{"title":"More-than-human sonic engagements in documentary film and phonography","authors":"Adam Diller","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1815125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1815125","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Reconceiving relations with the more-than-human is a central concern of scholarship in the Anthropocene. In documentary film, entanglements with the more-than-human are expressed through cinematic relationships with subjects such as bees, freeways, Antarctic science, abandoned military bunkers, and emergency firefighting operations. Several recent documentary films use their soundtracks to anchor these engagements. This paper examines the construction of these soundtracks through a comparison between documentary film and phonography. Phonography – broadly defined as creative practices of recording, editing, and listening to sonic environments – foregrounds the material/cultural processes of all sound recording by attending to specific uses of microphones and studio editing techniques. I situate these sonic practices in relation to the foundational poles of soundscape and objet sonore established by R. Murray Schafer and Pierre Schaeffer, work by contemporary practitioners, and recent theorizations in sound studies. Interweaving an account of recent documentary soundtracks with theories and practices of phonography highlights the conceptual implications of specific sound recording techniques and attends to the ethics of sound recording practices. These sonic practices pose new questions about the work performed through documentary film soundtracks’ engagements with the more-than-human.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"238 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1815125","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44161011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interactive documentary as relational media: exploring an actor-network theory approach","authors":"John Hondros","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1815126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1815126","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper explores Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a framework for understanding interactive documentary. It examines Adrian Miles’s work in this area, where he uses ANT as a way of conceptualising interactive documentary as socio-technical media assemblages and consequently to question the relationship between human and non-human agency as understood within the field. After introducing ANT and reviewing Miles’s position, the paper engages in a detailed discussion of ANT’s key concepts in the context of specific interactive documentaries showing how these concepts operate and examining the insights they provide. This discussion supports and extends Miles’s position while also broadening and deepening interactive documentary’s engagement with ANT through a more detailed and systematic engagement with its concepts than has been attempted previously. The paper concludes by raising issues concerning the adaption of ANT’s concepts to the field, including the question of whether they offer a complete theoretical framework for understanding interactive documentary and by suggesting future lines of enquiry to address these issues.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"256 - 270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1815126","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44687114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The autobiographical documentary: archive and montage to represent the self","authors":"Vladimir Rosas, R. Dittus","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1815123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1815123","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay aims to examine how archival material is repurposed within autobiographical documentaries in order to reconstruct the documentarian filmmaker’s self in relation to their family. It is plausible for the filmmaker to explore their own identity by reexamining their family history, especially with interviews and observational devices; however, domestic media plays a particular role in creating a supporting discourse that finds new meanings from the confrontation of statements and images. By analyzing three examples of autobiographical documentaries, namely Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003), 51 Birch Street (Doug Black, 2005) and The Marina Experiment (Marina Lutz, 2009), we will explore how the re-contextualization of personal images works as a narrative strategy to unveil identity contestations in American autobiographical filmmaking.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"203 - 219"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1815123","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44235372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voices from the Valley: an unfinished agenda","authors":"S. Venkatesan, R. James","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1782808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1782808","url":null,"abstract":"Since the end of British occupation in India in 1947, the political status of Jammu and Kashmir 1 not only continues as a contentious domestic issue but also remains a major source of geopolitical ...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"267 - 279"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1782808","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45514747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feminist counter-cinema and decolonial countervisuality: subversions of audiovisual archives in Un’ora sola ti vorrei (2002) and Pays Barbare (2013)","authors":"Orianna Calderón-Sandoval, A. Sanchez-Espinosa","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1782807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1782807","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article we analyse the Italian compilation films Un’ora sola ti vorrei (Alina Marazzi, 2002) and Pays Barbare (Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, 2013) as examples, respectively, of feminist counter-cinema and decolonial countervisuality working with and against audiovisual archives. By means of a close-reading of the two films from an intersectional feminist perspective, we discuss: on the one hand, the ways in which Marazzi contests the rigid gender performativity of home movies, by restituting her mother’s memory and exposing her sense of discomfort; on the other hand, the strategies employed by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi in their dismantling of the sexism and racism of the colonial archive, while also warning about the fascist past haunting the present.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"187 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1782807","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41431323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Documentary resistance: social change and participatory media","authors":"Wakae Nakane","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1762318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1762318","url":null,"abstract":"In what capacity does the documentary engage in public dialogue for creating social change? Conditioned by the broadly shared ontological understanding of documentary's indexicality to the lived wo...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"105 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1762318","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45193162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond observation: A history of authorship in ethnographic film","authors":"B. Winston","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2020.1762319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1762319","url":null,"abstract":"George Stony, pioneer of interactive media-making, felt that he had spent his life filming documentaries about other people that they should have made for themselves. Perhaps this regret applies no...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"280 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2020.1762319","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49475116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interactive documentary at the intersection of performance and mediation: navigating ‘invisible’ histories and ‘inaudible’ stories in the United States","authors":"Dale Hudson","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1678561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678561","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Examining four interactive documentaries, this article analyzes how performance and mediation can encourage curosity, empathy, and accountability in relation to complex issues and perspectives that cannot be always represented with any pretense of objectivity or ethics in conventional analogue practices. They can foreground emotional and affective registers as meaningful – sometimes more meaningful than the empirical and rational registers typically prioritized in analogue media. They model a critical engagement with digital evidence, tactile interfaces, and locative experiences to navigate a postcolonial/transnational United States and allow for potentially multi-perspectival understandings of issues. Documentary studies historically focused on visible or audible evidence. It has paid less attention to invisible and inaudible evidence. By activating invisible geographies, interactive documentaries facilitate new ways of imagining relationships and new ways of enacting collaborative solutions to problems that are larger than any one of us. They can instruct in ways to navigate larger processes, such as forced migration and global warming. Rather than the universalizing revolutions of past centuries – industrial revolutions, anticolonial revolutions – the current moment demands micro-revolutions and micro-assemblies. In addition to devoting our intellectual energies and financial resources in 360° VR as a new mode for documentary presentation, we can focus on less expensive technologies that allow underrepresented perspectives to affect audiences.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"128 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678561","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44288117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Filming the world from home: windows in personal documentary films in Israel/Palestine","authors":"Liat Savin Ben Shoshan","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1614269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1614269","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines documentary diary and essay films made in Israel/Palestine from 1973–2009, where windows play a central role as architectural elements, cinematic frames and embodiments of the relations between the private and public spheres. The films represent personal, artistic and political turning points: David Perlov's Diary, made in 1973–1977, began with the transformative event of the 1973 war, the film was a turning point in Israeli filmmaking which had until then consisted primarily of Zionist social realist documentaries and popular dramas; Michel Khleifi's Fertile Memory (1980), the director's feature documentary debut, it marked the beginning of a new period in Palestinian filmmaking, by its focus on personal rather than collective. The third example is Anat Even's Closure (2009), a camera positioned on a window reflects on death, loss and transformations in urban history. In all films, the window is both a physical and a symbolic space, mediating private and political, constituting a new material awareness of their interrelations, which is eliminated in contemporary technology based communication. The encounter between camera, window, and viewer reflects and facilitates the act of observing and engaging with conflicts, arguing that it is an opportunity for both self-reflection and political critique.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"81 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1614269","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46642467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Austria’s Indirect Cinema. Avoiding representation in Kurz davor ist es passiert (2006)","authors":"M. Hofmann","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2019.1678560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678560","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Contemporary documentary films are faced with the challenge of an oversaturation of certain images that have lost all power. One strategy to address this issue is the employment of artifice, the obvious and unconcealed manipulation of images. Films of what I call Indirect Cinema escalate this strategy by avoiding direct representation altogether. One example of this development is the film Kurz davor ist es passiert (2006) by Anja Salomonowitz about human trafficking in Austria. The film showcases stories of different instances of human trafficking that are not told by the victims themselves; instead, random Austrians recite their statements verbatim while carrying out their everyday tasks. The artifice of the scenes disrupts the reception by emotionally distancing the viewer from the suffering of the victim. Transferring the statements from one medium, and from one body, to another avoids an overwhelming emotional response. The forced dislocation of the viewer allows a space of critical awareness to emerge in which one can reflect upon the politics and boundaries of representation. After a brief overview of Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité as a point of departure, I give a close analysis of Kurz davor as a paradigmatic example of Indirect Cinema.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"14 1","pages":"114 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2019.1678560","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46296752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}