Panoptikum

Defining documentary

2023-07-03T07:34:22+00:00

The aim of this paper is to define documentary film. After a brief review of existing definitions, the author proposes his own. The methods of working on the set and the textual features of the films are considered as distinguishing documentary filmmaking from other film genres. Issues such as the filmmakers’ interference with the filmed reality, the criteria for distinguishing between fictional and non-fictional elements, the admissibility of special effects, the specificity of editing, and the place of the documentary film among other nonfictional genres are considered. The final definition is confronted with the most recent genres of documentary cinema, namely the animated documentary, the mockumentary and the web-documentary.

In Between Fact and Fiction. Queering the Borders of Documentary and Fiction

2023-07-03T07:57:21+00:00

The essay focuses on films between documentary and fiction, and their categorization by both film theory and audiences, particularly in the case of so-called mockumentaries. Using a semiotic and pragmatic perspective, I examine these films as practices of negotiating audiovisual identity in terms of genre. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of “queer”, I aim to describe the blurring of boundaries and the binary representation of fact and fiction in audiovisual media.

New Paths for Exploring ‘History from Below’: Microhistorical Documentaries

2023-07-03T08:19:22+00:00

This article proposes a specific category of documentaries that adopt a unique approach to explore the past, and which are referred to here as “microhistorical documentaries.” These films fall within the basic parameters of written microhistory, a historiographical trend that emerged in the 1970s under the broader umbrella of “history from below.” Those parameters include a reduced scale of observation, a central role given to human agency, a conjectural approach to archival research, and a reliance on narrative structures. But microhistorical documentaries also exhibit specific traits of their own, such as underscoring the affective dimension, using autobiographical and essayistic perspectives, drawing on the protagonists’ personal memories to reconstruct the past, and using family archives (mainly snapshots and home movies). Films of this kind therefore differ markedly from the informational/expository model of the conventional historical documentary, sharing features with a certain type of contemporary documentary, with some traits that can be linked to a postmodern sensibility.

Entextualizing History through Archives: Representation of Muslim Identity in Post 9/11 Documentaries

2023-07-03T08:36:58+00:00

Representation of Muslims in media post the Sept 11 attacks in the US largely focused on themes of terrorism and extremism. Such homogenized representation was particularly problematic in non-fiction media such as news and documentaries which use archival footage to create ‘reality’. The consequent circulation of these images across the globe is one of the many examples through which Muslim representation has been constructed through stock footage and sourced media images in media post the 9/11 attacks. In this paper, I examine stock images in documentary films in the form of archives to examine the representation of Muslim identity in the post 9/11 world. Using Malitsky’s framework of entextualization to analyze archival material in post 9/11 documentaries, I argue how stock images create a power differential between the East and the West (Said, 1979) reinstating imperial domination. Therefore, this paper intends to examine the use of archives that have been entextualized and re-present history to shape representation of Muslims across spatial and temporal differences through documentary films. To do so, I critically examine two post 9/11 documentaries – Secret Pakistan (2011) and Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) – to study how these films position the role of Pakistan as an Islamic nation in the Global War on Terror.

A New Paradigm for the Genocidal Interview: The Documentary Duel and the Question of Collaboration

2023-07-03T08:57:32+00:00

A global boom in mainly documentary films interviewing perpetrators recognizes the current shift from the era of the witness to that of the perpetrator. Post Khmer-Rouge Cambodian cinema (1989–present) is a unique and highly important case of perpetrator cinema. It proposes for the first time in cinema direct confrontation between first-generation survivor-filmmakers and perpetrators, a new form of genocidal interview: the documentary duel. Enabled both by the intimate horror of the autogenocide and the Khmer Rouge tribunal (the ECCC), dueling with high-ranking perpetrators shifts power relations between the two. In contrast, dueling with low-ranking perpetrators and collaborators, never to be tried, does not generate this much-desired shift. Thus, Cambodian collaboration revealed through cinema stresses the immense importance of the law in promoting familial-social-cultural processes of acknowledgement of accountability. Further, Cambodian duel documentaries constitute the ethics of “moral resentment” (my term), while objecting to and disrupting the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to the atrocious past.

In Queer Memory: Mediating Queer Chinese History in Digital Video Documentaries

2023-07-03T09:39:49+00:00

This article examines the digital and cinematic mediation of queer memory in four independent Chinese documentaries: Queer China, “Comrade” China (dir. Cui Zi’en 2008), Our Story (dir. Yang Yang, 2011), We Are Here (dir. Shi Tou and Jing Zhao, 2016) and Shanghai Queer (dir. Chen Xiangqi, 2019). All these films have been made by queer identified filmmakers and have used the digital video documentary format as an activist strategy; all have strived to record China’s queer history in the post-Mao era. However, because of the filmmakers’ gender and sexual subjectivities, together with the historical and social contexts in which these films were made, the four documentaries remember China’s queer history in different ways. Together, these documentaries contest a heteronormative and a homonormative narrative of Chinese history by constructing alternative memories; they also insert queer people’s voices and experiences into that history. All these mediations testify to the heterogeneity of queer people’s experience, as well as the overdetermination of queer memory as a result of a contingent assemblage of factors such as time, place, technology and filmmaker’s gender and sexual subjectivities.

A Defiant Act of Looking: Prisoners’ Illicit Documentary Practices of Shooting-Back

2023-07-03T10:31:39+00:00

During an armed security operation on Lebanon’s most notorious prison, an image emerges from the POV of a prisoner. Capturing the military vehicles and the prison bars obstructing his vision, a prisoner snatches a photograph through his illicitly smuggled cellphone camera.
In this article, I follow the events of Lebanese authorities’ intervention on Roumieh Central Prison’s Bloc B and collect a sample of images and videos produced and circulated by prisoners as the operation was taking place. By examining the frame, composition, POV, sound, and montage of such amateur fragmentary cellphone recordings, I note two major modes of framing adopted by prisoners; one frames outside the bars and the second frames inside. I contextualize such modes of framing as ‘counter-shots’ in relation to the state’s media strategies of legitimizing its repressive actions and I argue that prisoners utilize smuggled media technologies, such as the cellphone and its camera, as a response to the state’s performative acts of sovereignty. Prisoners operationalize the frame and the POV to create a ‘counter’ way of seeing and documenting the events on Bloc B. Hence, prison cellphone recordings reflect not only what is portrayed inside their frames, but also their means of production. Through the framework of media as practice and the notion of media witnessing, I argue that the illicitly produced modes of framing reflect a practice of media production based around the smuggling of media technologies into the prison. Through such a practice, prisoners produce images and videos to represent and document their lived experiences, relay testimonies, and make the audience bear witness to the horrific and precarious conditions of incarceration; hence, engaging in a practice of documentation from the prison.

Editorial

2023-07-03T07:31:37+00:00