Documenting the air

Abstract

The air sustains, connects and conditions our lives and has been of growing relevance to social scientists adopting an atmospheric approach to social life. Nonetheless, in screen studies, air’s critical uptake has so far been limited to narrative cinema, leaving it undertheorized in non-fiction filmmaking. In this paper, I introduce theories of the air that flow from the broader rise of atmospheric socio-aesthetic theories and suggest that it is possible to understand the air as an agent in the relationship between a filmmaker and their practice, and the film and its viewers. To make this argument, I first present a theoretical orientation to air as it is implicated in the non-fiction filmmaking process, before considering how the air has been understood in film scholarship, and how it has been taken as a subject of filmmakers working in experimental traditions. I then consider two bodies of non-fiction filmmaking through this aethereal lens. The first is Margaret Tait and her concept of ‘breathing’ with the camera, and the second is Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah’s And Still, It Remains (2023). In these analyses, I argue that thinking aethereally allows us to consider the co-construction of documentarian, document and viewer.