Critical Distance in Documentary Media

Frontmatter

Introduction: Critically Distant

Abstract

The introduction addresses the state of documentary studies in the 21st century and establishes the theoretical orientations for the collection. The editors argue that the present moment is one in which pressing challenges are best addressed through new formulations of ideas and practices within documentary media. The introduction contextualizes counter-narratives to dominant documentary media forms, practices, formats, and theories that the field of documentary studies has relied on while fashioning its scholarly and institutional identity. The editors consider the possible futures of documentary and make the case for expanding the purview of the field in light of historically neglected media and practices such as photography, installation art, and the plethora of theoretical and philosophical approaches at our disposal today such as the “new materialisms” that have forced a reconsideration of the human and its role on the planet. The last section of the introduction qualifies the term “critical,” which is followed by a chapter overview.

Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, Bruno Lessard

Indexicality in the Age of the Sensor and Metadata

Abstract

The concept of indexicality has remained fundamental to documentary, helping to distinguish the genre from other audio-visual forms and providing the sense of urgency it generates as a social-political form. This chapter considers the nature and implications of indexicality at a time when video capturing capabilities have become increasingly ubiquitous, and embedded in mobile, locative, and networked devices where image and sound recording operate together with an array of other sensors. The generation of video together with metadata involves the generation of additional layers of information which carry meaning above and beyond that seen within the frame. At one level, metadata help to augment the “sense-making” capability of documentary makers, increasing the means to scale up workflows around the collation, organization, and sifting of material. At another level, it is important to recognize that metadata can take on different meanings within the automated systems which assess, categorize, and perform operations.

Craig Hight

Shot in the Dark: Nocturnal Philosophy and Night Photography

Abstract

This chapter examines the neglected practice of night photography, and how it critically addresses the environmental, sociohistorical, and urban issues in recent series by Christina Seely, Bruno Lessard, Michel Huneault, and Jeanine Michna-Bales. Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and the emerging field of night studies to create a nocturnal philosophy—a dark photology—with which to frame the multifaceted issues at the heart of the series, the author examines the value that these photographic artists place upon night to document light pollution around the world, ongoing urban transformations in China, an environmental catastrophe and its aftermath in Québec, and the landscape of the Underground Railroad in the United States. These four series demonstrate how night photography offers a unique critical perspective on some of the most pressing problems of our age, and how these artists distance themselves from the predominantly diurnal register of documentary media.

Bruno Lessard

Approaches to Xianchang: Documenting the Real in Post-socialist China

Abstract

This chapter argues that performance artworks in China involving the participation of migrant workers over the turn of the century simultaneously demonstrate a desire to fully merge with society through sustained engagement with migrant worker communities, and to create a critical distance between art and society. Two such different notions of the relationship between art and society are demonstrated through two conflicting uses of the concept of site-specificity, or “xianchang” in Chinese, in the 1990s. The paradoxes involved in the use and application of xianchang were a direct reflection of China’s post-socialist condition, which include both the continued embrace of the ideals of socialism and a critical questioning of the repercussions of China’s socialist legacy.

Madeline Eschenburg

Ai Weiwei: Grafting as a Documentary Tactic in Art

Abstract

At its best, art confronts us with various realities and presents alternative ways to look at the world we live in, at social, economical, and political levels. In other words, art grafts parts of its perceptions in specific realities of the world to create something new. Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) is recognized worldwide for his practice both as an artist and as an activist. Critical distance is crucial in Ai’s practice, particularly in the documentary context as it is what allows him to nurture and aim at detachment from his own presuppositions and from his own socio-historical context. This chapter discusses the relationship between social activism and visual representation in the work of the Chinese artist, focusing mainly on the documentary aspects of his recent body of work on the refugee crisis and his use of social media in the same context.

Luísa Santos

Unsatisfactory Devices: Legacy and the Undocumentable in Art

Abstract

Regarding perception of ephemeral artwork when lost to the fractures of time, Peggy Phelan states that “you have to be there.” For Phelan ephemera, specifically performance, “become[s] itself through disappearance,” which draws empathy with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura of the original.” In practice, this a less than pragmatic account of the reality of experiencing such artworks, for how can they exist beyond the moment of making if not recorded, in order to map their histories? This essay interrogates the critical, sensitive, and individualized distance necessary to archive transient artworks. Moving beyond the disciplinary ghettos of event and documentation, it interrogates how divergent and sympathetic modes of practice allow for a greater level of sustainable critique. This complex and problematic terrain is analyzed in response to The Alternative Document, an exhibition I curated on the subject in 2016, and suggests archival possibilities beyond formal academic, artistic, and museological conventions.

Angela Bartram

From Above: Critical Distance, Aerial Views, and Counter-Images

Abstract

The sky above has been transformed into militarized airspace and, as technologies of war and surveillance invisibly peer down from the sky, some artists have responded by interrogating these technologies and the airborne view itself. To co-opt the surveillance apparatus or to turn the airborne platform against itself is to reclaim a vantage point in the name of a public’s right to see and know what is taking place over-head and in its name. Working in video and photography predominantly, the two artists who are discussed, Robert Del Tredici and Trevor Paglen, measure and map the scale of militarism while conducting raids on nuclear and military secrecy. Their work addresses militarism from above—that is to say, from the vantage point of the airborne view.

Blake Fitzpatrick

Phantom Rides as Images of the World Unfolding

Abstract

Traveling shots such as phantom rides symbolize the trajectory of travel and the experience of movement that is inherent to travel. Their primary quality is movement and the ability to draw the viewer into the world on screen. They are ideal tools for documentary makers to experiment with form and content, with time and space, duration and distance, and in doing so create a moment of critical distance for the viewer. This chapter focuses on two Australian works that use phantom rides as their basic material to engage with the world: the SBS documentary The Ghan (2018) and Daniel Crooks’ mesmerizing video installation Phantom Ride (2016). Contrary to mapping duration as a coherently located whole as in conventional documentary film, The Ghan and Phantom Ride provide different, sometimes competing, temporalities that lack a clear (narrative) motivation. They provide restless spaces that denaturalize our experience of time, distance us from our habitual reading of space, and transport us into a world unfolding where things go off in unimagined directions.

Gerda Cammaer

Mobile Media: A Reliable Documentary Witness?

Abstract

Mobile media has marked an epochal shift in visual culture. As the everyday is archived in videos, selfies, GIFs, and photography, witnessing is no longer restricted by temporal and spatial distances. Witnessing is in fact a political performance as much as it is an acknowledgement of the quotidian. Sensory encounters with worlds that are censored by state-owned or mainstream media are a valuable source of alternate history, activism, and art. It is crucial, however, that documentary practices that embrace the intimacy and immediacy of digital ecologies provide a discursive structure to address questions of context, consent, and affect. Using case studies from the Indian context, the chapter examines how witnessing is embodied in collaborative and interactive documentaries that use mobile media. Interviews with practitioners reveal anxieties about meaning-making, editorial privilege, and the precarious lives of digital artifacts. The collapsing of distance between the filmmaker, the subject and their audiences, however, remains a pivotal promise of mobile media.

Anandana Kapur

Redefining the “Document”: Social-Media Photographs as Narrative, Performance, Habitude

Abstract

This chapter takes a closer look at the way in which digital vernacular social-media photographs—the “selfie,” in particular—are used to create and maintain a social persona, and to present a version of the self as the poster/author wants to appear to others. As it is shared online, the selfie often conveys a deceptive sense of closeness between the picture-taker and audience. Selfie-taking, to some staff of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, also presented an opportunity to co-opt the assumed intimacy of the selfie to appear to connect with millennial voters. This essay examines the manner in which the selfie challenges traditional notions of critical distance between subject and photographer, subject and social-media audience, and between the selfie-taker and the Clinton Campaign.

Kris Belden-Adams

Instagram as Archive: Constructing Experimental Documentary Narratives from Everyday Moments

Abstract

In this chapter I examine how Instagram allows mobile filmmakers to produce and distribute granular, personal documentary projects about everyday events through the use of various archive and database methods. Using a practice-led research methodology, I will be reflecting on the processes and outcomes of the of the mobile media film Quo Grab #02, a film made with a series of granular moments that were originally shared on Instagram. As in other mobilementaries, it uses the portability of the mobile device to capture everyday moments, that subsequently were remixed in order to create new meanings through juxtaposition. While the initial granular media objects had a life of their own when posted on Instagram, the final film created with them allows them to take on a broader meaning thanks to the critical distance of the maker to the personal meaning and context contained within the original source material.

Patrick Kelly

That Seagull Stole My Camera (and My Shot)!: Overlapping Metaphorical and Physical Distances in the Human-Animal-Camera Triad

Abstract

Historically, non-human animals have been a core subject of cinema and documentary films and practices. Either in fiction or non-fiction they have been recorded by humans, edited, and narrated to be represented and interpreted in certain ways, to make them stand for certain human symbols and projections. But what happens when one of those animals grabs the camera? What happens when a seagull steals a camera, when squirrels photobomb hikers or when macaques take spontaneous jungle selfies? This chapter relies on animal studies to address these situations and the agencies involved, how they have been reflected by contemporary art or in conventional wildlife documentaries in order to think about the changes which affect the confluences and distinctions between the physical and metaphorical distances at work within the human-camera-animal triad.

Concepción Cortés Zulueta

Re-placing the Urban Soundscape: Performative Documentary Research in Vancouver’s False Creek

Abstract

This chapter addresses how sound in location-based media can challenge established notions of reflexivity in documentary practice as a distancing strategy, emphasizing reception as a critical practice that can account for the necessary performativity in bringing a particular location to life on radio, TV, and film. I offer an intermedial historiography of Vancouver’s False Creek area that situates the audio documentation of the World Soundscape Project in the broader context of media recorded on location to discover the ways in which the city has been continually revealed and written over through the perspectives of diverse media-makers across history. When assessed from a critical distance that allows for hearing performative strategies in using sound and image to engage with place, these works re-inscribe location with otherwise obscured histories and uses that reveal the intersections of geographical, social, and political issues that live at the center of all location-based media.

Randolph Jordan

From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through Multi-linear Documentary

Abstract

Much of traditional documentary has been concerned with matters of voice and visibility. However, to speak is to occupy a position of power, and the act of listening has long been overlooked. This chapter explores the importance of listening as a critical and ethical turn in documentary through the discussion of the following non-linear works: Natalie Bookchin’s Now he’s out in public and everyone can see (2012 and 2017) and Long Story Short (2016), Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill’s Empire: The Unintended Consequences of Dutch Colonialism (2012–2014) and Rosemarie Lerner and Maria Court’s Quipu Project (2015). I claim that a documentary practice that foregrounds listening as both a methodological process and an audience experience creates critical distance which can destabilize traditional binaries and implicate the practitioner and audience in the documentary project as an ecology of relationships, multiple perspectives, and complexity.

Kim Munro

From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media

Abstract

This chapter wonders about interactive documentary as a relational media, and how this relationality is less about telling a story than it is about describing and performing the world critically. Stories struggle to account for, describe, or perform the entangled complexity of the world because of their inherent need to be linear and sequential. The author examines how the concepts and methods offered by recent materialist and post-humanist philosophy such as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) invite reconsideration of the role and agency of story for interactive documentary, and how ANT pays close attention to agency and relationality in the formation of complex assemblages. The chapter offers an alternative to the critical distance that characterizes traditional efforts to conduct theory and proposes its inverse: to perform critical intimacies recognizing the agency of all the parts that make up any assemblage that we participate within as interactive documentary makers.

Adrian Miles, Bruno Lessard, Hannah Brasier, Franziska Weidle

Backmatter