Print

Print


I have to agree somewhat with Matt Niednagel's statement

> ...while there were certainly a lot of directors in the  70s & 80s who were
> operating under much the same assumptions (see the work of Chris Marker and
> Harun Farocki, or Peter Krieg during this period), you will be hard pressed
> to find contemporary films that evince the same pedantic conviction...

... I think that part of the difficulty you will have in finding a
contemporary example is that though they are numerous today they are no
longer as starkly contrasting to their 'conventional' colleagues in their
surface qualities; but I would offer that another form of REFLEXIVITY is not
just in aesthetics, but in pretense to SCOPE. The conventional documentary
may have already integrated certain superficial aspects of the reflexive
style as 'hip', and I think the viewers are already instinctually opening to
the validity of subjective truths, or at least their entertainment
value...what I think is interesting now is to see documentaries which are
unapologetically SPECIFIC in scope, and whether they are developing
primarily an objective mode or a subjective mode, they allow that it is
limited as a general truth, and don't attempt to draw it as such. They leave
it to the viewer to make that projection reactively. HOW/WHEN/WHERE/FOR WHOM
is this true? Becomes a central question in the viewer's reading, and I
would offer this is what would be interesting to examine.