Jim quoted
By implicating the viewer, interaction is possible
> and almost mandatory. By opposing broadcast material to the Black
> Audio Film Collective's own, their film questions the belief in
> objective documentary.
And Tony wrote
'There's a certain closeness in some documentaries that blur that
distinction between reflexive and another the Nichols categories:
interactive. In both categories the filmmaking apparatus are
somewhat foregrounded within the texts. However the defining
difference is that in interactive mode the filmmaking process never
turns against and questions its own 'manipulative' existence within
the relationship.'
Although I dont know Nichols categories I think reflexivity in filmmaking
can have many functions, but primarily it simply makes a film an object of
its own depiction. The reflexive film is about - among other things -
itself. So I dont think reflexivity need imply a questioning of objectivity.
It is often an unacknowledged attempt to be more objective by showing how
problematic objectivity is. Nor do I think that reflexive film necessarily
reveals its own manipulative character - or at least not without the scare
quotes around manipulative.
Reflexivity is a fascinating thing, but I often think people are more
fascinated by it as a game or a technique or even a fashion than they are
inquiring about its power and the wide extent of its uses. It has many
functions and is coopted everywhere in nature and society and consciousness.
Derrida, I think, said somewhere that Proust's big reflexive novel was Hegel
written as fiction. No doubt Hegel, (who saw experience as form of
experience of itself and saw this as a 'moment' in the cunning subject's
conceiving of the object) is a great philosopher of reflexivity, and as a
philosopher of history, a seminal philosopher of the obsessively reflexive
character of modernity. But I like to think of him as rewriting Sterne's
fiction as philosophy, and maybe not doing Sterne's more jaundiced view of
reflexivity justice.
Ross
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