Documentary Work Research Articles

Conceptualizing documentary performance

ABSTRACTIn discussions of non-fiction film-making, the issue of performance has often been given short shrift. This article begins to fill this gap by outlining a framework for understanding and discussing the documentary actor's work. I contend that a three-tiered model, which takes into account everyday performative activity (tier #1), the impact of the camera (tier #2) and the influence of specific documentary film frameworks (tier #3), is necessary to describe the non-fiction subject's work effectively. This kind of multifaceted conception also suggests the necessity of a complex, interdisciplinary method of analysis. If one is to consider adequately the nature and implications of documentary ‘acting’, one must draw from and combine the insights of fields that investigate each of the performative levels that non-fiction subjects negotiate. By amalgamating the relevant work of sociologists and social psychologists, film acting scholars and documentary theorists, I enumerate many of the performance strategies and techniques available to non-fiction subjects and demonstrate a means of analysing these choices. Throughout, evidence from The Up Series (Apted, 1964–2005) is used to suggest the utility of such an approach.

One-Way Street

I was working for the Center of Documentary Studies at that time in Community Programs, and we were invited to be a part of some of the very initial meetings, but it became very clear that a lot of work needed to be done before anyone was going to do any documentary work.
 'Why are you taking that picture? What ar you going to do with that?' 
 This and again that, 'We're tired of students coming into the neighborhood, taking what they need for their research, and leaving...'
 'What happens to what they would do for us? How does that positively impact our community?'
 These words were spoken in an interview with Barbara Lau, director of the Pauli Murray Project and "Face Up," a collaboration between Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and the local Durham community aimed at celebrating the life of Durham-native and activist Pauli Murray while promoting solidarity between residents of different neighborhoods and also between residents and the university.

Documenting mixed reality performance: the case of CloudPad

This article introduces an original documentation and archiving tool, CloudPad, that integrates ‘cloud computing’ into the annotation and synchronisation of mixed media resources. Through CloudPad users are able to view a documentation, edit a version of it, and record their own comments in response to it. Whether users may have created and/or experienced a particular work, or whether they may simply wish to consult a work's documentation, their journey through these records and annotations are subsumed into the work's documentation, thus augmenting the ‘original’ artwork's field of social engagement. Before discussing CloudPad in detail, we proceed to explain how recent debates in performance documentation influenced our methodology and development, and the general challenges of mixed reality documentation that CloudPad aims to address.

Photographing Handsworth: photography, meaning and identity in a British inner city

ABSTRACT ‘If you say “Handsworth”’, the novelist Salman Rushdie remarked in 1986, ‘what do you see? Most people would see fire, riots, looted shops … and helmeted cops … a front page story.’ In the 1980s, ‘front page’ images of violence and disorder had come to define areas of black settlement such as Handsworth. However, for both Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, photography has the potential of unearthing alternative histories of black people in Britain. Connell explores how this might work in practice by taking Handsworth, an inner-city area of Birmingham, as its case study. Following the Handsworth riots in 1985, a photograph of the ‘black bomber’ appeared on the front page of every national tabloid newspaper, and Handsworth became conceptualized by the media as ‘Frontline Britain’. At the same time, there are numerous examples of photographs from within Handsworth that attempt to present a different view of the community: images taken at high-street portraiture studios, community photography projects and the documentary work of the professional photographers Vanley Burke and Pogus Caesar. What such images offer the historian, it will be shown, is not clear cut. Photographs from within Handsworth are suggestive of possible themes in any alternative history of race in Britain, particularly in their emphasis on everyday life. However, Connell shows that it is also necessary to understand what is often the unacknowledged politics behind these images, something that makes them—in differing ways—as problematic as the stereotypical narratives presented on the front pages of tabloid newspapers.

The political representation of Muslims in Brussels

Compared with other major European cities, the Brussels-Capital Region has a unique configuration in terms of the political representation of elected representatives descended from diverse ethnocultural groups, and in particular Muslim elected representatives. Nearly one out of five members of the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region is of Muslim origin. This is all the more unique given that, for the first time in Brussels and in the entire European Union, one of the seats in the Brussels Parliament is held by a Muslim member who wears a headscarf (Mahinur Ozdemir). The present article is based on documentary work as well as an empirical approach carried out using interviews which were conducted with Brussels MPs and community stakeholders mobilised before the elections as well as an ethnographic observation of the election campaign. Its objective is to understand the explanatory factors regarding this political representation which is quite unusual in Europe, by formulating the hypothesis of the deciding influence of institutional parameters combined with the demographic evolution and community mobilisation of Muslims in Brussels.

Tracing the Political Lives of Archival Documents

This volume explores the ways in which archival documents shape political struggles and influence social change. With case studies from the Pacific, Australasia, Africa, Inner Asia and South America, the articles ethnographically trace the political genealogies of archival documents as they are transformed across space and time. The contributors of this volume engage with a current turn in anthropology towards the documentary process and the material, showing how the aesthetics, form and materiality of documentary work shape the means by which archives exert power. They thus demonstrate how the performance of documentary practices enable particular subject formations, modes of governmentality, new and ongoing expressions of sovereignty and agency, and the circulation of affect. By examining such practices as the conversations that occur in documents' margins, the composite layering of files, the strategies by which documents are extracted from the state, and the means by which documents are re-evaluated and redeployed, this volume offers a dynamic picture of contemporary archival work and an expanded frame for imagining the archival field.

Competing Cultures of Conservation

In the last quarter century, environmental conservation efforts by nongovernmental organizations, private companies, or nation states have most prominently featured expansion of formally protected areas and the integration of elements of biological and social sciences in their monitoring and management. For most involved in such efforts, culture has been either an obstacle to wider adoption of practices intended to achieve conservation or a characteristic of societies who protect nature through their management practices and belief systems. The next quarter century would benefit from a broader awareness of conservation culture, which I define as a series of distinct aesthetic, technical, and ideological positions. Conservation cultures pertain not only to small societies, but also to the institutions and initiatives that characterize conservation as a complex transnational field of experts, policy makers, private and public sector leaders, and community members. I write of my own experiences in Appalachia and equatorial Africa and of popular novels and films to show how a reflexive idea of culture, or awareness of symbols and meanings in one’s own self and society, is a key to future conservation success. Contrast and Conflict in Conservation Cultures I grew up in Tennessee, along the perimeter of the U.S. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a suburban youth whose family often went backpacking in the park on weekends. Oblivious to the history of the park’s designation, I relished that landscape’s contrasts with my ordinary routines. After time in the mountains, my sister and I basked in the hour-long return drive to our home, our bodies salty and streaked with the loamy black soil of southern Appalachia. We would ride out of the park through valleys dotted with shacks, where pickup trucks almost all sported gun racks. As we crossed the Tennessee River into Knoxville we saw emblems of a suburban landscape. The first was the groomed lawn of a graceful yet dilapidated old mansion that housed the Teen Board of Knoxville, a social club that invited us to attend both cotillions and meetings to organize volunteer projects. From that mansion onward we looked out at a parade of carefully mulched dogwood trees and azalea plants nestled around splashing stone fountains. In my residential neighborhood, named Sequoyah Hills after the famous Cherokee leader, such fountains were designed in the 1920s to emulate Native American symbols and designs. They are interspersed with an actual Indian mound, badly eroded but affixed with plaques provided by a neighborhood preservation association that offer a terse history of Cherokee settlement in the region. As an adolescent, I was vaguely conscious of ways of life that had been displaced in favor of the settlements that matured into today’s suburban riverbanks. Not until my early twenties, after working at conservation sites in the Congo Basin as a Peace Corps volunteer and researcher, did I find myself avidly reading reprinted works from the early 1900s such as James Mooney’s ethnography (Mooney & Ellison 1992) of Cherokee culture and Horace Kephart’s (1976) accounts of his time with white farmers and hunters in the southern Appalachians. These books were early attempts to debunk stereotypes about so-called rural or primitive peoples, yet each unwittingly established new stereotypes. In trying to translate alterity, or otherness, in relation to dominant cultural norms, these books also marked cultural difference in ways that inadvertently reinforced boundaries among contemporary land uses. Suburbia and wilderness are distinct, yet both preclude the kind of local subsistence use of resources that Mooney or Kephart chronicled.

Photographs of Early Twentieth-Century Cuba by Sumner W. Matteson

In February 1904, American itinerant photographer Sumner W. Matteson, a native of Decorah, Iowa, visited Cuba for about four months. He travelled extensively throughout the island and took over five hundred photographs. It was the first time Matteson had left the United States and, upon reaching the island, he headed into the countryside and began to photograph a wide range of individuals. Matteson's documentary work represents an image of Cuba that was relatively unknown in the United States at the time. His photographs cut across racial, gender, class, and geographic lines, and portrayed Matteson's subjects with a sense of pride and agency. This paper will argue that Matteson portrayed Cuba and its people with an intimacy unlike that of any photographer before him — this during the founding years of the republic, shortly after a four-year American occupation, and at a time when Cubans were seen as exotic others. The photographs reveal a multi-hued population of blacks, mulattoes, and whites, male and female — subjects rarely portrayed sensitively in photographs of the time. This paper will offer some suggestions as to why this white, Midwestern male photographer did not fall into the potentially exploitative trap of representing the Cuban people in the customary way. Matteson's images provide depictions of the Cuban people that had been previously absent, and offered a face of the rural subaltern consisting of both blacks and whites, working-class Cubans, and even a former Rebel Army leader — all less than twenty years after the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886.

Representing Race and Place: Black Midlanders on Television in the 1960s and 1970s

This article explores the history of black midlanders in media representations. Through a focus on Birmingham and television in particular it explores issues involved in approaching history in this manner. Key historical moments in television coverage are analysed in light of these concerns: how have black people been spoken about and how have their experiences (and responses to them) been recorded and dramatised? The analysis covers news reports held in the Media Archives Centre England archive and television production at the BBC, including the documentary work of Philip Donnellan and dramas such as Rainbow City, Gangsters and Empire Road. What is revealed here is evidence of a struggle over representations and their production. Ultimately, this is a struggle by black people themselves for adequate recognition, to be heard and ultimately to take up their place in a shared space of representation and history.

Chronicles

Recorded in Havana in June 2009, this conversation addresses a series of works by the Cuban artist Manuel Piña. Moving between Piña's recent video work, his earlier photographic practices and the tradition of photojournalism in Cuba, we investigate the continued and dynamic intersection between documentary work and revolutionary politics. This conversation reminds us that debates about the ‘end of Communism’ and the rise of the global art market must also contend with art production still confronting the realities of a socialist revolution.

Transgression and Transcendence in the Films of Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog’s films often have characters that are on spiritual journeys that take transgressive turns. These quests are also existential in nature, for what the characters often seek is transcendence. Because transgression is a sociological, philosophical, and theological entity, Herzog’s films are demanding because his outsider characters are often not easy to admire. Still, because they take on very personal self-examinations in their search for transcendence, we can respect their tragic, horrific, or painful excursions. Herzog’s protagonists are almost always outsiders in some form. Whether “being on the outside” quite literally or figuratively, protagonists like Nosferatu, Kasper Hauser, or Aguirre somehow eschew societal norms and become figures of empathy, fear, or disgust. Even the characters of his documentary work, like Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man , are people who somehow do not fit in with society, and so seek escape through crossing boundaries or intense trials of will and perseverance. As outsiders, they are shunned, but the way they handle this is sometimes different: through madness (Aguirre), spirituality (Kasper Hauser), or rebellion (the cast of Even Dwarves Started Small ). These characters are in constant conflict with others, society, and themselves. I want to argue that one of the main reasons Herzog makes both artful, meditative films and ones that challenge spectators’ expectations, is due to the recurrence of the theme of spiritual transformation—or transcendence—that often is transgressive. Such Herzog heroes as Aguirre, Stroszek, Fitzcarraldo, or even the entire cast of Heart of Glass push beyond the limits of sanity, freedom, and societal restrictions in order to transgress or “pass” into a different mental state. Furthermore, such moves are spiritual in nature, since the characters become individual disciples of their own imaginings, their own beliefs, and their own codes of behavior. Both physically and psychically, these characters undertake journeys that allow us to see how difficult, yet ultimately manageable, these passages to transcendence are. I will discuss several Herzog films and characters that exemplify this tendency, including, Even Dwarfs Started Small , Aguirre, the Wrath of God , and Grizzly Man .

La incidencia del proceso gramatical en la evolución histórica de los significados del verbo "verter" en español

Fecha de recepción:­13 ­de ­mayo­ de ­2010. ­Fecha de aceptación:­17­ de ­enero­ de­ 2011. La nuevas tecnologías electrónicas como los bancos de datos textuales,bibliotecas telemáticas, corpus informatizados, de referencia y específicos,así como los programas informáticos diseñados para facilitar la labor lexicográfica, suponen todo un avance en el desarrollo y estudio de la filología en pro de la lexicografía. La nueva lexicografía, especialmente,la lexicografía histórica, hurga en la documentación textual con el fin dehallar las razones del devenir de sus usos y en este sentido la labor documental telemática ofrece muchas ventajas. Para dar muestra de ellos, vamosa tratar en este trabajo la evolución histórica de los significados del verbo verter en español, centrándonos, especialmente, en la incidencia del proceso gramatical en esta evolución.

Corporate Philanthropy, College Students, and The LUNAFEST® Film Festival

In 2001, Clif Bar & Company, makers of LUNA: The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women, debuted LUNAFEST®, an international touring film festival that showcases short narrative and documentary work of female filmmakers and raises money for the Breast Cancer Fund and other nonprofit women’s organizations. A pre-packaged film festival with clear and easy instructions for every stage of the event—from publicity to ticket sales—LUNAFEST® is a user-friendly fundraiser that simply asks its host organizations to stage and promote regional festivals. Since its inception, LUNAFEST® has made significant inroads into university settings. Though the majority of LUNAFEST® programs are currently organized by nonprofit women’s organizations, the number of LUNAFEST® events on college campuses is noteworthy. Between July 2010 and July 2011, of the 125 LUNAFEST® events across the country, 25 percent of the events took place on college campuses. And while LUNAFEST® has not yet made major inroads to high schools, during this same period of time, students at six high schools were able to participate in the planning or screening of a LUNAFEST® program.1 As a professor of feminist media and women’s cinema, and a former curator of lesbian and gay and women’s film festivals, I am on the one hand pleased by the emergence and success of the LUNAFEST® enterprise.2 As feminist film scholars, feminist activists, and women filmmakers have long demonstrated, female directors are an under-represented and under-funded group (Lauzen; Hankin; Guerilla Girls).3 Like other marginalized filmmakers (particularly gays and lesbians and people of color), women filmmakers often depend on film festivals to support and bring attention to their work. Although national and international film festivals continue to grow at exponential rates, festivals dedicated solely to women directors remain a scattered and fragile enterprise.4 LUNAFEST® should be applauded for encouraging and supporting the work of women filmmakers and for bringing their projects to regions and communities that otherwise might not have access to nonindustrial cinemas. The LUNAFEST® enterprise is also a welcome addition on college campuses because it enables students to take part in the production and circulation of alterna-

Reality radio: telling true stories in sound

Ira Glass, the Kitchen Sisters, and others write about their audio craft. Over the last few decades, the radio documentary has developed into a strikingly vibrant form of creative expression. Millions of listeners hear arresting, intimate storytelling from an ever-widening array of producers on programs including This American Life, StoryCorps, and Lab, online through such sites as Transom, the Public Radio Exchange, Hearing Voices, and Soundprint, and through a growing collection of podcasts. Reality Radio celebrates today's best audio documentary work by bringing together some of the most influential and innovative practitioners from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In these nineteen essays, documentary makers tell - and demonstrate, through stories and transcripts - how they make radio the way they do, and why. Whether they call themselves journalists, storytellers, even audio artists - and although their essays are just as diverse in content and approach - the contributors to the volume all use sound to tell true stories, artfully.

DESCRIPCIÓN SOCIOAMBIENTAL DEL SUELO EN EL VALLE GEOGRÁFICO DEL RÍO CAUCA. EL CASO DE LA AGROINDUSTRIA AZUCARERA.

The paper aims to describe how the ground in the Valle del Cauca has been socially and environmentally appropriate for the sugar agribusiness model from the early twentieth century to the present. In this sense, the research makes a journey from farm economy entered into crisis in the nineteenth century in what is now the Valle del Cauca to an agribusiness model increasingly complex as the cluster of sugar. The core of the document deals with the historical-spatial description of the sugar agribusiness development, which has exerted strong pressure on natural resources which mainly has to do with the ground, which makes evident the different socio-environmental impacts are defining the use and ownership of this resource in the Valle del Cauca. The methodology used was taken from a draft environmental assessment called Pressure/Condition/Response, which was the center for registration and organization of the information collected from which emerged different qualitative and quantitative indicators, which joined the documentary work different from institutional documents produced by ASOCANA and CENICANA. At the same time, the aim is to place this issue in the discussion of the social sciences, discussing the notions of development and environment, according to the contributions of the intellectual output of the Economic Commission for Latin America (Called by Sunkel, 1981), Donald Worster (Called by Castro, 1995) Anthony Giddens (2000) and Ulrich Beck (1997, 1998a, 1998b).

The "Problem" of Brandon Teena

Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's documentary, The Brandon Teena Story (1998), released one year before the popular Hollywood film, Boys Don't Cry (Dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999), is suggested by Jennifer Devere Brody (2002) to be a and perhaps even more experimental [film] (p. 92) than its fictional counterpart. Much has been written about the various media representations of the Brandon Teena tragedy. Most have focused on the inconsistencies revealed in the different texts, or the various ways in which transsexual identity is displayed. Valid as those approaches are, our paper is not going to compare texts, or discuss transsexual identity. Instead, we seek to investigate the notion of ethics in The Brandon Teena Story by assessing how its structure balances both message and metaphor. Throughout this paper, the message to which we refer is the arguments that the film advances, while the metaphors are representative of the narrative, the visual effects, the symbolic imagery, and the score. The intention is to provide an analysis on the ethics of representation in documentary, especially, as in this case, when the main subject of representation is absent. The documentary will be closely examined in order to interrogate the general assumption that it is more in its presentation of facts. We hope to reveal much more about the film's views on the subject of Brandon Teena's murder than may initially be apparent. The purpose of such analysis is to unveil how the documentary addresses Brandon Teena's in such a way that submerges the issues of gender identity beneath other social discourses. We intend to show how the documentary presents Brandon as a problem rather than a person.The events that ended Brandon Teena's life are a mix of fraud, sexual abuse and finally murder. While there have been various media recreations of the events that led to Brandon's death, it has been argued by Judith Halberstam (2005) that Kimberly Peirce's film Boy's Don't Cry than any other representation of the case has determined the legacy of the murders (p. 24). The fictional film was greatly influenced by the earlier, lesser-known documentary. Though these films provide similar accounts of the crimes there are several key differences between the two that affect the messages they provide. It is understandable that Brody, as stated above, may find the documentary ethical than the Hollywood film, since documentary through its association with presenting facts rather than constructing fiction, tends to encourage such opinions. However, in the case of the Brandon Teena topic, a crime story about a transsexual who is raped and murdered, what exactly does more mean? Does it suggest that we have a clearer understanding of Brandon's identity, or a clearer understanding of the sequence of events (cause and effect) that led to his murder? In our opinion, the interesting, but frustrating aspect of nearly all the texts that attempt to recreate this tragic story is how little we learn about the main character.Before we discuss the film we must first cast an investigatory gaze on why documentary has generally been considered a more construct than fiction. This has partly been generated by the fact that documentaries are considered to be more truthful representations of the real world. Jay Ruby (2005) argues that audiences believe documentary images to be accurate representations of reality, unless they are overtly altered (p. 213). Although we do not feel confident in arguing what most audiences believe, it is fair to say that documentary suggests itself as a truthful text. Filmmaker and theorist Jill Godmilow (1997) qualifies this view:The essential claim that traditional documentary films make is that there's unmediated truth here because this was not scripted-because the materials are found in nature-thus, the text built out of them is truthful as well. That truth claim is still at the center of most documentary work [p. …

“We All Got History”

This review essay places Local Histories in the context of recent books and studies examining the wide variety of composition and rhetoric courses and pedagogical practices that existed in nineteenth-century America. The book has two general foci as represented in its split title: Local Histories, or microhistories of institutions, curricula, and figures; and Reading the Archives of Composition, an extended look at several hitherto unexamined archival sources and their associated projects. The editors identify three central purposes for their book: to challenge the “Harvard narrative,” which, they claim, places the origin of “composition” at Harvard and other elite Eastern colleges; to offer several alternative “microhistories” from various institutional sites, and to document, interpret, and interrogate specific archival holdings and the nature of archival work in composition. While the reviewers find the challenges to “the Harvard model” as history and historiography overstated, overall, they find the collection important for its studies of diverse sites and its attention to less visible figures: teachers who acted as early innovators, and students whose written compositions, informal diaries and letters offer new lenses for making history. The authors of various chapters who unveil their documentary and archival work in process, disclosing both finds and gaps and offering their developing understandings of the archive as construct, perform a valuable service to future scholars of composition studies.

Documenting Traditions and the Ethnographic Double Bind

Documenting Traditions and the Ethnographic Double Bind Martha King (bio) The documentary short Madison County Project: Documenting the Sound (King and Roberts 2008) tells the story of two intertwined traditions: a local a cappella ballad tradition and a documentary tradition that has developed around the music. This article touches on the history of documentary making in the area, discusses the experience of attempting new fieldwork in Madison County, North Carolina, and illustrates some of the problematic outcomes of doing that fieldwork collaboratively. In attempting to create an ethnographically-based documentary project, issues regarding representation and the dilemmas of collaboration were amplified by historical precedent and the decision to explore the ballad tradition through the vehicle of a film intended for a wide public audience. The nature of this project forced a kind of accountability not always experienced by those who do not labor with the expectations of their consultants reading, viewing, critiquing, and being a part of the finished work. Introduction Nestled between Asheville and the Tennessee border, Madison County boasts a long-standing musical legacy and has become well-known for the ballads emanating from its front porches for generations. This reputation is due, in part, to the simplicity and beauty of the music itself—long, repetitive, a cappella ballads relaying stories of unrequited love, intrigue, and murder. Its reputation is also due to the generations of ballad collectors, enthusiasts, photographers, filmmakers, and folklorists [End Page 37] who have documented singing families in the area since Cecil Sharp, an English ballad collector, came through the county in 1916. This relationship stands as a pair of symbiotic traditions: a community of Appalachian singers perpetuating their craft generation after generation alongside an array of documentarians capturing the music of the Blue Ridge Mountains in photographs, film, recordings, and text. Despite long-running disagreements between these two groups over money, ownership, and authenticity, collaboration between singers and recorders has continued into the twenty-first century. The collections that Sharp created (Campbell and Sharp 1917; Karpeles 1932) and a subsequent book about his visit to Appalachia written by his assistant, Maud Karpeles (1967), were among the first works to shift the focus in Madison County from singing as an everyday practice to music as a publicly valued heritage. Each successive documenter utilized new forms of media that added new layers to both traditions' interactions with technology. Although none of these collectors, film-makers, photographers, or folklorists used media forms that were so new that they might be considered foreign or exotic, they used media in new ways to interact with the musical tradition. For instance, the motion picture was not a mysterious concept in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Madison County, but John Cohen's use of film prompted an entirely different local exposure to this modern media form (see, e.g., Cohen 1963, 1970). The same can be said for Cohen's Smithsonian release of Old Love Songs and Ballads from the Big Laurel, North Carolina (Cohen and Gott 1964). Similarly, there was nothing shockingly new about Rob Amberg's use of 35 mm film to document the cultural fabric of Sodom Laurel. But the publication of those photos in glossy book form—and the narrative collaboration that gave rise to much of the book's text—pushed the community into new forms of engagement with modern representation (Amberg 2002). My own documentary work in Madison County repeated this pattern. The consultants regarded neither digital video nor filmic representation as unfamiliar or unavailable. However, mediating that representation with an online weblog and presenting the documentary product via streaming video pushed the musical tradition to a new representational and collaborative space. The effects of different technological and ethnographic approaches on the dialogue between these dual traditions—the ballad tradition and the tradition of documentary work in the area—shaped my own [End Page 38] entrance into the field.1 My co-producer, Rob Roberts, and I choose to film and edit a documentary video about these two entwined traditions. Becoming part of the documentary tradition revealed that relationships between tradition, documentary, and modernity were more complicated than we had anticipated. This revelation emerged explicitly from our utilization of collaborative ethnography. The...

Psalm 4<br/>Psalm 7

Psalm 4, and: Psalm 7 Rebecca Gayle Howell (bio) Psalm 4 Burning tree.Tree that does not burn.The ever kindling.Thing that should not talk,but does. You are the only grace. I stand in the fieldand stare into you.I stand on the edge.My face alight. I am the unwelcome,but you do not judge me.Night comes and again.The sun changes its mood. I tell you I am prettier in silence.You laugh, but don't tell me I am wrong.We both know your bushroots inside my body, that, in the end,I die singed. What the hell—this dumb tongue is only a muscle.I will speak, but I will not lie. I look up. The sky fliesround with blue birds.Or are those hawks? Every one, your ear. [End Page 103] Psalm 7 All night, you dug holes.What were you looking for?A secret. It was yours, but you called it mine.You said to me, you have a secret,your index finger in the air,your eyes squinting. And I believed you.I made a flag of your resentment,your real treasure. I made a dress. I thought I was out of control and needed control. I was a woman without a land. Inside me, a kettle boiling dry,a far away room. Inside me, a thousand fathers,two thousand eyes. Inside me,Naomi and Ruth. And still this—your tentacle hands.And still this—some of the hands are mine. [End Page 104] Rebecca Gayle Howell Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer and documentary artist. She is the author of The Hatchet Buddha (2007) and was the photographer for Arwen Donahue's This Is Home Now: Kentucky's Holocaust Survivors Speak (2009). Her documentary work on Eastern Kentucky's coal communities has been collected in Plundering Appalachia (2009) and The Artist as Activist in Appalachia (University of North Georgia Press), and her poems and essays have been widely published in journals. [r.howell@moreheadstate.edu] Copyright © 2010 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.

The ‘creative treatment of actuality’: Rationalizing and reconceptualizing the notion of creativity for documentary practice

ABSTRACTGrierson defined documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. The aim of this article is to add to existing discussions of this phrase. Attention will be given to documentary as art, and the Griersonian notion of ‘artist’. An examination of the relationship between art, creativity and documentary production and consumption will rationalize and reconceptualize creativity for documentary practice. This reconceptualization of documentary creativity will result from three theoretical perspectives. First, the systems model of creativity presents a holistic view of the creative documentary system at work. Next, the staged creative process theories will be paralleled to the documentary production process. The final theory presents group creativity which accounts for collaborative documentary work. In concluding, a brief discussion on the appropriateness of creativity theories for documentary practice will be presented.