two cents worth
The documentary problem is a genre problem. I've never been a genre type
(what is literature -- the collection of texts with literary qualities. And
what are literary qualities? the distinctive qualities of literature).
Here the question is representation. And that too is a poor question. (No
representastion is as 'good' as the thing it represents. Therefore things
and representations are qualitatively different. Representations are not
things. They are less than things. Therefore they can never be adequate.
Representations of representations are even less thingly. They gradually
disappear over the event horizon of history, taking history - which is a
representation of things - with them. qed)
The question concerning communication is what, how and along which
trajectories it communicates -- not the degree to which it refers. A
typology of media (as opposed to a genre theory) wd address content,
mediation and the mode of relation. What kind of relationship, if any, is
characteristic of the doco? Some people say it is the objectification of
the life observed. But there are for example indigenous filmmakers and
community video projects that work on a different kind of relation. This
seems to me more significant than whether any of these are generically
docos. Mediation raises groovy questions: Patricia Zimmerman has been
discussing the implications of digital documentary for some time,
frequently in the pages of (US) Afterimage. As to content, there is a
characteristic: docos have some (as opposed, let's say, to certain
structural-materialist films)
Rasied this way, there are as many connectivities as distinctions.
If questions like those surrounding genre and representation are so
difficult to answer, is it possible that it is because . . . they are the
wrong questions?
happy new year (Aotearoa)
sean
Sean Cubitt
Screen and Media Studies
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton
New Zealand
T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604
T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543
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http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/
Digital Aesthetics
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita
The Dundee Seminars
http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html
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