange has focused on American veterans and their fight to secure benefits, while film scholars have analyzed the Vietnam War in Hollywood movies and television. I investigate documentary film, the transnational activism that generates these films, and the representations of gender, disabilities, bodies, history and culture within them. Here I offer a close reading of two turn-of-the-twenty-first-century documentaries about Agent Orange in Vietnam. (shrink)

As digital technology advances at a truly exponential rate, documentary filmmakers may be tempted to bypass standards of ethical conduct – like subject consent and disclosure of contrived reenactments to audiences – in favor of dramatic impact. Some may also seek to replace missing archival or historical material and manufacture seemingly authentic content with the assistance of “digital performers.” This commentary examines the use of artificial intelligence in Morgan Neville’s film, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain and places it (...) within an historical context. Comparisons to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick highlight the importance of managing and negotiating traditional audience expectations in order to preserve the unspoken agreement between viewers and makers. (shrink)

In his 2009 film District 9, Neill Blomkamp employs a handheld camera to create the effect of an embedded documentary film, which ostensibly is devoted to an objective treatment of the escalating tensions between a stranded alien race – known only as the ‘Prawns’ – and the increasingly agitated citizens of Johannesburg. Mobilizing the self-critical perspective afforded him by this mise en abyme, Blomkamp demonstrates the extent to which the presumption of objectivity allows the documentary filmmaker to frame (...) the new reality to which a reluctant populace gradually accustoms itself. As depicted in the embedded documentary, the new reality is that human–Prawn relations have been damaged beyond repair. As such, the proposed relocation of the Prawns, which initially may have been utterly unthinkable to most residents of Johannesburg, rounds into view as the best and most reasonable option for all involved. According to Blomkamp, that is, the anonymous documentarians not only report the slow, incremental embrace of genocide – represented in the film by the unseen District 10 – but also play a largely unacknowledged role in promoting this transition. (shrink)

Documentary film is that genre of filmmaking that lays bare the fact of all film, which is that it presents "a world past" (Cavell, The World Viewed). This fact of film seems to point to a paradox of time in our experience of movies: we are present at something that has happened, something that is over. But what if we were to take this fact to show that film has the power to place us outside our ordinary, unreflective (...) relation to time? In this essay I examine three pre-cinematic descriptions of relations to time – in Emerson, Thoreau, and Weil – that anticipate the paradox of time inherent in film. I then put that examination to use in a reading of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a film ostensibly about prehistoric cave paintings but whose achievement is its declaration, not to document some past time, but to liberate the present moment. (shrink)

In Les Blank's documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe , director Werner Herzog eats pieces of his own sturdy looking footwear in order to settle a bet that he made with the filmmaker Errol Morris. While dining on his shoe, which he has cooked in garlic and duck fat, Herzog responds to the question, “What is the value of films for society?” Initially, he answers the question with a question: “Whose society?” . It appears that he has finished responding (...) and is returning to the business of eating, but Herzog is hardly known for keeping his answers…. (shrink)

Avant-garde filmmakers in the Soviet Union argued over the merits of the played film and the documentary film. They argued about the duration of shots, long or short. They questioned what constituted filmic material, camera subjectivity, the objective fact and whether film extended the eyes, and the capacity to see, or whether it wielded a fist, augmenting or bashing feelings. Shub contributed to these discussions, not least through her own film work, produced out of a combination of commitment and (...) necessity. This paper traces these discussions and Shub’s role within them through a focus on two objects and the way in which they come to appear in film and film-discourse: strawberries and cream. The strawberries are drawn initially from Shklovsky’s comments on the inequities of US agriculture in his Journey to the Land of Movies and the cream stems from Eisenstein’s mechanical separator in The Old and the New. Shub’s particular take on the object in her film work will emerge through the dialectical tensions of two objects. (shrink)

Tim Wardle’s 2018 documentary film Three Identical Strangers is an exploration of identity, family, and loss. It’s also about nature versus nurture and the boundaries of ethically permissible research, particularly research involving children. The film tells the story of identical triplets who were separated soon after birth in 1961. A different family adopted each boy, without being told that their son had two identical brothers. The adoption agency responsible for finding the families was collaborating with a group of researchers (...) working on a study about … something. Three Identical Strangers details the boys’ fight to obtain information about the study and for closure. But while the film may have received rave reviews, it left us feeling uneasy. We came away with two sets of questions, one having to do with the story that the film documents and the second with the ethics of filmmaking itself. (shrink)

In her 2011 documentary, La Langue de Zahra/Zahra’s Mother Tongue, Algerian/French filmmaker Fatima Sissani “gives voice” to her Kabyle mother, Zahra, who lived in France as an immigrant woman for years after Algerian independence without speaking French. Often considered uneducated and ignorant, these women act as archives of oral tradition, history, and poetry in a language their children often do not speak. In this paper, I will look at how this performative documentary film creates “spaces in-between” cultures through (...) its uses of performance, orality, and cinematic space. A number of recent Maghrebi and sub-Saharan African documentaries have emerged that can be described as performative documentaries in which historical evocation and emotive connection to the subject matter is as important to the filmmaker as factual referencing. The filmmaker plays a self-reflexive role in the text, which often shapes the content.It is important to note that the film is not about being forced to choose between two ge... (shrink)

The German filmmaker Werner Herzog controversially associates “truth” and “reality” in film with Kant’s notion of the sublime by explicitly treating the sublime as a key element in developing his notion of ecstatic truth. I critically examine Herzog’s interpretation of Kant’s sublime and the relations he establishes between the sublime and his own key aesthetic notion of ecstatic truth. I examine how the sublime in Herzog’s films arises from encounters with the overwhelming force and power of nature experienced by his (...) characters in the feature films and participants in the documentaries. I question whether Kant’s conception of the sublime is the one that best aligns with Herzog’s aesthetic aims and I contrast Kant’s transcendental sublime with what I describe as the physiological sublime of Edmund Burke. I draw some conclusions about the moral dimension of the sublime in the context of the relationship between humans and nature within the frame of contemporary ecological concerns. (shrink)

In his 21st-century explorer’s uniform, Nordiclooking Spencer Wells kneels alongside nearly naked, smaller, African hunters who sport bows and arrows. Featured on the National Geographic Web site, “Explorer-in-Residence” Wells hold a bachelor’s and doctorate degree in biology. He is also a filmmaker who both masterminded and hosted National Geographic’s 2002 documentary, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, which explains to non-scientists a molecular anthropology narrative of how humans left Africa 60,000 years ago to populate the rest of the (...) globe.In his latest exploratory adventure, Wells is the project leader and spokesperson for the recently announced “Genographic Project,” a “landmark study of the human journey.” In April 2005, National Geographic and IBM, with funding from the Waitt Family Foundation, launched the Genographic Project as a five-year “research partnership” that aims to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.”. (shrink)

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focussing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume (...) collects the major European ÒwavesÓ and figures ; Latin American Third Cinemas ; radical art and the avant-garde ; and world cinemas. It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bolla’n, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, PainlevŽ, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture. (shrink)

At the heart of the cinema of Werner Herzog lies the vision of discordant and chaoticnature – the vision of anti-nature. Throughout his work we can trace a constant fascinationwith the violence of nature and its indifference, or even hostility, to human desires andambitions. For example, in his early film Even Dwarfs Started Small we have therecurrent image of a crippled chicken continually pecked by its companions.2Here theviolence of nature provides a sly prelude to the anarchic carnival violence of the (...) dwarfs’revolt against their oppressive institution. This fascination is particularly evident in hisdocumentary filmmaking, although Herzog himself deconstructs this generic category. Inthe ‘Minnesota Declaration’ 3on ‘truth and fact in documentary cinema’ he radicallydistinguishes between ‘fact’, linked to norms and the limits of Cinéma Vérité, and ‘truth’ asecstatic illumination, which ‘can be reached only through fabrication and imagination andstylization’ 2002, 301). In particular he identifies nature as the site of thisecstatic illumination – in which we find ‘Lessons of Darkness’ – but only through the lack ofany ‘voice’ of nature. While Herzog constantly films nature he films it as hell or as utterlyalien. This is not a nature simply corrupted by humanity but a nature inherently ‘corrupt’ in itself; Herzog’s vision of nature is a kind of anti-vitalism, a horror at the promiscuous vitality of nature. (shrink)

This essay looks at the image of the ship in Péter Forgács’s documentary The Danube Exodus (1999) as a site that enables the viewer to meditate the encounter of the historical Self and the Other. Forgács, who works with the found footage material of an amateur filmmaker, teases out the paradoxical double movement of the historical event, in which both Jewish and German refugees use the river Danube as an escape route in the early phase of World War II, (...) traveling on the same paddle steamer in opposite directions. The documentary about two river-stories directed by an Eastern European filmmaker becomes a contemplation on interconnectedness, national cross-pollination and the inscription of the viewer in these processes. I argue that the film offers its audiences a way to visually and conceptually consider the unfeasibility of historiographic authority. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

RESUMO Entre a vasta produção de Eduardo Coutinho, destaca-se o documentário Jogo de cena, celebrado como “objeto solar” da filmografia do cineasta, no qual a entrevista ocupa um lugar central. O objetivo deste artigo é refletir discursivamente sobre ela a partir de cenas de fala postas a circular em relação às escolhas estéticas e à materialidade do documentário; natureza da relação entrevistador-entrevistadas, marcada pela recusa a uma “suposta neutralidade” e produção de agenciamentos, cenografias e mundo ético. Para isso, são acionados (...) conceitos basilares da Análise do Discurso, como interdiscurso, cenografia, agenciamento e ethos discursivo, conforme formulados por Dominique Maingueneau. Os resultados mostram que é possível estabelecer diálogos profícuos com os dispositivos metodológicos de Coutinho e conceitos da Análise do Discurso. A partir de uma aura mística do seu silêncio acolhedor, pode-se depreender um ethos respeitoso e atencioso do entrevistador em relação às falas das personagens. ABSTRACT Among Eduardo Coutinho’s vast production, the documentary Jogo de cena stands out and is celebrated as being the centerpiece of the filmmaker's filmography, in which the interviews occupy a central place. The purpose of this article is to reflect upon these interviews, discursively, based on: speech scenes put in perspective and in relation to the aesthetic choices and materiality of the documentary; nature of the interviewer-interviewee relationship, marked by the refusal of an “alleged neutrality” and the production of settings, scenographies, and ethical worlds. For this, we articulated basic concepts of Discourse Analysis, as theorized by Dominique Maingueneau, such as interdiscourse, scenography, setting and discursive ethos. The results demonstrate that it is possible to establish a dialogue between Coutinho’s methodological apparatus and concepts of Discourse Analysis. From a mystical aura of his welcoming silence, the interviewer’s respectful and considerate ethos in relation to the characters' speeches can be inferred. (shrink)

The orthodox view in analytical film theory is that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is anchored in communicative practice. Whereas the creator of nonfiction can be seen as asserting something as true, the creator of fiction merely asks of its spectators that they imagine the work’s content. This could be labelled an intention-response theory of the difference between fiction and nonfiction. While watching Supersize Me I am as a spectator very much aware of director Morgan Spurlock making an argument (...) about the state of affairs in the real world, and I assess the truth-value of this argument. While watching Avatar I imagine that there is a population of humanoids, the Na’vi, on the planet Pandora, fighting for survival: I assess what is fictional (true in the fiction). -/- However, when it comes to truth claims the difference between the many varieties of fiction and nonfiction is not as straightforward as this. For example, one may argue that the spectator can and commonly does perceive even a prototypical fiction film such as Avatar as laying claims to truth in the sense that she may read the film allegorically, and search for the filmmaker’s agenda. Is not Avatar a critique of Western imperialism, and our non-environmental lifestyle, for example? It is not fully accurate to claim that fiction film does not make truth claims – there are several ways in which fiction films are taken as asserting something that the spectator is asked to believe. -/- Among the many difficult issues this counterargument raises, I will concentrate on only one here, namely on the case of social realism in fiction. Social realism arguably asserts that something is true in our actual world and asks its spectators to believe this – although works of social realism are also classified as fiction. The solution is not to dismiss the basic theory, but to make finer distinctions. I argue that one difference between prototypical nonfiction and social realist fiction is that nonfiction asserts that its contents (characters and events) are true as tokens, e.g., this person experienced this. As fiction, a work of social realism calls for imagining. However, such a work also asserts that its contents are true as types, e.g., these types of persons experience these types of events. -/- I argue that this can explain what the difference is between the truth claims made in the nonfictional The Corner and The Wire as social realist fiction, respectively. Creator David Simon emphasizes that The Wire’s portrayal of Baltimore city life is true, and is to be taken as making assertions about American inner city decay. The background for the show is found in Simons and co-author Ed Burns’s nonfiction book The Corner, written after extensive ethnographic observation of a group of drug dealers in Baltimore. Their intention to assert something as true is reflected in the academic reception of the series, in which it is celebrated for its authenticity and realism. Studying the style, narration and content of The Wire carefully further illustrates how these truth-telling intentions are communicated to the spectator. Its documentary-like style mimics observational nonfiction film, and its cyclical narrative structure, focused on an ensemble cast of characters typically marginalized in mainstream popular culture by virtue of status and ethnicity, is typical of works of social realism. The spectator picks up on these clues and expects a certain accuracy and authenticity in the type representations in The Wire, although she is aware that the depictions of these token characters and these token events are not true, but only to be imagined. -/- In conclusion, the theory presented in this paper may not be able to neatly categorize any given film as either fiction or nonfiction, as some nonfiction films make type claims and some fictions make token claims. I do not claim that the difference between type and token claims is sufficient for categorizing any given work as either fiction or nonfiction. More work is needed in order to categorize and describe the various types of fiction and nonfiction, paying special attention to the particular blend of imagining and belief prescribed by each, as evident in what the creators say about their intentions, textual features of the work itself, and critical reception. However, difficult borderline cases such as social realism in fiction do not collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, as demarcated by the intention-response theory. Rather, such difficult cases should compel us to investigate more closely the communicative intentions and conventions at work. In the case of social realism, it is still correct to say that the spectator merely imagines that these fictional characters experience various events; however, she also perceives a double invitation to believe that these events and experiences are typical, and as such representative, of a larger group about which the work intends to assert something as true. (shrink)

The aims of my paper are triple: 1) to offer a panoramic view on the evolution of theoretical reflections on documentary definition, specially into the contemporary analytic aesthetics; 2) to evaluate the solution proposed by Carl Plantinga defining documentary as AVR (Assserted Veridical Representation); and 3) to contrast the aforementioned theoretical problem with an example of new documentary film, My Architect (2003) by N. Kahn, wich I find particulary interesting and significant concerning that problem. My thesis is (...) that new documentary emphasis in subjective involvement of both filmmaker and spectator results in a more deep understanding of documentary nature. (shrink)

Seen through the eyes of filmmaker David Teboul—who completed a documentary about the artist in 2010—Boris Mikhailov: I’ve Been Here Before offers an overview of Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov’s career. One of the most important artists to have emerged from the former Soviet Union, Mikhailov has for more than thirty years taken photographs that engage with the idea of the individual in the public sphere, as well as the breakup of the Soviet Union and its many human casualties. Extensively (...) illustrated with stills from Teboul’s film, the book also includes transcripts of Mikhailov’s discussions with Teboul, in which he provides insight into both his work and, more generally, the life of an artist in the Soviet Union before and after its fall. This volume brings back into focus Mikhailov’s beautifully crafted and often melancholy body of work which was relatively unknown prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to the UNICEF report entitled ‘Ending Child Marriage: Progress and Prospects’, there are 700 million women who were married as children, and 280 million girls are at risk of becoming child brides. In Turkey, according to the reports written by feminist organisations 1 in 3 marriages there is a child. These figures are alarming and signal the need for further and urgent research in the field. In 2016 I made my first ever film entitled Growing Up Married. The film (...) explores what happens after child marriage by focusing on the stories of four women from Turkey and making their experiences visible and audible, in an attempt to contribute to and advance debates around this significant, complex and emotionally charged human rights issue which has often been discursively silenced. Working on a documentary film on forced marriage in Turkey poses challenges to me as a UK-trained and based academic, who focuses on theories around feminism and media rather than filmmaking practice. In this article, I critically reflect upon the process of making a documentary film, and theories around interviewing women to examine the tensions inherent within representing forced marriage on screen. (shrink)

When my book Reframing Women: A history of New Zealand cinema was published in 2000 New Zealand women’s film was flourishing. There had been an explosion of filmmaking following the upsurge of twentieth century feminism in the 1970s beginning with the international women’s year film Some of My Best Friends are Women and the subsequent production of nine feminist documentary films. The energy generated by these films and the international feminist history projects that uncovered the formerly invisible contribution (...) of women across every sphere of creative was contagious. There was a feeling of optimism that anything was possible. Women were using the camera to focus the lens on themselves and their issues. Between 1980 and 1990 dramas and features dealing with gender issues increased dramatically while the formerly marginalised were gaining access to the technology to explore sexuality and identity politics. There were powerful films about identity by Maori, Pacific, Asian, Yugoslavi... (shrink)

This article explores what cinema can contribute to recent philosophical engagements with animality and what the work of contemporary French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in particular can bring to debates around the zoomorphic or ‘creaturely’ dimensions of film. Examining two works by des Pallières — the documentary Is Dead and the feature-length film Adieu — and drawing principally on the work of Jacques Derrida, the article attends to cinematic, historically-framed configurations of a shared vulnerability between the human and the (...) animal. Such instances of commonality are shown here to unravel hierarchical taxonomies of being, in a rethinking of the ethics and politics of responsibility. These nonanthropocentric modes of cinematic inquiry also engage with issues of minerality and technicity, animating correspondences between forms of life and nonlife, philosophically broadening a consideration of relations between the human and the nonhuman. (shrink)

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential-phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both (...) directly on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and on some recent film- and feminist-theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film-texts. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli documentary My Land Zion and the Palestinian documentary Paradise Lost. Both films are critical autobiographical texts and in both, the woman filmmaker negotiates her emotional and ideological ties with her culture, history, and nation. Naaman proposes that by using the autobiographical genre and by engaging emotionally as well as rationally, the women filmmakers discussed offer a particular gendered position rebelliously outside nationalism and the place of women within it.

This article examines the Israeli documentary My Land Zion and the Palestinian documentary Paradise Lost. Both films are critical autobiographical texts and in both, the woman filmmaker negotiates her emotional and ideological ties with her culture, history, and nation. Naaman proposes that by using the autobiographical genre and by engaging emotionally as well as rationally, the women filmmakers discussed offer a particular gendered position rebelliously outside nationalism and the place of women within it.

Maya Deren was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon, a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films. Maya Deren assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing Deren's (...) overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film. (shrink)

Alexander Sokurov’s latest film, Francofonia (2015), produced by the Louvre and filmed in France, takes up the issue of the Louvre in the middle of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris. This quasi-documentary, filmed along the lines of Sokurov’s signature documentary “elegies,” also encompasses the history of the Louvre up to the present day. Francofonia follows in the long line of Sokurov’s other films set in museums. Sokurov is an author who has worked more than (...) any other filmmaker to translate paintings into a cinematic medium. While engaging with art history and great museums, however, Sokurov also gives a poignant interpretation of the violence of history that often surrounds great works of art. Thus the museum, in Sokurov’s cinematic interpretation, is both an archive of the most valuable products of civilization, as well as a material monument to the founding cultural and political violence that produced and surrounds it. The overt scrutiny and hypervigilance with which Sokurov films museums affects the very mode of his filming: his camera operates as if it were a museum itself, each film becoming an attempt to save civilization from its own ruination, and from its own blindness. Every frame in Sokurov’s films is thus a freeze-frame, born out of the paralyzing tension between external historical nihilism and the beauty of art. (shrink)

The Call for Papers invokes a history of thinking about images in terms of Western traditions, culminating in the ‘apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate’ Jacques Rancière describes in The future of the image. Not considered in this scenario are other ways of looking at, being moved by, thinking about, going with and feeling through images, which I will unfold in this paper. Starting with filmmaker Merata Mita from Aotearoa New Zealand, who contrasts living images of her ancestors in documentaries, (...) ‘very much alive’ to her, with outsiders’ selective collecting of those images ; linking with Natalie Robertson’s tracing of takiaho, by which descendants keep connections with their ancestors in film fragments alive; I will also remember Aby Warburg’s notion of Nachleben – the ‘survival’, ‘continuity’ and ‘metamorphosis’ of images and motifs, and finally engage Mitchell’s consideration of a road not taken by Rancière in contemplating The future of the image. The paper explores a range of experiences, actions, reflections and emotions bundled in the terms appropriation and iconicity: from engaged encounters to consumptive misuse in the first case, from fleeting celebrity fame to a particular form of material presence that contributes to identification and community building in the latter. By bringing Māori and Pacific ways of thinking together with minor European thought traditions the paper shows that images, as appearance into visibility and doability, can not only connect the imagination with reality. They can also open up new and old realms of possibilities through affective and effective iconicity. Whether or not this can happen depends on the prevailing kind of belonging. (shrink)

Copyright gives creators a monopoly on most uses of their work throughout their lives and for seventy years post mortem. Copyfraud, in Mazzone's striking but far from unjustified usage, is a claim of ownership made by institutions and individuals that do not possess it. To discover how prevalent such frauds are (and the degree to which they constrain and contort writers, musicians, filmmakers, and others) is truly amazing. Mazzone deals only with the US, but though the precise contours of copyright (...) are slightly different in the UK and the EU, the same kinds of overreach arise more or less everywhere nowadays. Who are the perpetrators? Museums that claim copyright in images of works that they own or hold but that are in the public domain; picture libraries that charge license fees for out-of-copyright works; publishers who make false assertions of copyright in government publications, even in law school editions of the US Constitution; media corporations that claim to be able to license excerpts of works that they own despite the provisions of the (admittedly vague) “fair use” clause in long-established copyright laws; and the heirs and estates of writers who claim control of all uses made of the published and unpublished words of their fathers, aunts, and so forth. Publishers collude in this now rampant abuse of public access to cultural goods by insisting that authors of fiction and nonfiction works undertake to clear copyright to material borrowed from sources, a laborious process for which most writers are ill equipped. The result is that key evidence in scholarly work is often simply left out. In documentary film, the effects of copyfraud can be seen only in those films that are not made: the industry convention—“when in doubt, obtain a license”—makes many subjects financially and practically unviable.This book should have been a wake-up call, when it appeared a decade ago, for all involved in what is now called “cultural production” to reassert their rights, and the rights of the public, to free access to material that is not and never will be privately owned. Alas, Mazzone's detailed chapters on what ought to be done next have remained dead letters. It is time to reread them and to heave the ball back down the false mountain of improper claims of ownership made by corporations and individuals who know what they are doing and know they can get away with it. This laudably clear, direct, and readable book brings to mind an old English rhyme that remains as relevant today as it ever was: The law doth punish man or woman / That steals the goose from off the common / But lets the greater felon loose / Who steals the common from the goose. (shrink)

Ten years after the popular uprising that became a brutal war, Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian authors are engaged in the struggle to craft a historical consciousness that can acknowledge and mourn for their recent revolutionary past without reifying it. As they write in and of material, political, and social ruin, their works echo collective traumas in regional memory: the Palestinian nakba, the rise of Syria’s Assad regime, Lebanon’s civil war, the 2003 occupation of Iraq, and more. The ruin appears cruelly recursive, (...) yet it is arrested in the corpus of works discussed in this article: poetry by Firas Sulaiman and Osama Esber; prose by Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Samer Yazbek, and Ra’id Wahsh; and documentary film by the Abounaddara Collective. Drawing on Arabic poetic modernism and regional politics, I argue that ruin imagery—ranging from war’s rubble to ancient artefacts—carries distinctive structures of temporal anticipation in Syrian literary and cultural memory. The writers and filmmakers discussed deploy formal and thematic means of stasis and repetition, displacement and accumulation, to summon these temporal structures—only to refuse, interrupt, and reroute them. I argue that such poetic engineerings of the images of ruin assert the singularity of the Syrian present within broader collective memories of ruin. As such, they raise a historicizing challenge to the current academic dominance of reading ruin imagery, notably from the Middle East, through an imperial lens. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Among Eduardo Coutinho’s vast production, the documentary Jogo de cena stands out and is celebrated as being the centerpiece of the filmmaker's filmography, in which the interviews occupy a central place. The purpose of this article is to reflect upon these interviews, discursively, based on: speech scenes put in perspective and in relation to the aesthetic choices and materiality of the documentary; nature of the interviewer-interviewee relationship, marked by the refusal of an “alleged neutrality” and the production (...) of settings, scenographies, and ethical worlds. For this, we articulated basic concepts of Discourse Analysis, as theorized by Dominique Maingueneau, such as interdiscourse, scenography, setting and discursive ethos. The results demonstrate that it is possible to establish a dialogue between Coutinho’s methodological apparatus and concepts of Discourse Analysis. From a mystical aura of his welcoming silence, the interviewer’s respectful and considerate ethos in relation to the characters' speeches can be inferred. RESUMO Entre a vasta produção de Eduardo Coutinho, destaca-se o documentário Jogo de cena, celebrado como “objeto solar” da filmografia do cineasta, no qual a entrevista ocupa um lugar central. O objetivo deste artigo é refletir discursivamente sobre ela a partir de cenas de fala postas a circular em relação às escolhas estéticas e à materialidade do documentário; natureza da relação entrevistador-entrevistadas, marcada pela recusa a uma “suposta neutralidade” e produção de agenciamentos, cenografias e mundo ético. Para isso, são acionados conceitos basilares da Análise do Discurso, como interdiscurso, cenografia, agenciamento e ethos discursivo, conforme formulados por Dominique Maingueneau. Os resultados mostram que é possível estabelecer diálogos profícuos com os dispositivos metodológicos de Coutinho e conceitos da Análise do Discurso. A partir de uma aura mística do seu silêncio acolhedor, pode-se depreender um ethos respeitoso e atencioso do entrevistador em relação às falas das personagens. (shrink)

"Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book." -- Edward W. Said In The Material Ghost , Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory, lifelike and dreamlike at once, a peculiar mix of reality and imagination. "The images on the (...) screen," he writes, "carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost." "Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating." -- Alfred Guzzetti, Boston Book Review "A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum "Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism." -- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor "Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic André Bazin." -- Sight & amp Sound "The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation none of the chapters is without memorable insights." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book--the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching -- accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film." -- Stanley Cavell "Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... [Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses." -- James Naremore, Cineaste. (shrink)