From Amateur Video to New Documentary Formats : Citizen Journalism and a Reconfiguring of Historical Knowledge

Abstract

The Arab Spring of 2011 appeared on the news in countless video testimonials shot by participants and bystanders. Yet the sheer amount of such visual data, combined with the untranslatability and poor quality of the footage, delivers an often opaque and ambiguous material. Peter Snowdon’s film The Uprising (2013) appropriates and reassembles this amateur footage. Compared to the 1992 film Videograms of a Revolution by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică, The Uprising raises the question of a possible knowledge shift produced and performed by the amateur video maker. In an analysis of these films, this chapter investigates the possibilities of documenting historical events through mobile video footage.