Experimental Documentary Research Articles

Oceanic feeling in Mati Diop’s Atlantique

ABSTRACT The ocean is a constant presence in Mati Diop’s award-winning film Atlantique/Atlantics (2019), a ghostly love story about the ongoing migration crisis set in Dakar, Senegal. A critical issue Diop explores in this film is the contradiction between the geopolitical stasis of a high-rise tower and the expansive continuity of the sea, making the physical reality captured by the lens overlap with the unrestricted flow of presences carried by waves of sea and sound through the film frame. This article analyses oceanic aesthetics and the unrestricted flows of bodies of water and work in both Diop’s recent feature film and her first experimental documentary of almost the same title, Atlantiques/Atlantics (2009). These corporeal drifts disrupt narrative and temporal flows and position the cinema as a space for poetic and political change. What the ocean embodies is not only a tragic archive of colonial violence, as Rosalind Galt has recently argued, but also a space for a feminist and decolonial refusal of such loss.

About the Cover Image

This issue's cover image: As part of the same AHRC-funded research project about gay male “pig” masculinities that led to the conference behind this special issue, I had the pleasure of working with an incredible film crew to produce a short experimental documentary titled Oink!. Having originally planned to shoot a feature-length documentary, the first COVID-19 lockdown was eventually announced to come into force one week after we had planned to start filming in Berlin. Adding to all the anxieties associated with a new, not fully-known, pandemic, we had to change our filming schedule and concept in order to respond to the virus. As such, a film that we had planned to film over a whole month and across a variety of locations, private and public, to document a gay male sex culture in which exchanges of bodily fluids have a core role, we were forced to condense filming into the last week before lockdown and to cut out all the plans to film in sex clubs and dark rooms. The film thus gained an unexpected layer of nostalgia for a very recent time when bodies had been able to touch and exchange fluids (once again) without fear. For the most part, the bodies in the film are alone in their private spaces, and intimacy and the intensity of sex becomes something that is only talked about, visually alluded to, but never shown. In that context, the photo in the cover of this issue, a production photo I took during filming, is somewhat charged with that very longing. It no longer just depicts a man looking for a hookup on a mobile phone app, but it also signals the painful desire for human contact—for touch, sex, and intimacy—at a time when public health measures were about to be put in place that would restrict the satisfaction of that important human need. I would like to thank Liz Rosenfeld, Rob Eagle, Rufai Ajala, and Liam Byrne for having gone through that journey with me. And special thanks to Giovanni, depicted in the cover image, for his hospitality and candor.

“What is the Orbit of Our Dreaming?”: Hale County This Morning , This Evening and Black Time Studies

Abstract: This article delves into the profound connection between Black life in Alabama, the temporal qualities of Southern geographies, and emerging formulations of time from the interdisciplinary field of Black Time Studies. The paper positions RaMell Ross’ 2019 experimental documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening , within an emerging field that examines radical representations of time in experimental Black art, aesthetics, and everyday life. Black Time Studies underscores the critical role of time in the ordering of Black life and labor, acknowledges modes of resistance, and envisions forms of liberation within the unique temporal landscape of the South, inviting this discussion of abstraction, framing practices, waiting, and patience. Hale County This Morning, This Evening explores and enacts an intricate interplay between time, place, and Black aesthetics, offering a generative contribution to theories of time in the South. Situating the film within this particular interdisciplinary discourse enables us in turn to draw from the methods, traditions, and analytical tools of poetry, experimental prose, sound, and music—fundamental elements of Black Time Studies, to create an expanded reading of the film. It is through this lens that we will ponder the film’s central question: “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”

Visual Encounters: Transforming the ‘Watching’ Narrative of the UK’s Marginalized Overseas Chinese in ‘The People Watching’

This essay explores how an experimental documentary film that explores the previously lives of the UK’s overseas Chinese community, can question on the watching relationship enriched using video camera and large-format camera. "The People Watching" (2023) serves as a compelling case study. The film collaborates with a young Chinese photographer using a large-format camera, transforming the meticulous portrait-capturing process into a pivotal element that establishes a sense of "to-be-seenness (Vasudevan 2010:43)" for overseas Chinese individuals often relegated to the margins. The film aspires to spark broader reflection on the nature of identity and its transformation for those navigating the periphery of society. By providing a platform for previously unheard voices within the overseas Chinese community, the film invites viewers to not just watch, but to truly "see" these individuals and their stories.

Old Is the New: Immersive Explorations in Another Beautiful Country—Moving Images by Chinese American Artists

This article explores how diasporic Chinese video artists present familial histories and tales of cross-cultural exchange in the context of an exhibition I am curating, Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists, at the University of Southern California (USC) Pacific Asia Museum. I discuss projects by featured artists Richard Fung and Patty Chang. These artists’ experimental documentaries and performative videos foster deep personal discoveries that defy the late-capitalist obsession with the new as defined by youth, novelty, and the next trend, providing revelatory insights through recuperative engagements with what has come before. In analyzing artworks by Fung and Chang, I also reference related texts by/about artists and historical figures including Walter Benjamin, Anna May Wong, and Zhang Ailing, who emigrated from the People’s Republic of China to the United States in the 1950s and whose special collections in the USC Libraries helped inform the exhibition’s programming. I also interweave my own related familial histories and share some (not-so-new) curatorial ideas for immersing audiences in intercultural art and reflection.

Review: Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars, by Jill Godmilow

Review: <i>Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars</i>, by Jill Godmilow

The Ethnographic Pastoral Re-imagined: Embodiment and Inhabitation in Aboio and Sweetgrass

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on two experimental documentaries about herders and their animals. These films depict ways of life on the verge of extinction but depart from classical ethnographic and narrative conventions, instead calling for embodied modes of spectatorship. In so doing, I argue, they de-center the human perspective and make an implicit case for a working-class eco-politics grounded in interaction and interdependence between human and non-human subjects. Simultaneously, in reclaiming iconic landscapes of national cinema as inhabited ecosystems, these films contest the temporal displacement of such spaces and those who live there. Highlighting a revised version of salvage ethnography in twenty-first-century documentary filmmaking, this article thus signals a connection between posthumanist aesthetics and decolonial critiques of ethnography. In the films analyzed here, both endeavors hinge on embodied spectatorship and the perception of interconnection it engenders.

Reinventing democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian urban montage

Sylvain George is one of the most interesting French filmmakers working today. He has made a series of poetic, experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees around Calais and has brought together migrant figures and Occupy movements in his two ‘city symphonies’, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright) (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018). The principal theoretical influence on George's cinema is the work of Walter Benjamin. This article shows how certain essential Benjaminian concepts can help us understand George's films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilisations and the history embedded in urban spaces. But it also argues that, even as they point towards a renewal of fundamental European political traditions, they show that a politics no longer limited by national belonging remains to be found.

Sarah Keller, Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame

Barbara Hammer is a key figure within experimental film, her work often linked to the heightened visibility of LGBTQ+ cinema and media over the last two decades of the 20th century, which culminated in what came to be known as New Queer Cinema.1 Hammer’s diverse work provided a springboard for queer and feminist experimental cinema, and throughout a career spanning nearly 50 years she persistently explored the boundaries of the medium. Hammer also challenged the traditional spaces of cinema exhibition, giving screenings in womens’ clubs, museums and galleries, and blurring the lines between film as a theatrical phenomenon and film as art practice. In works such as Available Space (1979), Hammer shook up the convention of the passive, seated audience by projecting her film from a wheeled rotary projector table that she shifted around the architectural space, coaxing the audience to move about in order to see the film. As Sarah Keller puts it, ‘energizing the spaces and scope of cinema’ and ‘pushing out of the frame’ were among Hammer’s chief objectives (p. 15). Hammer also holds a prominent place in the development of queer experimental documentary. In works such as her landmark, feature-length film Nitrate Kisses (1992), she honed factual film’s relations with personal expression and sensual engagement, joining the contemporary documentary experiments of Marlon Riggs, Tom Joslin and Trinh T. Minh-ha, among others, in transforming documentary conventions and expectations.

An Introduction

An Introduction

From naked bike rides to spectacles of motion: cycling and the rider-bicycle in experimental documentary film

ABSTRACT Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from researchers, there are no accounts on how it links to experimental documentary film and avant-doc storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on cycling to discuss the rider’s embodied experience of travel in a few short and stylistically distinct works, Chuck Hudina’s Bicycle (1975), Jon Behrens’ Girl and a Bicycle (1995), Vanessa Renwick’s The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Ken Paul Rosenthal’s I My Bike (2002), Tomonari Nishikawa’s Into the Mass (2007) and Tony Hill’s Bike (2013). Despite a different format and narrative focus, which questions the genderedness of cycling, explores it in a trance and dreamlike state or turns it into the sheer spectacle of motion, all films echo the recent phenomenological turn in film studies and present cycling as a multisensorial, kinesthetic practice, demonstrating how the rider-bicycle hybrid assemblage relates to both cycling mobilities and the riding environment. Compared to narrative and fiction film, experimental documentary film looks at the bicycle identity as a distinctive subject of inquiry and maps cycling not so much through its traditional connotations as through the actual lived experience, one that is not necessarily already pre-determined, mediated and ideological.

Experimenting with non-fiction VR storytelling: micronarrative, abstraction and interactive navigation. The case of In Pieces VR

ABSTRACT This article presents In Pieces VR, a VR-based artwork and experimental documentary on political prison, and discusses its main design challenges, goals, and creative approach. This project aims at creating a documentary and artistic experience that departs from conventional immersive journalism by presenting to its viewers a story made out of very small narrative units, and with subjects presented in the form of virtual sculptures devoid of any specific identity. The idea is that by leaving much of the making sense left open, viewers will have to fill in the gaps. The working hypothesis is that this will help create a different emotional, intellectual and political connection with the piece than that a conventional documentary would achieve, particularly to an audience unfamiliar with, or even politically alien to its specific context. Public exhibition of the work and user evaluation showed that the piece was successful in creating such connections.

Rethinking Algerian Visibility and Invisibility in Ali au Pays des Merveilles

This article examines Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy’s experimental documentary Ali au pays des merveilles (1975) and discusses how the filmmakers expose Algerian workers’ living conditions in the 1970s France, a promised land where racism and exclusion persist. This study analyses the visibility and invisibility of the Algerian labour by first discussing the exclusion of Algerian migrants on the basis of their racial identity and their social status, in light of thinking related to French republican identification. The author then examines the interrelations between the Algerian labour and the commodities produced by their labour, as well as the glamorous spectacle associated with the commodities. Finally, the article reflects on the reflexive archaeology of the image that questions the power and limits of archives, interrogating the entanglements of French colonial history in Algeria. The article argues that Abouda and Bonnamy’s stylistic devices are in line with those of the Third Cinema, providing an alternative that allows post-colonial sensibilities to challenge the official discourse and the self-claiming “universal” but indeed Eurocentric aesthetics.

Shock Absorber

This essay attends to Insomnia of a Serial Dreamer (2020), the latest feature film by Lebanese filmmaker Mohamed Soueid. Drawn from footage gathered over eighteen years, this deeply personal experimental documentary engages the wounds of war, yearnings of love and obsessions of cinophilia. Soueid organizes his work through a somnambular conceit: that by telling him bedtime stories, his friends might help him fall asleep. This pretext serves as a container for a form of compulsive storytelling whose intimate emotional textures are threaded with melancholy and nostalgia. Insomnia of a Serial Dreamer explores the possibility of a curative cinema—one whose attitude to the past is not to stabilize or hermetically seal it away—but to materialize the imprecisions and uncertainties of collective memory through the cinematic medium as a form of social relation.

Built of Earth: The Casona and Vernacular Earthen Architecture in Oaxaca, Mexico

This article discusses Built of Earth, an artistic research project by the author in collaboration with Mexico City-based architect Octavio Castro Gallardo. The work-in-progress—an experimental documentary project consisting of a short film, a publication, and a site-specific installation—explores the restoration of Castro Gallardo’s 200-year-old adobe family home in the town of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico, that was damaged by an earthquake that shook the Pacific coast in February 2018. This article situates the restoration of the Casona within the discourses of vernacular earthen architecture and performance studies, describing how, in addition to being the site of various cultural performances, the Casona itself performs cultural memory. Heyn-Jones discusses the relationships—among humans, more-than-humans, and other actants—that permeate and haunt the adobe walls of this spectacular ruin. Heyn-Jones’s essay offers a provisional discussion of local seismic cultures, aspects of architectural material culture that reactively or preventively resist earthquake damage, and the way these manifest in the Casona. In contrast to the centuries-old adobe Casona are the concrete-block dwellings that surround it and that are ubiquitous across Mexico. This article situates this vernacular within the discourse of the ‘remittance house’ and discusses the materialities and temporalities of these ‘dream houses’ in the context of the Casona. Finally, this article offers some thoughts on architectural animism and how it might manifest in the Casona, this singular dwelling, built of earth.

Exhibition of a VR Experimental Documentary

During the exhibition session, we propose to view a VR experimental documentary of 20’. The VR film is made after a three-year practice-based collaborative research on mothers and children living together in a condition of imprisonment. The objective is to understand their different points of view about the confined spaces they are - or have been living - and how they endured the challenges of raising children in prison, and also which are their hopes and dreams for the future. This Ph.D. research mixes theory and practice, with the intent to analyze the production of the VR film, made combining live-action shooting and animation Objectives and methodology: The aim is to discuss which are the potentialities and also limitations of immersive storytelling applied to visual anthropology in closed contexts such as prisons, with the collaboration of multiple approaches and forms of art, like animation. VR filmmaking process helped to research confinement - in confined places - during the pandemic. The objective is to understand their different points of view about the confined spaces where they have been living in the past, and how they endured the challenges and the crises they faced during their childhood and motherhood, worsened by the pandemic. The attempt to hear their own voices and their perspective following Mirzoeff’s ideas (Mirzoeff 2011, 2015) brought me and a group of artists and practitioners to experiment and employ different forms of art and methodologies, such as illustration, animation, digital storytelling, photo-elicitation and anthropological observational fieldwork. My hypothesis is that the VR filmmaking process – more than the normal ‘flat’ documentary cinema – helped to build and share a collaborative process (between academics, practitioners and the protagonists of the research). Furthermore, I (Rossella Schillaci) think VR technology helped to support the participation of children and youth, envisioning new possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations and to better listening to children’s ideas of participation, and expression of their point of view about the present, past and mostly future, representing their thoughts, fears and dreams. Intended results: reflection and debate about ethical problems, the potentiality of using new technology in the research and also in the dissemination of the results. How new media can facilitate and open a broad discussion about the topics that involved not only academics but also practitioners and decision-makers? The VR film will be available for participants. An excerpt will be available for publication, together with a paper about the making process, the methodology, the challenges faced and the results obtained.

Between presence and absence in Tuni Chatterji’s Okul Nodi

This article examines the layers of vistas of landscape, archival audio, ambient sound and documentation of history and culture in Los Angeles–based filmmaker Tuni Chatterji’s experimental documentary film Okul Nodi (Endless River) (2012). Chatterji’s film consists mainly of luminous shots of boatmen travelling along Bangladeshi rivers. During key sequences, recordings of Bangladeshi boatmen’s songs known as bhatiyali are heard on the soundtrack. Interspersed among these shots and tracks are brief interview scenes with anthropologists and archivists of this musical form and musicians who perform or study the genre. This article shows how the film fuses experimental filmic approaches from artisanal to structural with documentary, ethnographic and archival modes, including that of ‘ecocinema’, highlighting questions of seeing and knowing. It also traces how the film obliquely brings to light a history of twentieth-century engagement with and archiving of this musical genre on the part of collectors of folk and Indigenous music, as well as radical subcontinental modern artists, thinkers and activists across Partition’s borders.

The way of the bricoleuse: experiments in documentary filmmaking

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the way experimental documentary film practitioners may utilize the methodology of the bricoleuse in order to create films. I refer to my experiments in documentary film practice – mediations of memory, place and subjectivities – where I deploy hybrid filmic strategies of critical realism and fictional enactment. The bricoleuse may use footage obtained through pocket cameras, mobile devices, stills, archive or found footage – including their own past films, analogue and digital – using a digital database to store footage and to provide her with an endless storehouse of digital documents that can easily be accessed and reused in infinite ways to create new practice [Baron 2014. The Archive Effect. London: Routledge, 142]. I analyse in particular My Private Life II [Daniels, Jill. 2015. dir. My Private Life II. UK. https://vimeo.com/139077147] where I used the footage from an earlier film, My Private Life [Daniels, Jill. 2014. dir. My Private Life. UK. https://vimeo.com/104385249], to create a split screen view and my short documentary essay film, Breathing Still [Daniels, Jill. 2018. dir. Breathing Still. UK. https://vimeo.com/253291495] (shown at The Mobile Innovation Network and Association [MINA] in 2018), a short epistolary film addressed to Rosa Luxemburg and shot on a pocket camera (Canon G9X).

Historical Trauma, Queer Sex, and Physical Touch in Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses

For lesbian-feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, “making up” lost queer history in the absence of conventional archives is a material and embodied process seen in her experimental documentary Nitrate Kisses (1992). This film centres around different queer couples portraying various erotic, physical and sexual acts. Each of these acts are aligned with voice-over interviews and visual archival ephemera detailing particular historical traumas, including the AIDS crisis and the erasure of lesbian experiences from life narratives of Holocaust survivors. I argue that the body and various erotic acts in Nitrate Kisses become sites of consciousness and cognition employed in the recovery of traumatic memory. As I explore, it is physical touch—sexual and erotic touch in particular—that acts as a conduit for accessing lost or purposefully invisibilized archival knowledge. Employing Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography, I argue that sex and other forms of physical touch in Hammer’s film become a method of remembering historical injustices, making them visible through an embodied queer-feminist archival practice in order for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory.&#x0D; This article contains images of nudity and sexual behaviour.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction