The Audiovisual Turn of Recent Korean Documentary Cinema: The Time-Image, Place, and Landscape

This article discusses several documentary films since the 2010s that portray the place and the landscape related to Korea's social reality or a personal or collective memory of its past, classifying their common trope as the “audiovisual turn.” The trope refers to the uses of the poetic and aesthetic techniques to highlight the visual and auditory qualities of the images that mediate the landscape or the place. This article argues that the films’ experiments with these techniques mark formal and epistemological breaks with the expository and participatory modes of the traditional Korean activist documentary, as they create an array of Deleuzian time-images in which a social place or natural landscape is reconfigured as the cinematic space liberated from a linear time and layered with the imbrication of the present and the past. The images, however, are read as updating the activist documentary's commitment to politics and history, as they renew the viewer's sensory and affective awareness of the place and the landscape and thereby render them ruins.

This Is Not Reality (Ceci n'est pas la réalité): Capturing the Imagination of the People Creativity, the Chinese Subaltern, and Documentary Storytelling

How has documentary(re)presented subaltern creativity? Focusing on post-socialist, globalizing China, I examine documentary narratives by and about the creative subaltern originating from Chinese “cool cities” and expanding in the virtual space of global digital media. In these narratives, the creative subaltern has appeared obliquely, tangential to other narratives, subordinate to internationally recognized artists, or with a more central role, as the author or the protagonist of documentary films. I analyze these narratives’ entanglement with elitist definitions of creativity, the representation of subaltern reality, the expression of subjectivity, and the tension between the political and the personal. I argue that documentary has played an important albeit ambiguous role—provocative and empowering, but also, at times, formulaic and constricting—in shaping the discourse on the subaltern as a creative subject, by amplifying creativity’s indexicality to the real and obfuscating its imaginative quality and its ambition of breaking free from the real. Reflecting on the contemporary relevance of the Free Cinema movement’s advocacy for a subjective, personal approach to capturing the “imagination of the people” and exploration of lyric realism in documentary filmmaking, I propose that documentary can and should dare to “make poetry.” Forms of documentary expressivity such as poetic, not plot-driven narratives can reconcile imagination with reality and offer alternative, more appropriate means of capturing the complexity, heterogeneity, and contradictoriness of the subaltern condition, and for subaltern creativity to be expressed, appreciated, and affirmed.

How Do We Look?

In How Do We Look? Fatimah Tobing Rony draws on transnational images of Indonesian women as a way to theorize what she calls visual biopolitics—the ways visual representation determines which lives are made to matter more than others. Rony outlines the mechanisms of visual biopolitics by examining Paul Gauguin’s 1893 portrait of Annah la Javanaise—a trafficked thirteen-year-old girl found wandering the streets of Paris—as well as US ethnographic and documentary films. In each instance, the figure of the Indonesian woman is inextricably tied to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. Rony also focuses on acts of resistance to visual biopolitics in film, writing, and photography. These works, such as Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s The Dance that Makes You Vanish, Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao (1995), and the collaborative films of Nia Dinata, challenge the naturalized methods of seeing that justify exploitation, dehumanization, and early death of people of color. By theorizing the mechanisms of visual biopolitics, Rony elucidates both its violence and its vulnerability.

Multimodalność w relacjach z działań komunikacyjnych

W artykule zostały przedstawione wybrane wyniki części pilotażowej badania eksperymentalnego nad relacjonowaniem multimodalnych działań komunikacyjnych przez dorosłych użytkowników języka polskiego. Punktem wyjścia w przeprowadzonym eksperymencie były teoretyczne i empiryczne studia nad zaangażowaniem w działania komunikacyjne różnych modalności, tj. oprócz słów, także intonacji, prozodii, mimiki, gestów, ruchów całego ciała i poszczególnych jego członków, por. Austin (1962), Kendon (1994, 2000, 2004), Poggi (2007), Hellbernd i Sammler (2016). W ramach badania 101 osobom różniącym się wiekiem, płcią i wykształceniem zaprezentowano 23 fragmenty filmów dokumentalnych, pochodzących ze zbiorów Archiwum Szkoły Filmowej w Łodzi. Zadaniem uczestników badania było zrelacjonowanie, co robią bohaterowie filmów. W rezultacie powstał korpus, w którym do poszczególnych działań komunikacyjnych zarejestrowanych na filmach przypisano wypowiedzi uczestników badania. Na potrzeby pilotażu została przeprowadzona analiza jakościowa i ilościowa wypowiedzi dotyczących 10 fragmentów. Analizie tej zostało poddane znaczenie i odniesienie słów, którym uczestnicy badania posługiwali się w celu zrelacjonowania multimodalnych działań komunikacyjnych, zaobserwowanych na zaprezentowanych im filmach, a także frekwencja używanych w relacjach wyrażeń oraz rozbieżności między poszczególnymi relacjami. Analiza wykazała, że jeśli daną kolejkę tworzą kompozycje lub sekwencje działań o różnej modalności, to sprawozdawcy zdają sprawę albo z każdego z tych działań osobno, albo używają pojedynczego kwalifikatora na określenie całej grupy działań. Takim kwalifikatorem mogą być zarówno nazwy aktów performatywnych, jak i nazwy działań o dowolnej, określonej modalności. Jeśli rozmowa przebiega w sposób zmienny pod względem modalności, to przez poszczególnych obserwatorów może być postrzegana przez pryzmat różnych epizodów, które się na nią składają. Pewne działania bywają przy tym częściej niż inne uwzględniane lub pomijane w relacjach, co świadczy o różnicach wagi, jaką sprawozdawcy przywiązują do działań różnych rodzajów. Multimodality in reports on communication activities Summary: The article presents selected results of the pilot part of an experimental study on reporting multimodal communication activities by adult speakers of Polish. The starting point of the experiment was theoretical and empirical research on the involvement of various modalities in communication activities, in addition to words, intonation, prosody, facial expressions, gestures, movements of the whole body and its parts (Austin 1962; Kendon 1994, 2000, 2004; Poggi 2007; Hellbernd & Sammler 2016). In order to obtain data for the analysis, 23 fragments of documentary films from the collection of the Archives of the Film School in Łódź were presented to 101 adults, who differed in terms of age, sex and education. The participants of the experiment were asked to report on what the characters were doing. The result of the study was a database that included recordings of both the communication activities and the reports on them. The pilot part of the study covered the qualitative and quantitative analysis of 10 fragments of films. We analysed the meaning and reference of the vocabulary used by the participants to report on the multimodal communication activities observed in the films, the frequency of expressions used in the reports, as well as the discrepancies in the reports. The analysis showed that if a given turn was a composition or a sequence of activities of different modalities, the speaker could report on each of these activities separately or use a single qualifier to describe a whole group of activities. Such qualifiers can be both the names of performative acts and the names of actions of any specific modality. If the conversation changes in terms of modality, then it can be perceived by individual observers through the lens of the various episodes that make up the conversation. Certain actions are sometimes more often taken into account or omitted, which shows differences in the level of importance that speakers attach to different types of activities.

Subordinasi dan Sudut Pandang Perempuan Suku Malind Marga Mahuze dalam Film the Mahuzes (2015): a Feminist Standpoint Theory

Documentary films are one of the most suitable media to be used as a reference in seeing reality. Like the reality of subordination and women's point of view in The Mahuzes. In general, this film tells the story of the conflict that occurred between the Malind clan Mahuze in Merauke and corporations that entered their territory through the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) program, besides that there were horizontal conflicts between tribal members. This study aims to analyze the form of subordination and women's point of view seeing the problems of indigenous peoples dealing with corporations which are shown by the documentary film The Mahuzes in the perspective of Feminist Standpoint Theory. This study uses a qualitative approach and a critical paradigm by collecting data from various relevant sources. Events involving or relating to women were analyzed using three basic concepts of Feminist Standpoint Theory, namely standpoint, situated knowledge, and sexual division of labour. The results of the study indicate that women in The Mahuzes are a marginalized group, forced to take responsibility for the domestic space, and are limited to take part in the public sphere. Even so, they have a broad and comprehensive perspective in viewing horizontal conflicts between clan members and vertically between clans and corporations. Keywords: Subordinate; Feminist Standpoint; MIFEE; The Mahuze Abstrak: Film dokumenter menjadi salah satu media yang paling sesuai untuk dijadikan sebagai rujukan dalam melihat realitas. Seperti realitas subordinasi dan sudut pandang perempuan dalam The Mahuzes. Film ini, secara garis besar berkisah tentang konflik yang terjadi antara suku Malind marga Mahuze di Merauke dengan korporasi yang masuk ke wilayah mereka melalui program Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), selain itu terdapat konflik horizontal antar anggota suku. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis bentuk subordinasi dan sudut pandang perempuan melihat permasalahan masyarakat adat berhadapan dengan korporasi yang ditampilkan oleh film dokumenter The Mahuzes dalam perspektif Feminist Standpoint Theory. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dan paradigma kritis dengan mengumpulkan data dari berbagai sumber yang relevan. Agedan-agedan yang melibatkan atau berkaitan dengan perempuan dianalisis dengan menggunakan tiga konsep dasar Feminist Standpoint Theory, yaitu standpoint, situated knowledge, dan sexual division of labour. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa, perempuan dalam The Mahuzes merupakan kelompok yang terpinggirkan, dipaksa untuk bertanggung jawab pada ruang domestik, dan terbatas untuk berkiprah di ruang publik. Meskipun begitu, mereka memiliki sudut pandang yang luas dan menyeluruh dalam melihat konflik horizontal antar anggota marga maupun vertikal antara marga dan korporasi. Kata kunci: Subordinasi; Feminist Standpoint; MIFEE; The Mahuze

War in the Young Russians Language Consciousness: An Associative Experiment

The article is focused on the analysis of the stimulus The Great Patriotic War based on the data of both directed and free associative experiments, held among the young Russians aged 18-23, the students of the Philological faculty of RUDN University. The aim of this research is to study the ordinary language consciousness of common speakers of the Russian linguoculture through the prism of their attitude to the Great Patriotic War as a cultural phenomenon. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the experimental data allow us conclude about the mediated perception of the Great Patriotic War by young Russians, who have knowledge about the war from secondary sources: fiction and documentary films, history and literature textbooks. On the material of these associative experiments, the experimental associative fields are formed, which could potentially become a part of the associative dictionary of the contemporary Russian younger generation. In the course of the study, semantic crossings are revealed between the lexical units of the formed associative fields and the data from Russian associative dictionaries. A comparative analysis of the data from RAD and the two experiments is conducted, demonstrating minimal matching of reactions (12.5%) in the RAD and the experiments, with a higher percentage of matching reactions in the directed and free experiments (56.6%). The reactions to the stimulus Great Patriotic War obtained as a result of the experiment are semantically grouped, and their further interpretation represents a fragment of the young Russian's language consciousness regarding the events of the Great Patriotic War. Thus, semantic analysis allows us to distribute the received reactions into several semantic groups: evaluation of the events of the past; WWII as part of family history; WWII as the distant past; WWII as a reason for pride; WWII as a joint social phenomenon in the cultural context; the events and realities of that war.

Shimmer and whisper

The author of the article, one of the acclaimed Polish cinematographers, describes his practical eforts involved in making two short documentary films on Holocaust directed by him. The first one,Sonderzug (1978), was based on Stok’s idea to recreate his first emotional reaction to the landscape around Treblinka in the film that lasts 9 minutes, as long as the way of the Jews from the ramp to their end in the death camp. The other film, Prayer (1981), is the portrayal of a Japanese Buddhist monk praying at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The formal inspiration of the film came from Japanese visual art.