The Documentary Attraction: Animation, Simulation and the Rhetoric of Expertise

In this chapter Leon Gurevitch discusses computer-generated documentary simulations that function both as spectacular attractions and visual signifiers of expertise and authority. Gurevitch explores the increasing prominence of such images within a variety of documentary contexts since the digital revolution that began during the 1990s. The chapter underscores the extent to which CG-animated documentary spectacles are today routinely encountered within a range of fields, many not readily associated in the popular mind with animated aesthetics, production technologies or histories: military, scientific, architectural and engineering, for example. Gurevitch explains that in the absence of live footage (or even in support of it), animated and simulated spectacle is frequently deployed within documentary film making in the interests of “expertise”. In this sense, CG simulations function to persuade the audience of the time and effort put into making the documentary and therefore act as an index of a given moving image work’s veracity.