Studies in Documentary Film最新文献

{"title":"The face of the environment: environmental human rights on screen","authors":"Djoymi Baker","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1940433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1940433","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines eco-documentaries that employ the ethics of the face to engage with the notion of a universal human right to a healthy environment. Climate Refugees (Nash, dir 2010) and I Bought a Rainforest (Searle and Woodward, dir 2014) use close-ups of the human face to bear witness to environmental damage. They each emphasise a shared human right to resources and a safe environment, but in the process often enact colonial discourses that I Bought a Rainforest begins to critique. Terra (Arthus-Bertrand and Pitiot, dir 2015) uses the nonhuman animal face to emphasise an equivalency between human and nonhuman animals in their shared environmental vulnerabilities. Hija de la Laguna (Daughter of the Lake, Cabellos, dir 2015) initially withholds the face to depict the personhood of the environment itself from an Indigenous perspective. These different approaches to the face highlight anthropocentric tensions in the environmental human rights approach to ecological ethics.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"53 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1940433","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45277588","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":"Falsehoods in film: documentary vs fiction","authors":"Stacie Friend","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923145","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is a faithful representation of the facts, whilst fiction films merely invite us to imagine what is made up. Instead, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a combination of non-essential features and which influence appreciation in a variety of ways. An objection to this approach is that it renders the distinction too conventional and fragile, undermining our justification for criticising documentaries like Bowling for Columbine or The Hunting Ground for playing fast and loose with the facts. I argue that this objection is misguided, misidentifying the justification for criticising non-fiction films that mislead or deceive. I develop an alternative account that explains why we also criticise many fictions for inaccuracy.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"151 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923145","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42603088","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":"Documentaries and the fiction/nonfiction divide","authors":"M. García‐Carpintero","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923146","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper rehearses a debate with Stacie Friend on the nature of the fiction/non-fiction divide. The paper first puts in a sharper focus the dividing issue, arguing that it is ontological in character. It focuses on how the distinction emerges in films, by contrasting fiction films with documentaries; Friend has also discussed films, even though the debate has mostly studied the literary case. The medium does not affect the main issues, but it raises interesting questions. After highlighting two important points of agreement with Friend, in contrast with some other proponents of a similar view on the present debate like Currie, the paper offers a normative account of the distinction, offering reasons to prefer it to Friend’s.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"163 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923146","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49114501","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":"How documentaries mark themselves out from fiction: a genre-based approach","authors":"John Ellis","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923144","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Assessments of the truthfulness or otherwise of documentaries are best understood as genre conventions which vary historically. Genre conventions are shared between audiences, filmmakers and institutions. Beliefs about the acceptable use of fictional techniques in documentary storytelling, particularly in television, are subject to occasional public controversies. The move from photographic to digital processes underlay one such controversy at the end of the last century. This was particularly the case around the so-called ‘docu-soaps’ on television, but public doubts about the truthfulness of documentary filming meant that many filmmakers developed new approaches. The result is that both public and professional documentary beliefs and practices have changed. Where once observational filming was seen as the bedrock of authenticity, newer approaches have developed a growing emphasis on the assessment of the ‘documentation’ of past events. They frequently gather and interrogate footage and other visual information from very diverse sources. They are seen as evidence in explicit attempts to reconstruct those events.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"140 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923144","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47480202","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":"Virtual reality documentaries and the illusion of presence","authors":"Eric Studt","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923147","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT I argue that virtual reality (VR) documentaries mandate that users employ a fictional attitude toward their presence in a virtual environment (VE) for the purpose of engaging with nonfictional content. The most salient feature of VR is that VR users typically feel as though their bodies were present in a VE. This paper explores presence in VR as a perceptual illusion facilitated by certain technological features. Drawing on Kendall Walton’s concept of fiction, I argue that the illusion of presence in VR also requires a fictional attitude that VR users employ when imagining themselves in a VE. In the case of VR documentaries, while users’ attitude in regards to the feeling of presence is best characterized as make-belief, they nevertheless employ an attitude of belief in regards to the content of the documentary and accept this content as nonfictional.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"175 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923147","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45478014","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":"Evocative animated documentaries, imagination and knowledge","authors":"Annabelle Honess Roe","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923143","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article refines previously made claims that evocative animated documentaries enable us to gain knowledge about unfamiliar states of mind and mental experiences through prompting our imagination. Building on recent scholarship in philosophy of mind, cognitive film theory and film and animation studies, I argue that it is evocative animated documentaries that do not, counterintuitively, invite audiences to identify or empathise with individual characters or documentary subjects that effectively prompt knowledge-through-imagination. This is because these films elicit a primarily epistemological rather than emotional response. The films in question, which include the Animated Minds films (2003–ongoing) and An Eyeful of Sound (Samantha Moore, 2010), feature documentary subjects that stand in for a mental health condition or psychological state that we are invited to primarily understand rather than feel. It is in this way that these evocative animated documentaries are less like fiction than their live-action documentary counterparts, despite their animated form. Applying philosophical ideas on the relationship between imagination and knowledge to a new filmic context, this article offers a way of understanding how these films work and how they are effective as documentaries of subjective, psychological experience","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"127 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923143","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41551174","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":"Textualism, extratextualism, and the fiction/nonfiction distinction in documentary studies","authors":"Mario Slugan","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article critiques existing textualist and extratextualist (intentionalist and reception-driven) approaches to capturing the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in philosophical and film scholarship on documentary and offers an alternative extratextualist approach dubbed institutionalism. I argue that textualist attempts fail because no textual element (presentational strategy, misrepresentation, staging, or indexicality) is necessarily either fictive or nonfictive. Intentionalism falls short because films can change their non/fictional status over time (e.g. phantom rides). Finally, reception-driven approaches confuse personal categorizations for public ones. The proposed institutionalism, by contrast, combines the strengths of moderate textualism and reception-driven theories (allowing for the changing status of documentary and nonfiction) with those of intentionalism (denying that some textual elements are necessarily fictive and others nonfictive) to capture the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"114 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59978052","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 Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: Documentary Studies and Analytic Aesthetics in Conversation","authors":"Mario Slugan, E. Terrone","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1923141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923141","url":null,"abstract":"Theories of documentary film oftentimes devote their opening pages to the distinction between fiction and documentary. In its earlier more radical instances, documentary theorists have claimed that discursivity itself i.e. the use of film tropes, introduces fictive elements into all films, documentaries included (Renov 1993). Later accounts have been more moderate in arguing that it is not discursivity in general but specific textual features such as the degree of fabrication that constitute fiction (Nichols 2017). But the fact remains that the current consensus in documentary studies is that the documentary/fiction distinction is a matter of degree rather than that of a firm boundary. Analytic aesthetics has also had a fruitful tradition of discussing the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Here, by contrast, earlier classic works (Currie 1990; Walton 1990) have established a firm boundary where fiction essentially involves imagining whereas nonfiction essentially involves believing. More recent authors like Stacie Friend (2012) and Derek Matravers (2014), however, have put this strict divide under pressure and the border appears more fluid than it was 30 years ago. Presently, then, documentary studies and analytic aesthetics appear to be closer than ever in their views on the fiction/nonfiction distinction, yet little dialogue exists between the two. This special issue aims to bolster the disciplines’ common ground as a step in that direction. In the case of analytic aesthetics, the debate has mostly focused on the fiction/nonfiction distinction in literary texts. Given that the latest accounts of documentaries have been developed some twenty years ago (Carroll 1997; Currie 1999; Plantinga 2005) this is a significant opportunity for analytic aesthetics to address documentaries as a paradigmatic case of nonfiction, and to engage with the latest scholarship in documentary studies. Reciprocally, documentary studies gain to benefit from engaging findings in analytic aesthetics, especially the claim that whether something is true or not is independent from whether something is fiction or not. This special issue has grown from the second Analytic Aesthetics and Film Studies in Conversation conference titled ‘Documentaries and the Fiction/Nonfiction Divide’ held at Queen Mary University of London, 15–16 November 2019 and sponsored by the British Society for Aesthetics. The issue brings together 3 documentary film scholars and 3 analytic aestheticians in conversation. Mario Slugan opens the issue with an","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"107 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1923141","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41477579","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":"Queering Indian documentary: an interview with Debalina Majumdar","authors":"S. Venkatesan, R. James","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1913839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1913839","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Although documentary filmmaking in India has a long tradition, one rarely sees any serious engagement with LGBTIQ issues. However, in the recent times, a new body of LGBTIQ documentaries either by heterosexual directors or by filmmakers who identify themselves as LGBTIQ, using a variety of formalistic styles, foreground intimate and multiple expressions of LGBTIQ subjectivities in their films. As a filmmaker who approaches LGBTIQ issues from inside out, Debalina Majumdar belongs to such a group of distinguished LGBTIQ filmmakers who documents homophobic violence, queer desires and forgotten queer histories. Her documentary films celebrate queer lives, emphasizes LGBTIQ rights and imagines queer futures through forging a nonconformist visual politics and through a range of poetic articulations. For her, filmmaking is a practice of reclaiming suppressed LGBTIQ desires as well as a mode of institutionalizing LGBTIQ identities. Debalina Majumdar in the present interview with Rajesh James and Sathyaraj Venkatesan discusses her filmic self, her engagement with LGBTIQ resistance movements in India and her documentary practices.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"15 1","pages":"271 - 280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1913839","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46744988","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":"Data activism and meta-documentary in six films by Forensic Architecture","authors":"Miren Gutiérrez","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2021.1908932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2021.1908932","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Data activism –or data-centered campaigning, mobilization, and research– is a hybrid, shifting endeavor. Data activist organizations are currently exploring new tools and languages to communicate findings and influence judicial and political processes. However, it is the method of turning data into a film that sets Forensic Architecture (FA) apart from other data activist endeavors. This article employs ideas from social movement and documentary studies to examine six films produced and disseminated by FA. These documentaries expose official corruption relating to abuse and killings in Burundi, Israel and Palestine, Syria, and the Mediterranean. The analysis employs the lenses of data activism and the meta-documentary to think about how FA uses participatory strategies, involves victims and human rights organizations, places science and technology at the center of its narratives, generates counter-stories implicating new data agents and methods, and uses a new fora to influence court cases and change the status quo. Ultimately, it illustrates the potential for impact offered by hybrid forms of data activism.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"32 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/17503280.2021.1908932","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43768631","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}