Early Documentary Research Articles

South Korean Documentary Cinema and remembrance: the past in the present, at Jeonju Film Festival 2024

ABSTRACT Korean documentary film has historically both been designed as a contribution to political life and also as a creative exploration in the growing film industry. Documentary in the service of political mobilizing, which occupied a large place in early documentary, has evolved into a wide range of expression, without losing the overall character of social commitment. As seen at the Jeonju Film Festival 2024, documentary work continues the longstanding politically-engaged character of South Korean documentary, while demonstrating sophisticated approaches to the challenge of developing narratives of remembrance. This work is undertaken with techniques ranging from animation to strategic use of silence and absence, reflexive archival use and memoir. Documentary choices testify to professionalization and innovation in the field and also to the enduring identity of documentary filmmakers as storytellers of a fraught, contested and still in formation Korean identity.

Mirror Images in "The Double Life of Vronique"

Krzysztof Kielowski was a world-class French director of Polish descendant whose early documentaries had a strong realistic style, and his later work, represented by the Red, White, and Blue Trilogy, showed a strong personal style and philosophical thinking of human beings. The Double Life of Vronique is his transition work, essential in the shift from Poland to the West. The use of mirrors as imagery and the mirror-parallel structure of the two women's stories become an essential way to express the core of the film. This paper will analyze the film's audio-visual language and mirror expressions, starting from the mirror and the mirror-parallel structure, to reveal how Kielowski uses virtual images and metaphors to express the universal experience of women as subjectivity in the filmusing Jacques Lacan's mirror stage to illustrate how Weronika and Vronique establish their subjectivity. Also, Krzysztof Kielowski created several layers of mirror relationships, all of which apply to the crystal of time of Gilles Deleuze's theory.

Reframing Space: Religion, History, and Memory in the Early Documentary Film of the Yugoslav Space

Reframing Space: Religion, History, and Memory in the Early Documentary Film of the Yugoslav Space

Between the Long Sixties and the Short Eighties: An Analysis of Jorge Denti’s Film Malvinas, historia de traiciones

This article surveys early documentaries about the Malvinas War, through an analysis of Jorge Denti’s Malvinas, historia de traiciones (1983), the first such film about the 1982 war by an Argentine filmmaker. Forty years after this conflict, this article recuperates this frequently overlooked film in order to analyse how its narrative dialogues with different imaginaries and identities of the sixties and eighties – influenced, of course, by the experience of state terrorism in the seventies. Paying special attention to Denti’s political and cinematographic trajectory, this article focuses on the film’s use of testimony and its construction of an epic around the idea of popular organisation that underscores the tensions between different epochal perspectives.

Influence of Soviet Union on Early Documentaries in China

Influence of Soviet Union on Early Documentaries in China

Showing How They Made Them Move: Early Making-of Documentaries on the Production of Animated Films

Contrary to popular belief, ‘making-of’ documentaries are not a phenomenon of contemporary home cinema culture, but have a long pre-DVD history. This article engages with a special subcategory: ‘making-of’ documentaries on the production of animation. With a focus on French and American examples, the author retraces the transition of production imagery from metaleptic cartoons to emergent documentary genres of the 1930s, arguing that this historical shift reformulated the question of how the creation of animated films can be captured cinematically. Providing decidedly nonfiction (but not necessarily ‘objective’) images of the making of animation, the films challenged established concepts to address the realm of cinematic production. The article seeks to examine this theoretical potential, using the notion of a cinematic hors-cadre as a key example.

뤼미에르 형제의 영화에서 영화배우와 그 의미: 〈공장을 떠나는 노동자들〉을 중심으로

This paper analyzes Workers Leaving the Factory by Louis and August Louis Lumière focusing on acting and its relations to labor. First of all, this paper illustrates how the first film was carefully directed to present the workers getting out through a factory gate and going home with enthusiasm. The workers are not professional actors, but real employees of the company that Lumiere brothers owned. However, they perform assigned specific roles―to be individuals separate from the labor collective of a factory, and show their own identities as non-workers. The portrayal of workers seems to idealize the life of French citizens so the French audience of the film feel a sense of connectedness. This film was made in the age of modernity, the late 19th-early 20th century, and this is one of the ‘actualities,’ which implies early documentary, portraying the various images of urban landscapes. Proven above, however, the case of Workers Leaving the Factory is directed to ‘look’ real rather than document the reality as it is. In this light, I argue Workers Leaving the Factory is considered the archetype of acting in fiction which resembles acting that was institutionalized during the classical Hollywood period. Finally, it is reminiscent of the industrial context where acting is equivalent to labor and cinema to a giant factory.

The Female Burden Visualized: Cinematic Representation of Women during Epidemics

The Female Burden Visualized: Cinematic Representation of Women during Epidemics

요리스 이벤스의 초기 다큐멘터리 연구

This article deals with the early documentaries of Joris Ivens, born in 1898, in Nijmegen, a Dutch town close to the German border. Unfortunately, there is no research on him in Korea. This is the reason why this paper had to start with the introduction of early works, and it is also an excuse. His documentary aesthetics will be completed only after the study of socialist and communist documentaries after the 1930s, which is left as a task for the next study. Joris Ivens produced analytical and formal works under the influence of the European avant-garde in the 1920s. He analyzed the rhythm and movement of visual images through <De Brug>, and captured the current fleeting features and the improvisation in <Regen>. If the former emphasized formal and abstract events, the latter was regarded as a cinema-poem that recorded the city's lyricity by capturing more than 130 shots of Amsterdam in rain. However, even though two films each vividly recorded Rotterdam bridge and the rainy scene of Amsterdam, Balaz criticized the two works as images that lack reality. But it is not ture. The reason is that Ivens emphasized European avant-garde aesthetic practice at this time. It is indisputable that the two films which attempted to record Amsterdam's present through iron bridges and rainy places occupy an important place in his documentary aesthetics.

Ellen Spiro’s Early Documentary Films: Challenging Normative Cultural Productions of HIV/AIDS through DiAna’s Hair Ego (1989) and Invisible Women (1991)

Many cultural and scientific discourses about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s further marginalized those who were infected with the virus, especially vulnerable populations such as women of color and drug users. Ellen Spiro’s early documentaries, directed as part of her work for the activist organization ACT-UP, maintain a strong opposition to these normative conceptions of HIV/AIDS at the time. This article analyzes two of her documentary films: DiAna’s Hair Ego: AIDS Info Up Front (1989), and Invisible Women (1991, co-produced with Marina Alvarez). In both films Spiro empowers vulnerable populations and makes their stories visible, highlighting the protagonists’ efforts to offer and find resources and to denounce both the inability of the governments and institutions to address the problems of women with AIDS and the lack of information about HIV/AIDS in communities of color.

Occupational Classes, Information Technologies, and the Wage

Occupational classifications mix epistemic and social notions of class in interesting ways that show not only the descriptive but also the prescriptive uses of documentality. In this paper, I would like to discuss how occupational classes have shifted from being a priori to being a posteriori documentary devices for both describing and prescribing labor. Post-coordinate indexing and algorithmic documentary systems must be viewed within post-Fordist constructions of identity and capitalism’s construction of social sense by the wage if we are to have a better understanding of digital labor. In post-Fordist environments, documentation and its information technologies are not simply descriptive tools but are at the center of struggles of capital’s prescription and direction of labor. Just like earlier documentary devices but even more prescriptively and socially internalized, information technology is not just a tool for users but rather is a device in the construction of such users and what they use (and are used by) at the level of their very being.

로스 맥켈위 초기 다큐멘터리의 특징 연구 : 〈뒤뜰〉, 〈샬린〉, 〈무한한 시간〉 분석을 중심으로

“모든 것은 가족으로 시작하고 끝난다.”<BR><BR> 로스 맥켈위는 1980년대 개인적 일기 또는 에세이 다큐멘터리로 알려지게 된 자신만의 성찰적 양식으로 주목을 받아왔다. 로스 맥켈위가 작가로서 인정받게 된 결정적 계기는 〈셔먼의 행진〉으로 1987년 선댄스 영화제에서 수상하면서부터이다. 그 전까지는 그는 그의 영화가 매우 사적이며 자전적인 작업이길 원했음에도 불구하고, 오랜 기간 동안 인터뷰, 장면의 설정, 영화의 캐릭터에 대한 연출을 배제하는 다이렉트 시네마의 방식을 사용하였다. 그의 위치를 확립한 이후 지금까지도 대부분의 다큐멘터리 작품에서 1인 제작방식과 16미리 필름 작업을 일관되게 고수해오고 있다.<BR> 본 논문은 그의 초기 작품 중 〈셔먼의 행진〉을 제외한 세 작품〈샬린〉, 〈뒤뜰〉, 〈무한한 시간〉을 중심으로 맥켈위 영화의 특징을 분석하고자 한다. 그 이유는 〈셔먼의 행진〉에 이르러 그의 스타일의 특징들이 대부분 완성되지만, 캐릭터의 측면에서는 〈샬린〉과〈뒤뜰〉에서 시작되어 〈무한한 시간＞에 이르러서야 비로소 완성되기 때문이다. 이들 세 작품의 분석을 통해 그의 영화에서 핵심 캐릭터의 형성과 의미를 살펴보고, 그들이 어떻게 영화의 주제와 연결되는가를 파악해보고자 한다.<BR> 맥켈위의 영화는 자연스럽게 개인의 문제와 사회적 문제를 동시에 담아낸다. 다큐멘터리 작가로서 로스 맥켈위가 특별한 이유는 자신의 영화를 통해 시간의 흐름을 기록하고, 자신이 사랑하는 사람들의 존재를 보존하여, 미래 세대를 위한 이야기를 만들어낼 수 있기 때문이다. 그는 자신의 영화에서 인생의 큰 질문에 진정으로 혼란스러워 보이고, 이를 통해 그 질문들에 대해 관객 스스로 생각하도록 만든다. 이러한 점들이 홈무비처럼 보이는 가족의 일상에 대한 그의 기록이 한편의 완전한 다큐멘터리가 되는 결정적인 이유이다.

Moving Images and Black Life-Worlds: An Interview with Terence Nance

Moving Images and Black Life-Worlds:An Interview with Terence Nance Elizabeth Reich (bio) and Terence Nance (bio) terence nance's moving-image productions span decades, styles, sounds, rhythms, and genres. They bring profound colors, cuts, and noise to the screen; envision otherworldly beings and modes of embodiment; transport us through breath-giving alternative time-spaces; and continually stretch, and strain against, known visual and sonic forms and strategies. They also range wildly in scope: from political shorts, such as The Time Has Come: John Burris Speaks (2015), music videos (nick hakim's Bet She Looks Like You and the dig's You & I & You), an experimental French-African drama and a speculative history of jimi hendrix, to The Triptych (2012), an Afropunk-produced full-length documentary with nance's neighbors and collaborators, wangechi mutu, sanford biggers, and barron claiborne. Click for larger view View full resolution Terence Nance. Photo credit: Barbara Anastasio [End Page 275] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Terence Nance. Film still from You & I & You (2015). Image courtesy of the filmmaker. Perhaps most importantly, through their logistics of production as well as their transformative sound-visions, Nance's works bring new, and often communal, Black life-worlds into being. Yet until summer 2018, when HBO premiered his collectively written and directed series, Random Acts of Flyness, and more recently in fall 2018 when Warner Bros. announced that Nance would direct Space Jam 2, Nance was primarily known for his 2012 feature An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Oversimplification premiered at Sundance and received positive reviews highlighting the film's creative form—a semi-animated, highly reflexive collage of found and new footage—although it didn't bring Nance the kind of recognition his contemporaries, Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, 2013) and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, 2016), received for their work. When I spoke with Nance on September 24, 2018, my focus was on his use of documentary because I was writing an article on The Triptych. But I was also eager to ask about Nance's relationship to Afrofuturism, a phenomenon I understand to be expansive in its aesthetic, thematic, and political scope: a transnational, transhistorical, and continually arising form of Black art and expression tied to the political commitment to imagine Black life otherwise. Nance was surprised that I found his work to be Afrofuturist, and described his form as shaped instead by "litany." Litany is a practice Nance identifies as intrinsic to Black [End Page 276] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Terence Nance. Film still from The Triptych (2012). Image courtesy of the filmmaker. American arts, literature, and religion. It is a practice, I would argue, that renders Black art as always-already political, engaged with a demand for freedom and repair, and shot through with the efforts of protest that have been fundamental to the creation of Black publics—whether viewing audiences, church congregations, slavery resisters, or #BlackLivesMatter and other Black freedom activists. Such litany (the verbal and visual lists at the beginning of Swimming in Your Skin Again; the repetition of names, exhortations, and interactive images across The Time Has Come, for instance)—for me—is the stuff of Afrofuturism: a form that functions in a time-space alternative to the sociopolitical; an embodied insistence on what Ashon Crawley has called "otherwise possibilities."1 However one might describe it, Terence Nance's profound assertion of litany as fundamental to Black expressive practice proposes a reconsideration of imagination as insistent world-making: an issuance of a set of demands rendered real and persistent through their very form. Terence and I spoke by FaceTime. Our discussion meandered through my questions about Afrofuturism and Terence's thoughts about litany. We talked about Terence's early documentary film The Triptych, its situatedness in Black community and collaboration, and how documentary practice has changed across recent decades. And Terence explained his hopes and frustrations with Random Acts of [End Page 277] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Terence Nance. Film still from Jimi Could Have Fallen from the Sky (2017). Image courtesy of the filmmaker. Flyness, another collaborative project, and one which Terence imagined might create political change despite...

Mis-education and the deaf child: Lindsay Anderson and the documentary film Thursday’s Children (1954)

ABSTRACTThe English folk rhyme ‘Monday’s Child’ predicts a fortune for children based on the day of the week on which they were born. Line 4 reads ‘Thursday’s Child has far to go.’ This article explores whether Lindsay Anderson and Guy Brenton edited the documentary film Thursday’s Children (1954) to convince the viewer that deaf children educated in the oral method at the residential Royal School for the Deaf, Margate, Kent, England, would go far. Alternatively, perhaps the filmmakers were presenting the educational experiences on offer with a film-title tinged with doubt. The film’s voice-over, scripted by Anderson, states: ‘without words there can be no thoughts, only feelings.’ We are also told that only one in three deaf children will achieve ‘speech’. This tension is presented in the documentary with a curious mixture of visual and verbal contradictions. The author argues that the seeds of Anderson’s other filmmaking can be found in this early documentary. His ultimate interest was not a ‘tender’ portrayal of children submitting to a particular pedagogy, but instead to show the power and camaraderie of children who, however, they might be taught, should not be made to feel dis-empowered.

Spelling variation in historical text corpora: The case of early medieval documentary Latin

Spelling variation in historical text corpora: The case of early medieval documentary Latin

Asian documentary connections, scale-making, and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF)

Intersecting both fields of film festival studies and transnational cinema studies, this article examines how Asian documentary film festivals help to configure and orchestrate regional documentary/film connections. In particular, this work examines Asia’s earliest documentary film festival, the biennial Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF), established in 1989 in Japan, and one of its visionary founders, documentarist Ogawa Shinsuke. This project first traces how YIDFF articulated Ogawa’s ideal of establishing a creative alliance of young generations Asian filmmakers toward the region’s post-Cold War transition. Subsequently, the YIDFF, intertwined with the changing political economy of global and regional film festivals since the 1990s, has taken up Ogawa’s legacy and renewed efforts to generate an Inter-Asian film network. This article leverages Anna Tsing’s conceptualization of global connections to distinguish the YIDFF’s region-making project and rethink the discursive framing of international film festival network. Additionally, it grasps the political significance of the YIDFF’s region-making by explaining how, as an idiosyncratic festival model, it has disturbed and reframed the given configuration of global image consumption and circulation, and has been retained and reinvented through intra-festival connections across Asia.

Fricative Debuccalization and Primary Split in Terena (Arawak) Historical Phonology

This paper discusses a set of morphophonemic alternations in Terena, an Arawak language of Brazil. I propose a number of non-alternating Pre-Terena forms and a sound change in a diachronic account of these alternations. Using internal, comparative, and philological (early documentary) evidence, I trace the development of these alternations from its precursors in allophonic variation to its partial morphologization. The proposed change debuccalized the voiceless allophones of the Pre-Terena coronal fricatives, changing them to glottal fricatives while leaving unaffected their voiced allophones, whose occurrence is restricted to nasal contexts related to the exponence of 1psg possessors and subjects. I suggest that the partial merger between the Pre-Terena oral fricatives and h took place gradually rather than abruptly and that this accounts for the existence of a contrast between two glottals, h and hʲ, which existed as separate phonemes but that nowadays appear fully merged as h.

Remembering Slavery, Again

IN 2015, A YEAR OF DEBATE OVER THE CONFEDERATE FLAG and intense meditation on the meaning of race in America, it would be a shame to miss the equally public memories of race-slavery in Britain. Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, a twopart BBC documentary,1 publicised the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS), a University College of London database of all the slave owners in Britain who were awarded compensation when slavery was abolished on 1 August 1834. A Broadway musical, Grace, dramatised the story of the British slave-ship captain, John Newton, who wrote the hymn that would become associated with African-American culture and civil rights struggles - and which President Obama sang at the eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinckney, killed in June 2015 by a white supremacist who shot six other members of the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the literary sphere, British novelist Caryl Phillips published The Lost Child, partly a prequel to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, in which he draws on the long critical speculation that Heathcliff, brought from the slave port of Liverpool to the Yorkshire moors, is black.2 It appears that both the US and the UK are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison says of Beloved (1987),3 something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia.4Aside from the fact that these are actually two cases of national amnesia, what is striking is how much people keep remembering, and, more, how often it is the same icon remembered repeatedly as though with all the power of the first time. The hymn Amazing Grace plays as the signature music in both the BBC's Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners and an earlier documentary, the 2009 independent film A Regular Black: The Hidden History of Wuthering Heights,5 which speculates on Heathcliff's racial identity in the context of Yorkshire's historical connections with slavery, and Amazing Grace is the title of both the aforementioned musical about the moral awakening of Captain (later Reverend) John Newton, and a 2006 film about William Wilberforce, who led the successful fight in Parliament in 1807 to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire (but not slavery itself, which happened much later, in 1833). Yet, despite the circulation of these four productions across the Atlantic, it is safe to say that most Americans would not recognise the British roots of this black spiritual - and that few readers anywhere would recognise a 'black' Wuthering Heights. Looking at 2015, a year of transatlantic memories of the New World racial past and its legacy in the present, may therefore give us insight into national amnesias, plural - how two nations continue to grapple differently with their intertwined histories, the global institution of nineteenth-century slavery.The history of slavery is of course neither new nor unknown, yet its afterlives seem to be repeatedly rediscovered at particular moments in time. Some of these coincide with obvious anniversaries, such as the 2007 bicentenary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (when the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was, symptomatically, the Wilberforce biopic Grace). And vice versa, as the voluminous work in the field of memory studies shows, the legacy of slavery is subject to periodic erasure of different kinds in public space and public memory as well as in popular literary and academic discourse.6 In the US, seeking roots can be tantamount to rejecting them: Henry Louis Gates Jr, host and executive producer of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, has been embroiled in controversy over its capitulation to actor Ben Affleck's request that the programme not reveal his ancestor's slave-holding history in a 2014 episode. (PBS put the series on hold after determining that the episode violated its editorial standards. …

The Act of Remembering, the Xianchang of Recording

The Minjian jiyi yingxiang jihua or Folk/Minjian Memory Project of Caochangdi (CCD) Workstation in Beijing, led by Wu Wenguang and Wen Hui, provides a multi-media effort springing from interviews by a team of young people in the countryside about the Great Leap Forward Famine of the late 1950s. The project combines feature documentaries with the archiving of oral history video, and embeds the resulting digital work in theatrical performances. This essay concentrates upon several of its early documentaries that combine the aesthetics of “making-of” films with a “filial quest,” a search for historical news to expand the self in history, in a human time that is counted in generations. Amid ongoing and constantly remade filial obligation and attachments of love and anger, these documentary makers and the people they film wrestle with this fact: while memories are objectifications of the past, remembering is an act in the present.

From Deconstruction to Activism

This article explores how the increasing visibility of new collectives in contemporary China has shaped independent documentaries. Countering a prevalent approach to documentary studies that emphasizes the individual and the subjective, this article suggests that how to represent collectivity has preoccupied Chinese documentary filmmakers from the inception of this art form. Yet early independent documentary filmmakers of the 1990s did not have a clear agenda on the representation of collectivity. The crowd in their films appears as an indistinguishable entity, akin to a passive or inactive social agent. More recent documentaries present significantly more complicated interactions between the camera and the crowd and deliberately tap into the problem of representation of contemporary crowds not just from a formal perspective, but from a political perspective as well.