Negotiations of In/Visibility: Surveillance in Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen

In this paper, I analyze Hito Steyerl’s artwork How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) from the perspective of surveillance. Looking back at one of the most influential artworks of the last decade, I understand How Not to be Seen as a discursive practice using images that poses an ambivalent surveillance critique through media- and wordplay. I first outline the historical references of Steyerl’s critique of technology, including Heidegger’s (1938) “image as world picture,” and position her in relation to other relevant surveillance-resistant practices. Drawing on analytical theory by Rancière (2006), I argue that the video is an example of a documentary fiction that organizes heterogenous visual, semiotic, and sensory material horizontally. From here, I move on to analyze the artwork focusing on how in both its content and form it engages humorously in discussions of (in)visibility, targeting, resolution, and data extraction. Using discourses on Steyerl’s work from herself and others, I show how the .MOV file, in playing with representational media, subverts categories used for surveillant targeting and data extraction. Hence, I argue that Steyerl ultimately advocates for resistance through ambivalence as a playful counter-visuality in the face of ubiquitous surveillance. In an era of intelligent imagery, this implicates using the image as an object that is part of the medium and not as subject representation.

“I reduce the history to a man”: “Zinc boys” by Svetlana Aleksievich

The article is devoted to “Zinc boys” by Svetlana Aleksievich as a phenomenon of documentary fiction. The problems of the work, the image of the narrator, and the organization of the character world are considered. We are talking about the positions of the “witnesses” of history, their views on the war in Afghanistan and the present of the 1980s, as well as the reception of this text by the public consciousness of the 90s.

“JEWISH ISSUE” IN THE DEEDS OF ANTON IVANOVICH DENIKIN DURING THE FRATRICIDAL SLAUGHTER (1917–1920)

The author of this article researches the historical personality of Lieutenant-General Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872–1947) – a unique, tragic figure in the history of the Russian power, a military leader, a politician, a writer, – during thirty years of his scientific and pedagogical activity. The scientific results obtained by the researcher are reflected in his doctoral dissertation, four monographs. The biography of the combat Russian general was written, which was published twice (in 2000 and 2006) by the publishing house “Young Guard” in the series “Life of wonderful people”. Documentary-fiction narration about the personality and the fate of Anton Ivanovich has been performed, a large number of articles in scientific periodicals and reports in the materials of various scientific forums were published. An anthology about him is also published in the format “pro et contra”. It is clear that such a vast and diverse body of work could not but reflect the topic that is indicated in the title of this article. Was Lieutenant General Anton Ivanovich Denikin an anti-Semite? If he was, how was it reflected in his deeds? The search for answers to such burning questions, questions that are exclusively debatable and sometimes polemical in nature (both in domestic and foreign historiography), was carried out through the analysis of a number of business documents and materials deposited both in federal state archives and published in various collections and separately. It was necessary to study a number of historiographical sources created by researchers in the Soviet, post-Soviet, modern periods of domestic historical science development, as well as abroad. At the same time, the author of this article tried to ensure a careful and correct attitude to the historiographic developments of the predecessors. However, such a research algorithm does not exclude a critical aspect (do not confuse with ill-natured criticism!). Naturally, the article doesn’t have any claim to represent a complete coverage of the problem. It has some elements of sketchiness and appeals to the author’s early works, which comprehensively research the historical personality of Anton Ivanovich Denikin, including the problem of the «Jewish issue”.

En Route to Fortress Europe: Migration and Exilic Life in Roadblocks

Following a discussion on what happens at the Greek-Albanian border, the author examines issues of transnational mobility in the seminal Roadblocks/Kleistoi Dromoi (2000) considering the routes of migration that the film’s Kurdish refugees tread on their way to Greece and Italy. The author here is interested in the notion of mobility impeded by borders that transform a journey of hope into nightmare and how this is actualized through the director’s original blend of documentary, fiction, conventional and experimental filmmaking. In order to further comprehend the contours of the migrant journey in Roadblocks, one needs to examine the push and pull factors of Kurdish migration. We take under consideration then the concept of the migrant imagination and how it fuels the journey and figures in the tragedy of hope turned dystopia. It is finally argued that, despite an original depiction of migration and refugee lives in limbo, Roadblocks screens explosive violence and imminent tragedy maintaining refugee lives in a perpetual state of crisis.

NATIONAL CHARACTER IN THE MODERN KAZAKH NOVEL ( based on the novel trilogy by S. Elubai “Lonely Yurt ”)

The article examines how modern Kazakh novels in the framework of historical reality show the traditions and customs of our people, formed over the centuries, it is considered how the authors find an artistic solution to depict the customs and customs of the people. The national character is conveyed through the content and form of the epic. The article notes that the experience of our ancestors, which has developed over thousands of years, should be continued in the future.The image of the national character is particularly evident in modern Kazakh novels, created in the last quarter of the XX century and at the beginning of the XXI century. The author of the article considers the features of the aesthetics of the artistic solution in S. Elubay's novel “Ak Boz Uy” (Lonely Yurt): from the documentary fiction is born, against the background of nature the realities of human life are revealed, national and ethnographic traditions are shown in comparison with the reality of time, etc.

Resisting 'Recumbency on The Past ': Literary Strategies for Overcoming Retromania in Maria Stepanova's Novel In Memory of Memory, (2017)

This article discusses the philosophical semi-documentary novel In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova (2017). The narrative about the past can be interpreted as a strategy of dealing with the dominant retro-utopian sentiments in Russian society. The history of several generations of Stepanova’s own family is depicted against the backdrop of tragic twentieth-century Russian upheavals which are transformed into a meta-novel focusing on the workings of memory and ways of articulating it. The article identifies two strategies used in Stepanova’s novel to counter retro-utopianism. The first strategy is the choice of a hybrid genre – documentary fiction – to recount the events of family and national history. The second strategy relies on the concept of memory as a catalogue used to complete the ’work of grief’ in Russian literature and to help it escape its fixation on the past. These strategies in Stepanova’s novel appear to be closely connected with her reception of W.G. Sebald’s (1944-2001) works, in particular his documentary fiction. Keywords: M. Stepanova, W.G. Sebald, documentary fiction, meta-novel, retromania

Durchfall, Auschwitz’s Unwritten Story: Filth and Excremental Violence in Tadeusz Borowski’s Postwar Fiction

As an author central to postwar literature on the concentration and death camp experience, Tadeusz Borowski chose to depict the relatively taboo subject of excremental violence. Borowski’s documentary fiction depicted an aspect of history that was, especially in 1946 after his own incarceration and survival, both raw and controversial. Writing in Polish as part of a collective work, Borowski was intent on speaking in his native language to a shattered Polish nation. This article analyzes how Borowski drew attention to human rights violations by writing about excremental violence. It further examines how Borowski eschewed oversimplified postwar categories of perpetrators, victims, and resisters. Instead, drawing upon his own experiences in Auschwitz, Dautmergen, and Dachau, his works articulate the powerlessness of those in the camps and the dehumanizing conditions they faced, thus challenging any misleading narratives regarding heroic agency.

Od trawelogu do King Konga. Misja badawcza jako motyw kina lat dwudziestych i trzydziestych w świetle imaginarium społecznego epoki

From the travelogue to King Kong: Science expeditions as a cinematic motif of the 1920s and 1930s in light of the social imaginaries of the eraScience expeditions are a staple of cinematic fiction. The theme has been utilized in dozens of permutations in different media and film genres ranging from adventure flicks to family comedies and horrors. Indiana Jones, undoubtedly the best-known “field researcher” in the world, is one of popular culture’s most recognizable figures. In this article, however, I am interested in an era predating his cinematic debut by at least a half century. Its main focus is the 1920s/1930s threshold in which science expeditions began constituting themselves as a motif of cinema and the reasons why such a seemingly august, scholarly enterprise transformed into a popcultural phenomenon. My analysis will focus on two often overlooked but massively popular genres of the era: expeditionary films and exotic exploitation films, both of which, I argue, can be traced back to the ethnographic travelogue. I begin my inquiries — and end them — with Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong 1993, which provides me with a framework for describing the ever-fickle relationship between documentary, fiction, truth and fabrication, which defined the cinematic representations of science expeditions from the very beginning.