Documentary Tradition Research Articles

Amazon Journeys and Poetic Re-Discoveries in Jan Conn’s 'Jaguar Rain' and Malu de Martino’s 'Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua'

The year 2023 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of botanical artist Margaret Mee’s final expedition to the Amazon. On this trip, she was at last able to paint the rare night-flowering of Selenicereus wittii, commonly known as the Amazon moonflower. Such an accomplishment was not only significant due to the rare nature of the event, but also because it was the final piece created by an artist who renewed the practice of botanical painting. Originally from Britain, Mee lived in Brazil for more than thirty years, embarking on fifteen expeditions to the Amazon region between 1956 and 1988, painting while travelling in dugout canoes deep in the forest and becoming a fervent activist for the protection of the environment. Her work has influenced many artists, e cologists, and biologists, and has served as inspiration for literary and filmic creations. In 2006, Canadian poet Jan Conn published Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems, in which she poetically recreates Mee’s journeys to the Amazon. As both a scientist and a poet who has also extensively travelled in the region, Conn reimagines Mee’s wondrous encounters while situating them as part of a tradition of travel and exploration in South America. A few years later, in 2012, the documentary Margaret Mee e a Flor da Lua, directed by Brazilian filmmaker Malu de Martino, was premiered. In the film, Martino reconstructs Mee’s final journey to the Amazon in search of the moonflower while also reinstating the artist’s important contributions as an artist, environmentalist, and contemporary explorer. The connections between the biographical, poetic, artistic, and professional Mee are closely woven throughout the documentary, which can be seen as inserted in a new documentary tradition, less analytical and more poetic, in which notions of truth, history, and reality are problematised and rendered through different lenses. Bearing in mind that both Conn and Martino re-read Mee’s journeys through the tropes of exploration and discovery, which are commonly associated with imperial practices and colonial narratives of the New World, in this paper, we propose to discuss in which ways these tropes are brought into context and problematised, especially in relation to the depiction of Amazonian nature.

Exploring post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma in adult animation: a comprehensive analysis of Flee, Waltz witn Bashir and L'Image Manquante

Animation has been employed as a productive and subtle means to represent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and historical trauma. The aim of this article is to study the narrative, visual, and psycho-affective strategies of both phenomena through the films Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), and L'Image Manquante (Rithy Panh, 2013). The ability of animated images to reconstruct moments for which there is no visual testimony, as well as their capacity to evoke the experience of traumatic events, emerges as the center of a specific aesthetic approach to history, forming a type of cinema of the real (Zylberman, 2022). Contrary to the tradition of documentary and visual essay, there is a more frequent expressive use of evocative mechanisms, dreamlike images combined with archival material, and forms of re-enactment of real events that necessarily do not involve the use of actors. The evocation of painful experiences establishes a visual framework in which the viewer becomes the epicenter of the affective staging of trauma and PTSD, prioritizing poetic construction.

Russian and Arabic documentary tradition: syntactic aspect

The object of the study is documents of business correspondence in Russian-Arabic official communication; the subject of the study is the syntactic features of Russian and Arabic business documents, the similarities and differences between Russian and Arabic syntax in business communication. Syntactic organization is very important for business writing; it serves as the final stage of its structure. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the identification of universal and culturally determined features of the syntactic structure in relation to Russian and Arabic-language business writing. Among the universal elements are the use of sentences that convey the non-personal nature of communication, indirect expression of imperativeness (using forms of the subjunctive mood, interrogative sentences), introductory words with the semantics of politeness. Original syntactic constructions can be used to achieve a similar communicative effect. The research was carried out on the basis of methods of analysis, synthesis, observation, description. Methods of component analysis, interpretation and classification, a system-structural method, and elements of a functional approach were used. As a result of the study, it was noted that the differences in the syntactic structure of Russian- and Arabic-language business letters are culturally and historically determined. The specifics of Arabic business syntax were influenced by increased requirements for the expression of politeness in society (indication of the regalia of the addressee), the predominance of the collective over the personal in culture, the origin of the official business style from the artistic, and not from the colloquial (long sentences). It is concluded that it is necessary to take into account cultural and historical factors both in the process of constructing business letters and in the process of their mutual translation. Among the important techniques of Russian-Arabic translation are combining sentences and increasing content

He Insists! From Apprentice Editor to Elder Statesman of the Black Documentary Tradition

FQ contributing editor Josslyn Luckett speaks with Sam Pollard about his long career, which spans collaborations as an editor with Spike Lee to producing and directing his own documentaries, histories of black independent media, and his most recent film Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes.

Realist Ethics

A review of Vassallo, Jesús. Epics in the Everyday: Photography, Architecture, and the Problem of Realism. Zürich: Park Books, 2019. 328 pages. ISBN 978-3-03860-162-3. Jesús Vassallo's Epics in the Everyday explores the question of realism in architecture as it has been mediated by photography's documentary tradition. Synthesizing an immense body of theory and practice, Vassallo argues that architects should address a world that is saturated with images and objects by embracing the banal ordinariness of these remnants.

FRAMING “THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SELF” IN EDUCATION PROGRAMS FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS IN RUSSIA AND SWEDEN

The aim of this study is to understand the ‘photographic selves’ – the collective competences and skills required for making, interpreting, and communicating through photographs — that are articulated in the educational framework for future photographers in Russia and Sweden. These are two countries with very different histories in relation to photographic practices. Theories on photography from recent decades have emphasized that digital photography is a different medium from analogue photography. This study seeks to understand whether and how this is addressed in two different cultural contexts, based on interviews with teachers and department heads, combined with written descriptions of courses and educational programs. The material makes visible different ideal photographic practices. One, the most common in both countries, is firmly embedded in the international documentary tradition. Other ways, represented by teachers at a Russian art school for photography, stress a more critical perspective toward established conventions. However, absent at the studied schools are more freer understandings of photography in the wake of digitization. Photography is still framed by the historically anchored indexical relation to the surrounding world and as a fixed object.

Decolonizing Documentary Spaces

In this paper we consider how grassroots community partnerships can transform academic spaces into creative and interactive sites of Indigenous agency and advocacy. Focusing on two projects based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), we bring these initiatives into a discussion that takes into account the larger context of documentary filmmaking in the territory often referred to as Québec. We address how each project uses care and collaboration towards a practice of visual sovereignty. We start with a discussion of the First Peoples’ Postsecondary Storytelling Exchange (FPPSE), an Indigenous led, multi-institutional, five-year initiative using decolonizing film and research methods to understand the needs and aspirations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis post-secondary learners. This multi-year project involved 22 communities, 10 nations and generated over 100 video stories. The group used talking circles, filmmaking, and community engagement as methods to validate indigenous ways of learning and teaching. The facilitators created safe space through the sharing of food, the attentiveness to languages, the foregrounding of shared decision making, interactive methods and more. Following this, we discuss Circle Visions, a settler-initiated partnership project based at Concordia, which has collaborated with the non-profit Wapikoni Mobile since 2016 to facilitate care-full creative spaces on the university campus for emerging Indigenous artists. This initiative features an annual cross-platform media-making Summer Institute for Indigenous filmmakers with workshops focusing on animation, experimental video, podcasting, documentary, and 360-degree / VR filmmaking as a tool for decolonization. We reflect on how we can activate decolonized documentary spaces within existing settler institutions and use care-full methods to unsettle hierarchies, promote well-being, and foster Indigenous productions. We then offer some context about the documentary traditions that we are building on within the place now known as Quebec.

II. Family Welfare and Pernicious Property: White Womanhood and Catholic Social Thought in the United States

A significant literature presents the Catholic social thought tradition (CST) as a resource for combating racism and white supremacy, and an equally important body of work critiques the documentary tradition for the ways it fails to adequately address these pernicious social sins. This essay will combine elements of both approaches to address a topic relatively modest in scope: showing how attention to the historical and contemporary operation of white womanhood, exposed by sociologist Jessie Daniels in her book Nice White Ladies, informs, critiques, and presents opportunities for Catholic social thought on gender and family, both in the ecclesial documents and in their appropriations by white US Catholic scholars. I will address three themes: images of women; the nexus of families and the welfare state; and whiteness as property.

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Spotting A Tree From A Pixel (With Remote Sensing Researchers)

This exposition contemplates the collaboration between me, a photographer, and remote sensing researchers from the Department of Geoinformatics at Aalto University, in an ongoing artistic research collaboration called Ground Truth. Ground Truth is a photography project about ‘seeing something when there’s nothing there’. Based in the research group’s initial intent to overcome the spatial resolution limits of satellite imagery, the project now investigates new imaging techniques such as computational photography and hyperspectral imaging of forests, while also referencing photography’s love affair with natural landscapes. Such a comparative approach to natural photography has allowed me to offer a vision that typically escapes human sight perception. I open this auto-theoretical text with a personal experience, namely being on a field trip with remote sensing scientist Daniel Schraik. I use this moment to, among other things, articulate my thoughts on the construction of the ‘real’ in different disciplines. I then contemplate the body of interviews and field trips that became a two-year-long interdisciplinary dialogue, and also brought together two distinct ways of looking at the forest: one symbolized by the camera, another by the terrestrial laser scanner. Inspired by remote sensing concepts such as ground truth and the inverse problem, I have come to examine photography through a new analytical framework. In everyday language, the term ‘ground truth’ refers, in part, to a first-hand experience. In our project, it makes sense, then, that Ground Truth connotes the documentary tradition and the act of witnessing. In the language of science, however, and specifically in remote sensing as a field, ground truth means something different. It refers to data collected on-site, which can then be used to calibrate, to build models, to predict, to interpret, and to decipher information from images; in this case, satellite images. Similarly, our interdisciplinary collaboration functions on another operational layer of photography beneath the immediately visible, one that illustrates an expanded notion of photography across contemporary discourse. Ground Truth interweaves archival imagery, documentary photography, experiment dataset, 3D digital art and conceptual photography. The constellation of employed elements contrasts the representational approaches of drawing and photography with the data-oriented and algorithmic approaches of computer-aided seeing. The two modes together allow for a parallel reading of the forest — one that contextualizes different epistemological regimes that allow for new configurations of the relationship between image and reality.

O Papel da Música no Documentário “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool”

This study seeks to address the use of music in the film “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool”. The theoretical reference for the analysis is Bill Nichols (2005). Among the ways Nichols addresses to delineate the boundaries that separate a documentary film from a fiction film is the audience, or the viewer. This is viewers, when watching the film, may assume that the sounds and images in that film originate from the historical world. I argue that in documentary film the viewer can retain their belief in the authenticity of the historical world represented on the screen, but this does not prevent their understanding of the film as a perspective on the world. It is part of the tradition of documentary to be able to convey an impression of authenticity, even if the close correspondence between image and reality is not guaranteed. However, when the music used is original, in this respect the correspondence with factuality gets closer.

Theorizing Transregional Cinemas

Theorizing Transregional Cinemas David Pettersen (bio) Niels Niessen. Miraculous Realism: The French-Walloon Cinéma du Nord. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. 338 pages. $95 hardcover. $33.95 paperback. Niels Niessen's new book Miraculous Realism is a fascinating study of films from the French-speaking part of Belgium (the Wallonia region) and the industrial French north (the city of Lille and the Nord–Pas de Calais region). The book fills an important gap because there is not a significant number of scholarly monographs on Wallonian cinema in English, and regional films within scholarship on French cinema tend to be treated as elements of a national cinema or international auteurist, art house cinema. However, the interest of Niessen's study goes beyond just making a corpus of lesser-known films visible. The book also represents a significant methodological intervention into how to study regional cinemas, especially regions that extend across national borders. Niessen finds inadequate now well-established approaches to studying transnational cinemas, the cinemas of small nations (Mette Hjort), and approaches to large regional cinemas such as those of Europe, so he develops his own "small regions" approach to what he terms the Cinéma du Nord, or Cinema of the North. Miraculous Realism argues that the Cinéma du Nord is a transregional cinema in southern Belgium and northern France that exists as more than just a scholarly category thanks to shared [End Page 377] cultural, linguistic, historical, and industrial reasons. The shared French language is of course the most obvious link, but Niessen makes the compelling case for cultural and historical connections in that these two parts of Belgium and France are working-class rust belt regions that relied on heavy industry such as coal mining. However, they failed to diversity their economies and consequently have struggled in a postindustrial Europe from the 1970s on. Miraculous Realism makes the case for a regional aesthetic tradition in filmmakers such as Robert Bresson and Maurice Pialat and in a common emphasis on secular understandings of humanism and grace that results from the historical importance of Catholicism in the two areas. Niessen also examines how national and regional governments and local media producers have fostered regional media industries within each of the two countries and developed synergies across the national border. I found the book's overall argument for the usefulness of a Cinéma du Nord as a category to be convincing. The risk of such a regionally focused study is that the choice to emphasize lesser-known Belgian and French films could make it difficult to connect with general readers who do not work on those films or their regions. Neissen negotiates this risk directly by structuring the book around two very well-known films, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta, made in Wallonia, and Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité, filmed in the French north. Both films were released in 1999, and both won awards at the Cannes Film Festival. All three filmmakers have gone on to become recognizable auteurs who have been well discussed by scholars. Miraculous Realism makes the strong case that scholars have much to gain by thinking of these films and filmmakers in terms of a regionally inflected Cinéma du Nord. The book's four chapters are methodologically diverse. Chapter 1 sets out to answer the question of what links Rosetta and L'Humanité through close analysis of both films that tease out how each is a covert passion story underneath a veneer of documentary realism. Neissen argues that both ultimately reflect on what kinds of consolation religion can offer in a secular, postindustrial age. Chapter 2 is split into two parts. The first part presents an economic history of northern France and southern Belgium in which Niessen argues that what links these two areas as a transregion is a shared Catholicism and a similar lack of response to deindustrialization. The second part of the chapter is about histories of cinematic representation of Wallonia, with strong roots in the documentary tradition and in northern France through films that combine local rootedness with audience appeal outside the area. [End Page 378] Chapter 3 focuses on a detailed analysis of the industrial structures of the...

The Old Toponymy and New Topography of Zion: Utah, Photography, and Daniel George's Series God to Go West

The Old Toponymy and New Topography of Zion: Utah, Photography, and Daniel George's Series <i>God to Go West</i>

The draftsman’s contract: Gianfranco Rosi’s El Sicario, Room 164

In Gianfranco Rosi’s El Sicario, Room 164 (2010), a former sicario (‘contract killer’) for a Mexican drug cartel narrates a twenty-year career of torture and murder. Veiled to preserve his anonymity, he delivers his 80-minute monologue within the confines of a motel room. Though the ‘talking head’ is a well-worn device associated with televisual documentary, Rosi’s film, shot on digital, might be said to be anchored in a cinematic documentary tradition by recourse to another medium: drawing. As the sicario talks, he sketches cartel activities ranging from drug transportation to brutal physical violence on the pages of a notepad. This article considers how Rosi’s filming of drawing in El Sicario reveals something significant of drawing in film, in documentary and in this director’s documentary films in particular. Informed by Jacques Derrida’s reflections on drawing and by the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, I suggest that the drawing of El Sicario illuminates concerns fundamental to documentary film – of sight and its occlusion, of scepticism and faith, evidence and education.

Between social documentary and a global aesthetic: the use of landscape by early-career South African photographers

This article examines work from three South African artists—Vincent Bezuidenhout, Renzske Scholtz, and Jabulani Dhlamini—and argues that they use landscape images to find alignment or clarity between themselves, the social and political history of their country, and its land. Caught between a generation of activists who immersed themselves in views of a contested landscape, and another generation who did not experience life under apartheid, these photographers must balance what they see in the landscape in a contemporary context and its history into their representations. In “Separate Amenities,” Bezuidenhout examines how segregated recreational areas inscribed racist views into the South African coastline. In her series “The Farm,” Scholtz uses triptychs to combine archival imagery, contemporary photographs, and personal artifacts from a family property that was bought by the apartheid state and used as a prisoner camp. Jabulani Dhlamini revisits locations in the Sharpeville township connected to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. Finally, this article asserts that the landscape medium offers artists such as Bezuidenhout, Scholtz, and Dhlamini a space in which to mediate and engage the influence of the social documentary tradition in a post-apartheid art-making context—all while developing their identities as professional artists engaged in a global photographic dialog.

Documentary(‘s) Challenges in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT This article engages with the obstacles confronting documentary-oriented artists when engaging with the multifaceted problem of the era of climate change. The label ‘documentary’ evokes several assumptions and suggests that such artworks represent events in an objective, neutral and unmediated way. Consequently, the premise of representing reality-as-it-is is attached to these kinds of documentary artworks. Despite the large body of theoretical reflections on the limitations of the documentary mode, these false assumptions and promises endure. By revisiting the genealogy of the documentary tradition, and with particular reference to Hannes Dereere and Silke Huysmans’ 2019 performance Pleasant Island, this article points at some challenges and possible solutions for documentary artists to cope with the overwhelming complexity that characterises our current period.

A Conversation with Nora de Izcue: Runan Caycu, New Latin American Cinema, and the Peruvian Documentary Tradition

ABSTRACTThis dialogue features the Peruvian filmmaker Nora de Izcue, paying particular attention to her early documentary Runan Caycu, the impact it had on her own trajectory as a director, and the role it played in connecting her with the New Latin American Cinema movement. De Izcue has not only contributed to the Peruvian documentary tradition through her groundbreaking films and filmmaking process, but has also been instrumental in promoting social justice filmmaking throughout Latin America. This article expands international awareness of De Izcue's work, opening new pathways for engagement and analysis.

Wandering Gazes on the Screen: The American Material Environment in James Benning’s Films

The experimental filmmaker James Benning has a unique way of approaching American life through a radical film language. My paper addresses the question of how American material culture and design appear in Benning’s early work. A recurring feature is his preference for the depiction of landscapes, buildings, objects, and vehicles over human characters that support viewer identification in mainstream documentaries. In the first half of the paper, I present the main stylistic features of Benning’s body of work within the context of structural film and documentary filmmaking. Then I provide a detailed analysis of three of his early films: 11 × 14 (1977), American Dreams: Lost and Found (1984) and Landscape Suicide (1986). I show how Benning was able to create a film language with structural experimentations, long takes, and wide shots that offers a perceptual experience that goes against mainstream narrative film and documentary traditions. Overall, the aim of this study is to present how Benning’s art provides an epistemological insight into American design and material culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

Cruising the staged Wonderland: Scenographic photography and the queering of space

This article attempts to introduce and define the creative practice of ‘scenographic photography’ through the exploration of a body of practice-based research completed as part of a Ph.D. at the University of Tasmania in 2018. As research, it examines how traditionally representational forms of photography and scenography can inform each other through the more performative mode of ‘scenographic photography’, an interdisciplinary neologism operating between the performing, spatial and visual arts. Throughout this article, in attempting to define ‘scenographic photography’ as an emergent field, I will concurrently explore how queer space making was used as a critical tool for the research, visualization, execution and exhibiting of this body of work. The title of the body of work – Cruising Wonderland – refers to a specific ‘beat’ site in Sydney associated with illicit encounters and the homophobic violence it engendered during the 1980s, as well as an embodied means of re-presenting such traumatic histories. Within Cruising Wonderland scenographic scale-model making is adopted as a critical tool with which to interrogate specific sites of queer trauma. The inherent ‘wonder’ and fascination associated with the art of the miniature encourages the possibility of a reparative reading not always possible via the explicit documentary tradition of photographing actual sites of trauma. Once presented the audience are required to ‘cruise’ the darkened exhibition environment, like the ‘beat’ spaces referenced in the work, with an acute sensory awareness of their surroundings, of fellow spectators and how they, as participants within Wonderland, perform and are perceived by others. This immersive approach to engaging with the work is designed to encourage a process of empathic engagement, illuminating often-invisible histories, allowing us to move towards reparation through active re-witnessing.

Mobile Moving Image Culture &amp; Smartphone Filmmaking Past, Present &amp; Future

Over the last decade, smartphone filmmaking evolved from an underground and art house into an egalitarian filmmaking practice and moving-image culture. In an international context mobile, smartphone and pocket films can provide access to filmmaking tools and technologies for a new generation of filmmakers. Max Schleser will review the developments and directions in mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking through the International Mobile Innovation Screenings (www.mina.pro). During the last ten years, he curated the screening and smartphone film festival, which captures and celebrates smartphone films about communities and cities from around the world. Mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking expands the tradition of experimental filmmaking, expanded cinema and documentary making. Smartphone filmmaking facilitates experimentation. This presentation will outline how early mobile filmmaking aesthetics still resonate in contemporary smartphones films and documentaries that screen at major festivals such as Berlinale or Festival de Cannes. Furthermore, mobile moving image aesthetics now influence filmmaking more generally.&#x0D; As Creative Arts research in screen and digital media, Max Schleser’s research projects are also disseminated via non-traditional research outputs. He applies practice-led research to examine novel film forms and formats. His creative practice focuses on filmmaking and curation. Max Schleser has demonstrated how mobile media can drive social innovation in interdisciplinary research projects. To establish a conversation on mobile media's potential for transdisciplinary research, he co-edited Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones and Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones. His monograph, Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory &amp; Practice will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2021.