The filmmaker, the subject and the audience : A dialectical exploration of documentary performance (original) (raw)

“In and Out of Tune with Reality: Opposed Strategies of Documentary Theatre”,

Over the last few decades, documentary theatre has experienced a boom in popularity with the commercial and critical success of works such as Anna Deveare Smith's 'Twilight: Los Angeles' (1994), Tectonic Theatre's 'The Laramie Project' (2001) and docudramas by David Hare such as 'Stuff Happens' (2004) and 'The Permanent Way' (2005). Recent works span everything from natural disaster survival stories, to the staging of dramatized versions of inquests to well as the examination of family violence in New Zealand in Hilary Halba's and Stuart Young's 'Hush' (2009 - present). Whether this documentary boom will follow the cycle of its economic counterpart and result in a bust can only be seen with the benefit of time. Rather, this paper focuses on the nature of representation in documentary theatre, in particular its relationship to the real. It is argued that the complexities involved in, and approaches to, representing the real in performance, place documentary theatre along a series of spectra. Documentary theatre does echo economic patterns in that at least two 2 polarised extremes of the form would seem to exist. As the terminology of a spectrum implies though, these opposing strategies exist more as a range of shifting, uncertain attempts to reconcile competing tensions, rather than as a sinusoidally oscillating pair of opposites. Attempts to avoid manipulating and aestheticizing the source material can result in strangely muted presentations that strip the drama from theatrical representation, placing it at one end of this spectrum. Other attempts to creatively shape and reconfigure testimony and context, can result in a heightened aestheticization and sensationalism. This theoretically pushes the performances to a "boom" out of tune or out of synchronicity with thesource material and to the other end of a perceived fiction-reality spectrum. This paper will examine some of the practices and ideas that inform the choices practitioners make in representing the "real" in performance and examine the aesthetic and ethical ethical impact these choices can have on the resulting performances.

The Documentary Real: Thinking Documentary Aesthetics

Foundations of Science, 2016

In this article we consider the growing interest in recent years in the use of documentary strategies in the wold of contemporary art, film and performing arts and explore some of the central epistemological assumptions underpinning the persistent idea that the documentary should be equated with 'non-fiction'. Following Stella Bruzzi we argue that if documentary theory maintains objectivity as the primary measure of value, it will inevitably and continuously arrive at the conclusion that the documentary genre is fundamentally flawed. Instead, we propose to move beyond the 'realist epistemology' of documentary theory and focus on the 'documentary real', i.e. the specific performativity of the reality constructed in and by the documentary genre. In the last paragraphs, we introduce the various articles that address the ''documentary real'' in this special issue.

Docudrama performance: realism, recognition and representation

2010

The hybrid television form of docudrama, blending documentary and drama conventions and modes of address, poses interesting methodological problems for an analysis of performance. Its topics, mise-en-scène and performers invite a judgement in relation to the real events and situations, settings and personae represented, and also in relation to the ways the viewer has perceived them in other media representations such as news, current affairs interviews and documentary features. In other words, docudrama's performance of the real asks the viewer to evaluate it in relation to anterior knowledge. But because of their adoption of conventions from drama, docudramas also draw on performance modes from fictional television forms and invite audiences to invest their emotions and deploy their knowledge of codes used in fictional naturalism or melodrama. These hybrid frameworks for viewing militate against docudrama being able to cultivate the authenticity or sobriety associated historically with documentary, and this has been a key reason for criticisms of the form. However, on the other hand, the multiplicity of available interpretive frameworks and routes of access for the audience can also enrich and broaden the pleasures and social purchase of docudrama. In this essay, I range over examples of docudramas on the post-1990 period, mainly made wholly or partly in the UK, to discuss some of the distinctions between kinds of docudrama performance, the implications of their links with related television forms and how docudrama performance exploits the capacities of television as a medium.

Elastic Realities - Documentary Practices between Cinema and Art

ARS (São Paulo)

Recently, documentary practices, including those working with moving images, have known an unprecedented boom in the art field, which provoked criticism but also led to fruitful discussions between the two fields of artistic documentary practices and the more traditional documentary cinema. This article aims to contribute to this discussion by analyzing some pivotal arguments of the ongoing debate, mainly the question of documentary practices and their relation to reality, art and politics. For a better understanding of the current situation, the analysis of key moments in the history of documentary discourse is the basis for the discussion of contemporary documentary practices between cinema and art, considering seminal examples combining moving images with questions of performativity.

Reality and methods in documentary filmmaking

Hungarian Studies

The method and the formal-technical language of documentary fi lmmaking have expanded so much that the traditional divide between documentary and fi ction cannot be reasonably held. Animation has also claimed its place among the possible devices of a documentary fi lm. Consequently, a documentary no longer wears its 'truthfulness' on its sleeve. The cues of documentary that were used historically, like archival footage or talking heads, are eclipsed by cognitively engaging interactive camera work provoking viewer's identifi cation. The dilemma that a would-be documentary fi lmmaker is necessarily confronted with is between perceptual realism and representational realism. An image cannot show the 'original': it can only declare it in a meta-communication about the image. In the history of fi lm the self-referential 'dead-end' of the 'ontological' image is expressed by a camera fi lming the 'eye' of another camera. The self-referentiality of documentary fi lmmaking also entails that documenting is necessarily gappy: it always leaves certain things unsaid or hidden. The story it tells has its own important lacunae. It is the Unsaid of a documentary, and not so much the representation's truthfulness and that constitutes the ethical source for the viewer.

Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts (2016)

Regarding the real develops an original approach to documentary film, focusing on its aesthetic relations to visual arts such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting and architecture. Throughout, the book considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary is an endlessly open form; an unstable expressive phenomenon that cannot help but interrogate its own narratives and intentions. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern arts in subverting structures of realism typically associated with the documentary. In the course of its discussion, it charts a fascinating path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas and Raymond Depardon.

Documentary as Critical and Creative Research

Much of the attraction of and debates and controversies around the documentary genre derives from it being a hybrid form, straddling both conflicting paradigms within the traditional social sciences on the one hand and the aesthetic dimensions of art and entertainment on the other. Mixed in with these cross-currents, the question of the political or ideological nature of documentary as research, its ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’ nature vis-à-vis dominant institutions, power relations, commonsense frameworks of explanation, interpretation and embedded cultural assumptions, are never far away. This essay is about this trinity of terms as they pertain to the documentary: critical, creative, research. It asks what it means to discuss documentary as a mode of research, i.e. to what extent this audio-visual based genre overlaps with issues around knowledge production associated with the social sciences; what it means to discuss some documentary films as critical practices, i.e. to define what ‘critical’ might mean for the media generally in the present contemporary context of unleashed global capitalism and how it might best be related to documentary; and this essay asks what it means to discuss documentary as a ‘creative’ practice, i.e. one in which aesthetics plays a key role in its production and consumption. Finally this essay explores the relationships between the critical, creative/aesthetic and research aspects of documentary.

Representation through documentary : a post-modern assessment

2012

Like photography, documentaries are a representational medium: They record and occasionally reconstruct the everyday reality viewers typically cannot experience themselves. Because photography is an indexical sign signifying truth, audiences understand the documentary, a moving photograph, to signify truth also. However, they are able to make the distinction between the “everyday reality” presented by documentaries and the fictive “reality” of cinematic films.