Material Traces of Lebanon: A Documentary Aesthetics of Feeling in the Art Gallery

This chapter first asserts that ‘speculative’ forms of documentary art — defined as playful, experimental and unbridled — accentuate the uncertain boundary between fiction and fact, but also between evidence and affect. With this in mind, it then proposes a detailed study of the work of artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, who use the speculative documentary form to examine the legacy of the Lebanese Civil Wars through its material traces. This case study shows that by confronting spectators to cinematic loops and material traces of the Lebanese Civil Wars in gallery installations, their documentary works formally and intellectually challenge their understanding of public and private memory, under which material and affective traces of these traumatic events continue to circulate today.

Chris Marker: Interactive Screen and Memory

Chris Marker (1921–2012), the creator of more than eighty films, has become a source of fascination for an entire generation of documentary filmmakers, as well as for the general public. Video and digital technical advancements allowed Marker to further develop his inquiry into image objectivity, and to keep looking back on the history and memory of the twentieth century in a non-linear, reflexive and interactive manner. This chapter examines the continuities and breaks in Marker's uses of technology and his views on history, as well as the specific bond he created with his audience. This unique relationship, which characterises Marker's entire body of work, stems from his concern with interactivity: an idea that operates under different definitions and is manifested in diverse ways within his art. Above all, his main objective concerns the circulation of images that explore cinema's various visual frameworks and how they transcribe history in different ways.

Post-unification (East) German Documentary and the Contradictions of Identity

This chapter focuses on the three major themes that have helped make the integration between East and West German documentary filmmakers successful and have contributed new strengths to German independent documentary as a productive and innovative enterprise. It first illustrates the phenomenon of collaboration between filmmakers from both East and West Germany, which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and provides the basis for unique accomplishments in documentary. Then, partly based on these East–West collaborations, it discuss examples of German documentary's frequent explorations of non-European topics, which challenge the clear separation of European and non-European in both politics and film art. Here, the film collaborations between Helga Reidemeister and Lars Barthel will serve as a case study. Finally, also as a result of decades of experimentation with the nature of the film medium's presentation of ‘reality’, ‘history’, and the individual human subject, Thomas Heise's German ‘portrait film’ Barluschke (1997) is explored as an example of this defining quality of independent German documentary filmmaking in the context of the post-Cold War.

Fukushima and the Shifting Conventions of Documentary: From Broadcast to Social Media Netizenship

Over the decades, evolving models of international broadcast television and their overt promotion of ‘public sphere’ engagement have sought ‘balance’ in their documentary, news, and current affairs programming, often allowing aggrieved corporate parties a ‘right of reply’. The more controversial and anti-establishment a documentary is perceived, the greater the pressure exerted to censor, discredit, or minimise its impact. Drawing from this larger context, this chapter demonstrates how repeated tropes and patterns of public/private interest have been contested in the arena of nuclear energy policy, most recently evident in the independent documentary responses to the earthquake, tsunami, and reactor meltdowns in Fukushima. It also discusses the problems resulting from this complex balance of power.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to draw attention to the similarities between heterogeneous documentary practices and forms by offering in-depth analyses of significant independent documentary works in the post-1990 era. It examines recent cases where independence is at stake, either in the discourse developed by documentary practitioners themselves or in the supposed systems within which documentary images are produced. Hence, the purpose of this collective volume is to adjust an ever-changing term to the concrete modifications of documentary film practices, as well as to the new constraints and opportunities that have appeared in this field over the past twenty-five years. The technological changes taking place in the 1990s and 2000s have played a significant role in reshaping documentary film practices. However, the consequences of the digital revolution still need to be addressed without overestimating the impact of technology on other political, economic, social, and cultural changes.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes. It suggests that case studies included here should not give the impression that this volume was conceived as a comprehensive overview of the issue of independent documentary in contemporary times. Rather, it aimed at prompting new interest for, and innovative academic perspectives on, the manifold significations of independent documentary production today. Besides demonstrating the complexity, variability, pragmatism and paradoxes that this notion of ‘independent’ documentary entails, this collection of case studies also endeavoured to reveal important similarities among different practitioners in the field. In fact, the book chapters may be reshuffled to highlight other significant connections between them.

Independent Documentaries and Online Uses in China: From Cinephilia to Activism

This chapter focuses on online documentary practices. It attempts to puts in perspective the uses generated by the independent Chinese documentary movement from the dawn of Internet film forums in the mid-1990s to the microblogs in the late 2000s. Two decades of online practices in this small film milieu reflect the evolution of both web-based platforms and Chinese independent documentary filmmakers. Using detailed examples, it shows that their unofficial cinephilia, emerging from piracy practices, quickly moved towards exchanges reflecting the filmmakers' concerns for recognition of their works and, beyond that, for the sensitive sociopolitical issues dealt with in their films. The popular practice of online document sharing completes and extends their film practices and creates a wider network ranging from film enthusiasts to activists.

Contesting Consensual Memory: The Work of Remembering in Chilean Autobiographical Documentaries

This chapter analyzes how four films containing a strong autobiographical dimension break with the consensual and normative image the transition fashioned out of the past: En Algún Lugar del Cielo (dir. Alejandra Carmona, 2003), Calle Santa Fe (dir. Carmen Castillo, 2007), Mi Vida con Carlos (dir. Germán Berger-Hertz, 2010), and El Edificio de los Chilenos (dir. Macarena Aguiló, 2010). It argues that the rupture lies in the work of memory these films bring to the foreground. Whereas the transition passively referred to the past and evoked it without question, these filmmakers not only receive an image of the past, they search for it. In this quest, the autobiographical form plays a decisive role, allowing them to reveal the work of remembering and sometimes to undertake a critical scrutiny of memory, as Carmen Castillo does in Calle Santa Fe.

Languages, Speech and Voice: The Heritage of Jean Rouch and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Convention: Black Wall / White Holes

This chapter analyzes Joris Lachaise's documentary approach in Convention: Black Wall/White Holes (2011), in order to identify how, as a Western filmmaker filming ‘Africa’ today, he positions himself vis-à-vis the double cinematic heritage of the French ethno-filmmaker and Italian film poet. This heritage seems of particular interest for contemporary independent documentary films. Indeed, in the context of modern cinema of the 1960s, Paolo Pasolini and Lachaise, in their own particular styles, drew a new path for the documentary film and broke away from the conventions of the genre. Pasolini developed a kind of film project against didactic and close-ended documentaries, while Rouch tried to report (or even adopt) the Other's point of view and thus broke away from colonial cinema, in which the dominating voice of the coloniser always prevailed. More specifically, this chapter will analyse the functions of speech, language and voice in the film Convention, because they are at the core of our interrogations concerning this heritage.

A Personal Vision of the Hong Kong Cityscape in Anson Mak’s Essayistic Documentary Films One Way Street on a Turntable and On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing

This chapter explores Anson Hoi Shan Mak's essayistic documentaries and her personal vision of the Hong Kong cityscape. Like the traditional mainstream documentary, the essay film often focuses on specific issue(s), rather than a fictional plot. However, while straight documentary makers concentrate on the ‘subject’, which is more ‘passive’ than the ‘active subject’ of the fiction film, film essayists opt to treat the subject as a theme ‘in which the subject is a particular development or an interpretation of that theme, and one that has a determining influence upon the form of the film’. The chapter argues that the radicality of Mak's film essays manifests itself both in a highly original aesthetics and in a critical perspective on Hong Kong. The independent filmmaker's discourse is articulated in a subtle way, but her political stance is, however, expressed firmly, especially in the more recent On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing (2012).