Affective authorship: contemporary Asian Australian documentary

Abstract

Documentary is a genre not widely understood through its capacity to engage the emotions. This article works to acknowledge the affective labour performed by documentary and, more specifically, the way emotions give meaning to documentary subjects. The analysis explores the production of Asian Australian subjects as documentary authors in four prominent films produced over the previous decade: Chinese Takeaway (Mitzi Goldman, 2002), Sadness: A Monologue by William Yang (Tony Ayres, 1999), The Finished People (Khoa Do, 2003) and Letters to Ali (Clara Law, 2004). These texts allow for a fruitful examination of the way the emotions that shape the expression of these author-subjects, such as mourning and care, might impact on the documentary representation of cultural otherness. Asian Australian subjectivity coalesces in and around these texts in a manner that is founded on the activity of mourning. Included here are not only the bereavements of loved ones, but also the losses that are bound to the movements of modernity, such as the lost fullness which is the promise of diaspora, the failure or absence of universal citizenship and the lack of safety in life lived in advanced capitalism. This article explores not only the absences suggested in these films, but also how these absences present a site of ethical encounter for the viewer that both resists reducing and assimilating the Asian Australian author to a devalued ethnic other while also addressing a community of viewers through a relation of reciprocity based in caring attachments to the social realm.