Documentary films constitute a challenge for philosophical thinking.
Relying on reality and addressing it explicitly as well, they raise the problem
of the encounter between world and images. The indexical images they feature do
not merely reproduce the real in its immediacy, but also constitute, in
themselves, a particular relation to it. Rather than a pure objective material,
they are always a product of a dialogue between the visible and its perception,
the historically developed reality and the meanings ascribed to it. Being at
the same time reproductions of the empirical world and artistic configurations,
documentaries appeal for critical reflection rather than blind belief. However,
many commercial productions, educational formats, or journalistic reportages
tend to conceal these intricate connections and claim to represent the factual
world in an accurate way through rather conventional forms. By uncritically
using strategies such as seemingly neutral voiceovers, interviews with experts
or victims, live footage or archival images contextualized in a coherent,
unilateral way, they obscure the fact that the topical issues have not only
been mediated through framing, editing, and sound, but also through the
filmmaker’s stance towards her subject.
By contrast, examples of the critical awareness of the complex relation
between filmic images and the reality they address can be found in the work of
independent filmmakers and theorists. Trinh T Min-Ha, for instance, not only
problematizes the confusion of the notion of truth with that of meaning along
with the authoritarian attitude of traditional ethnographic film, but she also
develops a particular “method” (“speaking near-by”) for her own films. Werner
Herzog opposes to what he calls the “truth of accountants” his own notion of
“ecstatic truth”, which intertwines understanding and experience, and thus
needs to be fabricated rather than recorded. Hartmut Bitomsky considers that
making an image always means to extract it from an original context, and uses
the notion of “ready-made” when he speaks of his own images as quotations of
reality. Jean Rouch advances the idea of ciné-transe as a means to penetrate
into deeper strata of the real by partaking in the action, and recently, Pooja
Rangan points to the authoritarian attitude concealed under the label of
humanitarianism in many documentaries. In a similar vein, many artistic
documentaries, as we came to call them, and essay films by committed filmmakers
implicitly criticize the existing power structures and rhetoric in which assertions
about objectivity operate. Through aesthetic means they problematize
standardized perception and deflect the focus in order to allow for a critique
of images and common sensical norms. These can be as various as distanciation,
separation between sound and image, slow motion (Wang Bing, S. Loznitsa),
meta-cinematic gestures disrupting the film’s indexical connection to the real
(J-L. Godard), reflective voiceover commentary and creative use of found
footage (C. Marker), experimental or archeological approaches (H. Farocki),
combination of observational techniques with expressive montage (F. Wiseman),
specific devices (M. Rau, L. Castaing-Taylor, and V, Paravel), alternative
perspectives on history (J-M Straub, C. Akerman, P. Costa, R. Panh), strategies
of /détournement/ and of poetic deconstruction of viral media (G. Thomson and
S. Maglioni), use of second hand images and radical editing (D. Gagnon),
recourse to fiction (E. Morris, N. Perada), and the list is not exhaustive.
These attempts show that aesthetics and politics, society and its
representation, knowledge and its embedding in institutional forms, are
interrelated on many levels, and this is why they allow for complex
philosophical investigations into ethical, political, epistemological, and aesthetical
aspects of reality today.
This issue of Cinema - Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image aims
at exploring the complex ways in which documentary films, as both an artistic
form and a representation of the social, material, political, and medial reality,
intersect with philosophical thinking.
Submissions are accepted in English, Portuguese, and French and should
be sent to cjpmi@fcsh.unl.pt
Prospective authors should submit a short CV along with the abstract.
Abstract proposals (max. 500 words) are due on April 1st, 2020, and a
notice of acceptance will be sent to the authors on April 15, 2020.
A selection of authors will be invited to submit full papers according
to the journal’s guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee
publication, since all papers will be subjected to double blind peer-review.
Cinema also invites submissions to its other sections: Interviews,
Conference Reports and Book Reviews. Please consult the web site of the journal for further details.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario