Module description
This module will examine how and why a strong documentary impulse has emerged in twenty-first century cinema, with special attention to films that seek to challenge traditional assumptions about the documentary form and its association with objectivity, authenticity, and immediacy. We will explore how filmmakers have interrogated the complex relationships between reality and representation in ways that extend, expand, and contest cinema’s long documentary tradition in light of today’s social, geopolitical, and technological conditions. Contemporary engagements with documentary are multi-faceted and complex, reaching far beyond notions of “fly-on-the-wall” immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity. Accordingly, this module will explore practices that understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality, but as a way of coming to terms with actuality by working with and through images. Topics will include: performativity, testimony, ethnography, the essay film, ethics, reenactment, representations of violence and atrocity, the materiality of the digital image, and postcoloniality. Our overwhelming focus will be on feature-length films, but the module will also include brief explorations of documentary practices in the wider media ecology of artists’ film, surveillance and biometrics, television news, and video installation.
Assessment details
- 500 word blog entry (10%)
- Essay 2500 words (90%)