The Visual Turn in IR: Documentary Filmmaking as a Critical Method (original) (raw)
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Studies in Documentary Film, 2017
This introduction to the special issue, ‘Engagement, Witnessing and Activism: Independent Chinese Documentary Filmmakers’ Different Positions, Approaches and Aesthetics,’ argues that how the political is registered and expressed in Chinese activist documentaries cannot simply be read through Western ideas, concepts and aesthetics. Rather, Chinese work has been shaped partly in relation to state-sanctioned public discourse, and partly through the localising of international influences according to Chinese socio-political conditions. Contemporary Chinese activist documentary makers have chosen as their primary modus operandi an open, exploratory engagement with the ‘grassroots’ (jiceng). The core commitment in this approach is to the truth of the on-screen subject’s experience as they themselves see it. Modes of engagement with the grassroots include: making visible people and identities that state-sanctioned representations hide or gloss over; bearing witness to events and situations that are similarly hidden, or presented in a very particular manner, in state sanctioned representations; and exploring memories and historical experiences which are otherwise unacknowledged or presented within narrow interpretive parameters in state-sanctioned media. This introduction details how the articles in this special issue analyse and discuss Chinese activist works that utilise one or more of these modes.
Observation, Performance and Revolution: Exploring “The Political” in Visual Art and Anthropology
Visual Anthropology, 2013
Following up on Marcus's seminal article on cinema and ethnography [1995] and weaving together anthropology, film theory and the analysis of four films-from the ethnographic, commercial, art and documentary genres-I argue that cinema can open a democratic and egalitarian space of observation of and interaction with ''the other'' and that anthropologists should approach their subjects in ways similar to some other filmmakers. But unlike Marcus, who considers films as metaphors of ethnography and advocates a posture of modernist distance, I look for juxtapositions between film and anthropology and, extending the Surrealist notion of ''the double'' across the fields of politics and aesthetics, I argue for a humanist anthropology, one that celebrates the dual nature of humans and cinema. MASSIMILIANO MOLLONA is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths' College, London. His work focuses on politico-economic anthropology and film, especially on ideas of participation, labor, class and activism. He has done extensive fieldwork and several film projects in Brazil and the United Kingdom.
De-marginalising and de-centring film studies in bodies, places and on screens
Film education journal , 2022
This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning experiences of the authors, Berenike Jung (in London when the conversation started) and Derilene Marco (in Johannesburg). Critically reflecting and engaging through an audio recording and letters, Jung and Marco ask each other about the processes of doing and performing the labour of decolonising film teaching in their respective courses and from different global locations. Keeping in mind the impositions and complexities of the pandemic, Jung and Marco also reflect upon the ways in which colonial posturing occurs in film studies spaces, such as highly visible international film conferences. In doing so, they reflect on how engagements such as these keep many scholars and their scholarship confined to traditional Eurocentric and North American strategies, methods and endorsements of approval and relevance. The piece is conversational and self-aware in its self-referential tone. It is intended that readers listen to parts of the audio if they please, but that they are not compelled to do so to find meaning.
In a changing and increasingly complex world but one still often defined in simple binary terms, presented in terms of stark contrasts, documentary films in specific instances help challenge these simplicities and presents voices that speak to and help understand the complexity of the world. By conducting an in-depth study of a series of important and complimentary documentaries produced by leading filmmakers in the post-9/11 era, my research proposal outlines how I will examine these films and explore the extent to which they help foster a greater understanding of the ‘War on Terror’ and its consequences, and what they offer to the study of International Relations and global politics.
International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power, by Sean Carter and Klaus Dodds
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2021
Once, there were comparatively few books that focused on the relationship between international politics and film. Happily, this is no longer the case. Sean Carter and Klaus Dodd's International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power is an exciting addition to the growing body of literature on the political ontology of art and aesthetics. As scholars in geopolitics and human geography, their love for film is evident, as is their command of the interdisciplinary literature. Despite its brevity, this well-argued and thought-provoking book covers an impressive 102 films from around the world, albeit some in far greater detail than others. Still, despite its compactness, it is a satisfying read that will undoubtedly attract casual readers unfamiliar with scholarship in either discipline but with enough substance to delight specialists in both film and international relations. Carter and Dodds successfully bring international relations (IR) and critical geopolitics into closer alignment with visual studies in general and film studies in particular. Their thesis is simple: first, the traditional emphasis of IR on macro-level players such as heads of state, diplomats, the intelligence community, and intergovernmental organisations such as the United Nations have created a biased perception of what constitutes the practice of international politics. Second, this bias is problematic because concepts such as the state and the homeland, amongst others, are abstract entities whose ontological statuses do not exist apart from the practices of people. It is ordinary people who, in conjunction with state officials, enact the practices necessary for things like borders to exist and who contribute to their sociocultural meanings, which are continually subject to negotiation and renegotiation. Third, given the role mundane practices play in international political norms, films exert a special power given their relationship to popular culture. Films help "to create understandings of who we think we are, how we regard other people and countries and the nature of group or societal membership" (10) and they do so through the performativity of international politics, the spatialisation of political practice, and through the role of the visual (6). Citing the work of geographer Luiza Bialasiewicz et al., the authors emphasise that, aside from law, economics, politics and military strategies, states owe their existence to a wide range of discursive practices that include "cultural debates about normal social behaviour, including "[t]he meanings, identities, social relations and political assemblages [...] made or represented in the name of a particular state but that state does not pre-exist those performances" (6). Thus, far from
Looking at China from Abroad: intermediality as a tool for documentary
Int. Commun. Chin. Cult, 2023
In 2020, due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, travel to China and around the world was mostly suspended. In the face of such restrictions, the 'Looking China Youth Film Project' took a different approach by inviting students from around the world to make documentary short films in remote mode. This meant employing different expressive resources and a mixed-media format, including techniques such as animation, graphics, typography, photographs, and paintings. The aim of this article is to shed light on this pioneering initiative from the point of view of the relationship between intermediality and forms and functions of the documentary genre. It opens with a discussion around the question of intermediality in the audiovisual media, considering how a realist impulse coexists in the cinema with its mixed-media nature, thus bringing together Bazin's ontology of the photographic image and his case for cinema as an impure form of art. This is followed by a discussion about the recent field of the 'animated documentary', both as a practice and as a theoretical debate, which faces the apparent incongruity between film's unique ability to record reality-which gave rise to the documentary genre, and animation's creation of a world without any referent in reality. Finally, it considers the experience of the Looking China Youth Film Programme in 2020, with a special emphasis on six documentary films made from a mixture of live images, animation sequences, graphics and screens. The examples analysed allow me to delve into different aspects of the research on cinema and intermediality, including the animated documentary, the influence of the internet in audiovisual media, and the possibilities of a remote practice of film production.
Studies in Documentary Film, 2015
Ai Weiwei's film Lao Ma Ti Hua (aka Disturbing the Peace, 2009) is one of the most influential activist documentaries that emerged during the aftermath of Sichuan earthquake in 2009. The film relates to Ai's ‘Public Citizen Investigation Project’, which gathers many volunteers to explore the substandard ‘tofu construction’ of school buildings that took thousands of children's lives when they collapsed in the earthquake. In August 2009, Ai's group went to Chengdu court to support another independent investigator, writer, and environmentalist Tan Zuoren who was prosecuted for subversion of state power. The night before the trial, Ai was beaten by secret security agents and the group was stopped from going to the court. The film subsequently records the group searching for an official explanation from the authorities. Whilst acknowledging the power of the film in constructing a collective political subjectivity, and the discursive effect through screenings and discussions raised, this paper focuses on the very action of proactive, activist documentation of one's witness to engage with fellow participants as well as viewer followers through digital camera. Under the theoretical framework of participatory culture, I propose the term camera activism to understand the camera-enabled individual participation into activism as a form of socio-political intervention. The paper also analyses some of Ai's problematic actions as a charismatic celebrity, which sometimes overshadow and obscure the complexity of resistance by Chinese individuals within China, thereby neglecting full recognition of the complex collective forces which support Ai. Nevertheless, ‘camera activism’ demonstrated in the making of Lao Ma Ti Hua reflects, and has the potential to reshape, the political landscape in twenty-first century China. The cinematic highlight of ‘I’, confronting and eye-witnessing what happens through the utilization of digital technologies positions ‘camera activism’ as an important part of China's iGeneration cinema culture
“Filming Space/Mapping Reality in Chinese Independent Documentary Films”
China Perspectives, 2010
S ince the beginning of the 1990s, independent documentary filmmakers have explored the Chinese territory and made visible people and places rarely seen or even taken into consideration by traditional media. This movement has grown in a specific space often described as an intermediate realm between the public and the private sphere, and has dedicated itself to the recording of China's margins, both geographical and social. As an attempt to reflect on society, documentary cinema deals with people and their living conditions. But the choice of a topic or of a main "character" is often related to another underlying but nonetheless very significant choice: the filmed space. The famous documentarist Frederick Wiseman has built all his filmography around this very concept: each of his films is the description of institutional spaces (jail, hospital, museum, etc.) and the way people interact in them. (2) In this type of film, and also in Chinese independent documentaries, places and topics are intimately related. While space plays a strong role in defining the scope of the film's subjects, its mode of representation also conveys the filmmaker's opinion about the event as well as his aesthetic preferences. (3) In the case of Chinese independent documentaries, not only have the filmmakers shed light on certain places, populations, and contemporary issues, they have also reconfigured the aesthetics and the practice of documentary film by questioning the medium and setting a number of new rules. Among those are the rejection of television norms for documentary films and the adoption of a style close to direct cin-ema, which includes a new approach of both subject matter and filmed counterparts. By focusing on ordinary people and giving them a space for speech, by developing their topics in full-length movies, and by rejecting any kind of didactic purpose (such as no explanation through voiceover) they aim at the standards of auteur cinema, and at a certain degree of "truth," as well. The emergence of this movement outside the realm of the film industry and television questions the status of documen-