A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film 9780470671641, 0470671645
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A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film Edited by

Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

This edition first published 2015 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc, excepting Chapter 1 © 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota and Chapter 19 © 2007 Wayne State University Press Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to contemporary documentary film / edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-470-67164-1 (cloth) 1. Documentary films–History and criticism. I. Juhasz, Alexandra, editor. II. Lebow, Alisa, editor. PN1995.9.D6C543 2015 070.1′8–dc23 2014031042 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: The Day of the Sparrow, directed by Philip Scheffner (Germany, 2010. Produced by ARTE, Blinker Filmproduktion, Pong, Worklights Media, and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF)) Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2015

Contents

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction: A World Encountered Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

1

Part I Planet Juan Francisco Salazar

19

Introduction Juan Francisco Salazar

21

1 Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries Imre Szeman

28

2 Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film Juan Francisco Salazar

43

3 Projecting Sea Level Rise: Documentary Film and Other Geolocative Technologies Janet Walker

61

Part II Migration Anikó Imre

87

Introduction Anikó Imre

89

4 Videogeographies Ursula Biemann

92

vi Contents 5 Rates of Exchange: Human Trafficking and the Global Marketplace Leshu Torchin

108

6 Documenting What? Auto-Theory and Migratory Aesthetics Mieke Bal

124

Part III Work Silke Panse

145

Introduction Silke Panse

147

7 The Work of the Documentary Protagonist: The Material Labor of Aesthetics Silke Panse

155

8 Old School Capitalism in Post-Socialism: The Struggles of Želimir Žilnik’s Workers Ewa Mazierska

176

9 Capturing the Labors of Sex Work: The Pedagogical Role of Documentary Film Anna E. Ward

191

Part IV Sex Laura Hyun Yi Kang

209

Introduction Laura Hyun Yi Kang

211

10 Documentary Practice and Transnational Feminist Theory: The Visibility of FGC Patricia White

217

11 Transforming Terror: Documentary Poetics in Lourdes Portillo’s Señorita Extraviada (2001) Rosa-Linda Fregoso

233

12 Reading Realness: Paris Is Burning, Wildness, and Queer and Transgender Documentary Practice Eve Oishi

252

Part V Virus Bishnupriya Ghosh

271

Introduction Bishnupriya Ghosh

273

Contents

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13 Animating Informatics: Scientific Discovery Through Documentary Film280 Kirsten Ostherr 14 HIV on Documentary Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa Rebecca Hodes

298

15 Digital AIDS Documentary: Webs, Rooms, Viruses, and Quilts Alexandra Juhasz

314

Part VI Religion Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow Introduction Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow 16 Rising in the East, Sett(l)ing in the West: The Emergence of Buddhism as Contemporary Documentary Subject Angelica Fenner

335 337

341

17 The New Religious Wave in Israeli Documentary Cinema: Negotiating Jewish Fundamentalism During the Second Intifada366 Raya Morag 18 Tran Van Thuy’s Story of Kindness: Spirituality and Political Discourse Dean Wilson

384

Part VII War Jeffrey Skoller

401

Introduction Jeffrey Skoller

403

19 Second Thoughts on “The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition” Jane M. Gaines

410

20 One, Two, Three Montages … Harun Farocki’s War Documentaries Nora M. Alter

431

21 The Unwar Film Alisa Lebow

454

Part VIII Torture Alisa Lebow Introduction Alisa Lebow

475 477

viii Contents 22 (In)visible Evidence: The Representability of Torture Susana de Sousa Dias 23 Interviewing the Devil: Interrogating Masters of the Cambodian Genocide Deirdre Boyle

482

506

24 The Female Perpetrator: La Flaca Alejandra and Operation Atropos524 Macarena Gómez-Barris 25 Toward the Dark Side: Seeing Detainee Bodies in Documentary Film Anjali Nath

Part IX Surveillance Elizabeth Cowie Introduction Elizabeth Cowie

536

557 559

26 Architectures of Control and Points of Resistance: Surveillance Culture and Digital Documentaries Sharon Lin Tay

566

27 The World Viewed: Documentary Observing and the Culture of Surveillance Elizabeth Cowie

580

28 Surveillance in the Service of Narrative Brian Winston

611

29 Face Blind: Documentary Media and Subversion of Surveillance Patrik Sjöberg

629

Index647

Notes on Contributors

Nora M. Alter is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), Chris Marker (2006), and co-editor with Lutz Koepnick of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). She is completing a book on the international essay film. Mieke Bal, a renowned cultural theorist and critic, is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to seventeenth-century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism, migratory culture, and mental illness. Her many books include Thinking in Film and Endless Andness (both 2013), Of What One Cannot Speak (2010), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), and Narratology (3rd edition, 2009). Mieke is also a video artist, and made a series of experimental documentaries. She made the video installation Nothing is Missing (2006–2011) that continues to be displayed. Her first fiction film A Long History of Madness, and exhibitions derived from it, have toured internationally (with Michelle Williams Gamaker). Her current video project is a series of installations and a feature film, Madame B, loosely based on Flaubert’s masterpiece, also with Michelle Williams Gamaker. Her co-curated group exhibition “2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration” traveled to four countries. www.miekebal.org Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich. She investigates global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources, and information. Major art projects on oil and water include Black Sea Files (2005), Egyptian Chemistry (2012), and Deep Weather (2013). She conducts research at the Zurich University for the Arts and Michigan State University, and is publisher of several books. Her video installations have been exhibited worldwide in museums and at the international art biennials of Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai,

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Notes on Contributors

Sevilla, and Istanbul. She was appointed Doctor honoris causa in Humanities by Umeå University, Sweden (2008) and received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. www.geobodies.org Deirdre Boyle is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement in New York and former director of their Graduate Certificate in Documentary Studies. She is author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997), among other books, and essays in Afterimage, Cineaste, Frameworks, The Independent, Millennium Film Journal, Short Film Studies, The Village Voice, and Wide Angle, among other journals. Elizabeth Cowie is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She was co-founder and co-editor in the 1970s of m/f a journal of feminist theory, and published Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, in 1997. She has subsequently written on film noir, on the horror of the horror film, and on the cinematic dream-work. In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (2011) she addresses documentary film as the serious, as spectacle, and as an art of the real. She published “On Documentary Sounds and Images in the Gallery,” Screen, 50 (Spring 2009), and more recently, “Documentary Space, Place, and Landscape” on the documentary imaging of the politics of landscape in the online journal Media Fields (2011). Forthcoming work includes essays on documentary and surveillance, on voting, and on gesture in film. Susana de Sousa Dias is a filmmaker and professor at the University of Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts-Audiovisual, a Master’s in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, and Bachelor degrees in Fine Arts-Painting (University of Lisbon) and Cinema (National Film and Theatre School). She also attended the National Music Conservatory. She has lectured widely on documentary, art, and cinema. In 2012 and 2013 she was a co-director of the International Film Festival Doclisboa. In 2001, she founded the production company, Kintop. Her latest films Natureza Morta (Still Life, 2006, 72 min., Atalanta Films Award Doclisboa, Merit Prize Taiwan IDF) and 48 (2009, 93 min., Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel, FIPRESCI Award at Dok Leipzig, among other prizes) have been shown in festivals, screenings, and art galleries worldwide. Stilleben, an installation on three screens, and Obscure Light are her most recent works. Angelica Fenner is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and German and Graduate Coordinator in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema (2011), co-editor with Robin Curtis of The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film (2014), and has published diverse articles, interviews, and reviews in anthologies and journals that reflect her sustained interests in European diasporic cinemas and contemporary documentary theory and practice. Rosa-Linda Fregoso is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer. She is the author of six books and edited collections, including Terrorizing Women:

Notes on Contributors

xi

Feminicide in the Américas, co-edited with Cynthia Bejarano (2012); meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (2003); and Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films by Lourdes Portillo (2001). Fregoso is currently the Interim Chair and Professor of the Latin American and Latino Studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writing and teaching reflect her research interest in human rights, culture, and feminism. Her publications cover issues of human rights, feminicide and gender violence, media and visual arts, race, cultural politics, and aesthetics, in the Americas. As a member of the editorial collective, Fregoso writes for the online news site, The Feminist Wire. Jane M. Gaines is Professor of Film, Columbia University and author of two awardwinning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law, and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era, and is completing Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry?, a companion to the web-based Women Film Pioneers Project, http://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu. One of the founders of the Visible Evidence conference and co-editor of Collecting Visible Evidence, the author continues to critique the “critique of realism,” but most recently in Film History also critiques the “historical turn” in film and media studies. Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches post-colonial theory, literature, and global media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of her scholarly work, including the two books, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (2004) and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (2011), investigate contemporary cultures of globalization. She is currently working on two monographs on speculative knowledge: a book on spectral materialism in global cinemas (The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization) and a comparative study of pandemic media in the United States, South Africa, and India (The Virus Touch: Living with Epidemics). Macarena Gómez-Barris is Associate Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and Sociology at the University of Southern California. She is author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009) and co-editor with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (2010). Her current work is on decolonial memory in the Andes. Rebecca Hodes is a medical historian based at the AIDS and Society Research Unit, University of Cape Town. Her current work focuses on science, race, and sex in South African history. She is the principal investigator of the Mzantsi Wakho study, about adolescent adherence to antiretroviral treatment and sexual and reproductive health. The study is part of International AIDS Society’s Collaborative Initiative for Pediatric HIV Education and Research. Her book, Broadcasting the Pandemic: A History of HIV on South African Television, was published by the Human Sciences Research Council Press in 2014.

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Anikó Imre is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies and the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice Doctoral Program (iMAP) at the School of Cinematic Arts of the University of Southern California. She has published widely on media globalization, (post)socialism, and identities. She is the author of Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Post-Communist Media Cultures (2009), editor of East European Cinemas (2005) and The Blackwell Companion to East European Cinemas (2012), and co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (2007) and Popular Television in the New Europe (2012); of special issues of The Journal of Popular Film and Television on Television Entertainment in the New Europe (2012), the European Journal of Cultural Studies on Media Globalization and Post-Socialist Identities (May 2009), and of Feminist Media Studies on Transcultural Feminist Mediations (December 2009). She co-edits the Palgrave book series Global Cinemas and sits on the editorial boards of the journals Television and New Media, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, and Studies in East European Cinema. Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV (1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (2005), Learning from YouTube (2011) and is currently editing, with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of AfricanAmerican Lesbian Filmmaking. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture including YouTube (www.aljean.wordpress.com) and feminist pedagogy and community (www.feministonlinespaces.com; http:// femtechnet.newschool.edu). Laura Hyun Yi Kang is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (2002) and the forthcoming books, The Traffic in Asian Women and The Stakes of Interdisciplinarity. Kang has also published essays in American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique, and Visual Anthropology Review. Alisa Lebow is a Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. Lebow has published widely on aspects of documentary film with a focus on “the political,” as well as on subjectivity and the first person modality in documentary. Her books include The Cinema of Me (2012) and First Person Jewish (2008). She is the recipient of numerous grants, including research fellowships from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. Originally a ­filmmaker, her films include Outlaw (1994), Treyf (1998), and For the Record: The

Notes on Contributors

xiii

World Tribunal on Iraq (2007). Her most recent project is an interactive documentary website called Filming Revolution. Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Contemporary Cinema at the University of Central Lancashire. She is author of numerous books, including European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory and Politics (2011) and Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Black Peters and Men of Marble (2009). She is principal editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Her monograph on representation of work in European cinema is forthcoming from Berghahn in 2015. Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War (2009) and Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema (2013). Anjali Nath is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. She holds an appointment in both the Center for American Studies and Research as well as in Media Studies. Her research examines the visual culture of military detention during the War on Terror. Eve Oishi is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Some of her articles include “I-Hotel” (2014), “Collective Orgasm: The Ecocyberpornography of Shu Lea Cheang” (2007), “Screen Memories: Fakeness in Asian American Media Practice” (2006), and “Visual Perversions: Race, Sex, and Cinematic Pleasure” (2006). Kirsten Ostherr is Professor of English at Rice University, where she teaches film and media studies, focusing on health and medical visualizations. She is author of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005), and Medical Visions: Producing the Patient Through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (2013). Silke Panse is Lecturer for Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts, United Kingdom. She writes about documentary moving images in relation to eco-­ aesthetics, art, television, and continental philosophy in Third Text (2006), Reading CSI (2007), Rethinking Documentary (2008), Blind Movies (2009), Marx at the Movies (2014), and Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (2013). She coedited A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television (2014), which includes her chapter “The Judging Spectator in the Image.” She was co-investigator of the Screening Nature Network (2013–14), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She wrote her doctoral thesis mostly about Werner Herzog’s documentaries and organized the conference “Werner Herzog’s Cinema Between the Visionary and the Documentary” (2005).

xiv

Notes on Contributors

Juan Francisco Salazar is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, where he is also a researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society. He has contributed a wide array of scholarly articles and essays on indigenous media in Latin America, citizens’ and community media, and environmental communication and ­ advocacy. He is co-author with Hart Cohen and Iqbal Barkat of Screen Media Arts: Introduction to Concepts and Practices (2008). As a media practitioner he has produced several documentaries, experimental short films, and video ­installations exhibited internationally. His current projects are concerned with anthropologies of life in Antarctica where he is developing ethnographic and media work around speculative futures. Patrik Sjöberg is Assistant Professor at Karlstad University. His research investigates the shared territories between experimental film cultures and the discourse surrounding documentary media. Publications in English include the book The World in Pieces – On Compilation Film (2001) and the articles or chapters “A Mirror With a Memory: On the Relation Between Camera-Produced Images and Memory” (2005); ”I Am Here, or, the Art of Getting Lost: Patrick Keiller and the New City Symphony” (2011). To be published: “Ich bin Fassbinder – Fassbinder and the Autobiographical gesture” (2014) and “Performing Autobiographical Gestures: The Politics of Mediated Selves in Documentary Media” (2014). Jeffrey Skoller is a writer and filmmaker and has made over a dozen films that have been exhibited internationally. Screenings and exhibitions include: The Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York; P.S. 1, New York; Flaherty Film Seminar, New York; Arsenal Kino, Berlin; Mannheim Film Festival, Germany; The Latin American Film Festival, Havana; National Film Theatre, London. His essays and articles have appeared in books, artist catalogues, and in journals including Film Quarterly, Discourse, Afterimage, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Cinematograph, among others. He is the author of two books, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (2005) and POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (2010). Skoller is currently Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies, and Sociology at the University of Alberta. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of social and cultural theory, film and visual culture, globalization and nationalism, and Canadian studies. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the US Cultural Studies Association. Szeman is founding editor of Reviews in Cultural Theory and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Mediations. Current projects include: a book on the cultural politics of oil; an edited collection on energy, history, and politics; and a major companion to critical and cultural theory.

Notes on Contributors

xv

Sharon Lin Tay is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Middlesex University. She writes widely about film and digital media cultures, filmmaking practices, documentary, world cinema, and film theory. She is the author of Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (2009). Leshu Torchin is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film Video and the Internet (2012); co-author with William Brown and Dina Iordanova of Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (2010); and coeditor of and contributor to Film Festivals and Activism (2012). Her work has also appeared in Third Text, Film & History, American Anthropologist, and Souciant, an online magazine of culture and politics. Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Feminist Studies and Comparative Literature Programs and the Environmental Media Initiative of the Carsey-Wolf Center. Her writings in the areas of feminist historiography, documentary film, and trauma studies have been published in journals including Screen and Continuum, and she is author or editor of books including Westerns: Films Through History (2001); Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (2005); and Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (with Bhaskar Sarkar, 2009). Walker lectures internationally and co-directs a local community project, “Video Portraits of Survival,” to create expressive videos and archival material from the testimony and encounters of refugees and rescuers of the Holocaust. Her current project is a book about documentary, geography, and environment. Anna E. Ward is a Lecturer in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Social Psychology Quarterly, The Scholar and the Feminist, and American Quarterly. Her current book project examines representations of flirtation in queer media. Patricia White is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999) and of numerous articles and chapters on women’s and LGBTQ cinema. She is co-author with Timothy Corrigan of The Film Experience (3rd edition, 2012) and co-editor with Corrigan and Meta Mazaj of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2010). She has served on the editorial collective of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura and the board of Women Make Movies. Her new book on global women’s filmmaking in the twenty-first century is forthcoming in 2014. Dean Wilson is a Guest Professor at the University of Montreal, Department of Art History and Cinema Studies. As a cinema policy consultant he created the first film degree programs at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, under

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a major grant from the Ford Foundation. He received his PhD in French from the City University of New York Graduate Center, writing on the colonial film history of Vietnam. Brian Winston is the Lincoln Professor at the School of Journalism, University of Lincoln. He is the editor of The Documentary Film Book (2013) and author of A Right to Offend (2012).

Introduction

A World Encountered Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

There is no formal element, or set of elements to which all documentaries adhere, just as there is no particular aesthetic characteristic. Even if we can agree that the majority of documentaries – though certainly not all, nor most of the more innovative ones – may be identified by certain well-worn practices, such as the talking head interview or voice-over narration, we accept what has become a commonplace within the field of documentary studies: that documentary defies definition. Our anthology does not attempt to distinguish documentary from other types of film, or fetishize the search for its elusive origins, defining characteristics, or great auteurs. Rather, we dedicate this contribution to those documentaries, scholars, and artists who use its many forms out of a passionate commitment to and direct engagement with the lived world, just as we hope that this anthology’s production and reception can be part of that particular documentary tradition. Since its first manifestations arising variously and with varying effects in Europe and North America, documentary has relied upon this aura of, and actual ­engagement with, the world. Whether attempting to salvage a dying culture, impact policy, or foment the revolutionary spirit, documentary’s beginnings were tied to events in the world and commentary on the world, as is true today. One of the more stubborn concepts to stick to these varied filmmaking practices is this commitment to a direct engagement with a world encountered by the filmmaker – be it as a flyon-the-wall observer, a vérité investigator, a poetic commentator, or a committed or reflexive participant. While not all documentaries are obligated to engage with the issues of the age, we find when surveying today’s field that documentary is still one of the key modes of cultural expression that intervenes in, and indeed goes some way to construct, not just our understanding of events in this world, but A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow

perhaps even the world itself. Using this rubric, it seemed logical to organize this volume thematically around some of the major issues affecting the world today to which documentary has powerfully, and at times quite influentially, turned its lens with a spirited commitment to engage and even to change. In this respect, our volume differs from other recent publications. We believe that documentary studies suddenly finds itself in its maturity, if the significant number of recent monographs and edited anthologies attempting to encapsulate the field are any indication.1 Given the fine work that has already been done by so many of our esteemed colleagues, the impetus of this volume is to not replicate their efforts. Rather than attempting to define or refine anew the field or its history, auteurs, and canonical texts, we have chosen to open up avenues for close study and debate about documentary’s world-changing aspirations. We hope that the structure of the anthology itself then becomes a model for further real-world applications; we ­envision how the book contributes towards documentary study and conversations that can continue to flourish in relation to an open-ended list of similarly salient real-world topics raised by documentary films, their filmmakers and associated communities, and the scholars who write about them. In other words, we imagined and have ultimately produced a volume that takes the lived world as its inspiration and hopes to reflect on and produce, in turn, some real-world effects. Comprised of 29 challenging essays, this Companion is organized around nine thematic strands, each containing three or four essays and an introduction written by the theme editor. Our unique production structure for this book began when the two of us proposed a set of themes and then approached a set of prominent scholars in the field to serve as theme editors. Emboldened by their overwhelmingly positive response, we understood quickly that there was something innovative about the structure and that it could potentially produce a truly unique volume. They each chose a theme that spoke to them and agreed to organize its coverage as interpreted by them, commissioning three or four original (and in two cases, reprinted) essays for their chosen theme. Rather than always resorting to predictable texts from well-known filmmakers who might be found working in dominant regions of documentary production, we encouraged our editors to seek out authors who would write on the texts that best expanded ideas about a given theme. We also encouraged them to include practitioner-theorists, filmmakers who could write about their own work, thus when possible getting filmmakers’ perspectives on their approaches. In this way, the book expanded the reach of contributors well past the circles of the usual suspects and even beyond areas of study that we each habituate. We then worked closely with the theme editors, and eventually with the authors themselves, in shaping the outcome of this experiment in academic publication. In addition to selecting authors and editing their essays, we asked our theme editors to remain mindful not only of the political and ideological implications by which the theme may be treated, but also of the diversity of aesthetic approaches as well as geographical and cultural positionalities that make up the contemporary media environment. Thus, our dual goal was to treat those films deserving of attention based on the topic or issue they represent, as well as to attend to the innovative ways

Introduction3 in which they represent it. We asked our theme editors to give consideration to new formal strategies, and to try to give space to films that may not be well known to our readership, thereby seeking out at least some writers who would be versed in ­non-dominant or non-Western practices and/or who could treat experimental ­documentary practices and more challenging modes than the standard fare. All of our editors and authors brought an attentiveness to documentary studies itself, thus creating a meta-commentary on the state of the field while making a direct ­contribution to it. As just one example, Eve Oishi, in her discussion of Wildness (Wu Tsang, 2012) explains how the film “helps us to understand how documentary ­conventions intersect with questions of representation endemic to changing formulations of queer identity and community.” In other words, our aim for this anthology was to have a strong collection of essays that not only looked at innovative films but looked at them in innovative ways. And in this, the volume has far exceeded our expectations, thanks to the shared vision of our theme editors and the myriad insights of our excellent authors. In order to foster fresh approaches, we devised a new model of scholarly collaboration, entailing not only the commissioning of theme editors, thereby creating a dynamic pyramid organization for the production of this book, but also devising a strategy that would engender a sense of communal dialogue, by bringing the authors of the volume together at an early stage in its production, to workshop their drafts within their themes and with the group at large. We hope that this process, and the essays that result from our iterative and dialogic project, is itself demonstrative. The idea was to multiply the internal resonances within the volume while minimizing unnecessary repetition. For students and teachers engaging with this publication, each theme becomes a potential unit that links social issues to alternating questions about documentary form, history, and theory. For scholars, we hope that our method reveals the intellectual expansiveness of the field and approaches to it: open to encounter new forms and formats, to think against or outside ready givens, and to link approaches, texts, and interpretations in ways that are evocative rather than prescriptive. Our themes are meant to be broad and provocative, not exhaustive or limiting, inviting further discussion and research about pressing socio-political phenomena of today’s world, its changing documentary forms, and what our linked roles might be as citizens, scholars, activists, teachers, and/or artists. We could, of course, imagine many other themes that would have worked fruitfully for a project of this nature, and indeed hope that this method might be taken up by others in relation to a range of topics not touched upon in this already ample volume. We briefly list here the themes treated in this book and the approaches taken by the editors and authors who address them. You will note that many of these themes are not new. You may note too, as you engage with the various themes, that there is at times a high degree of overlap, between say, the themes of Migration, Sex, and Work, or amongst War, Surveillance, and Torture. This is because the themes themselves are not meant to be discrete entities but rather are seen as intersections wherein geopolitical and representational forces converge in a nexus of power and resistance. These are the places in which documentary thrives.

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Part I Planet (edited by Juan Francisco Salazar) We begin the book with the theme “Planet” to put all of the other themes addressed into relief against the overarching issue facing the entire human race (and indeed all living things) today. The future of our planet looms large in the contemporary era, and consequently finds expression in a range of documentary practices; the planet that we inhabit is in the midst of radical change. The fight for dwindling natural resources fuels many of the other phenomena addressed in this Companion, whether Migration, Work, or War. We learn that documentary attends to questions of the environment in myriad ways with varying agendas and degrees of impact. When theme editor Juan Salazar was considering the vastness of the “planetarity,” what Ursula K. Heise (2008) understands as “a sense of planet,” he simultaneously attended to local or micro politics that are sometimes seen as in tension with the macro view. How documentary reports on the problem of peak oil and the social movements concerned with our shift away from oil dependency, is addressed in Imre Szeman’s engaging essay. There are also attempts to develop new ways of analyzing film in this section, such as Janet Walker’s ingenious method of “site seeing,” a term borrowed from Giuliana Bruno, that describes geolocative representations of places and people. Because representing the future – not ­typically an interest in documentary representation – is a key problematic troubling the environmental field, it is appropriate that Juan Salazar looks at documentary’s “futuring” ­potential. The future of our planet will create the necessary conditions for the representation and treatment of all other themes, big and small, or will obviate them altogether. Hence the decision to begin the book with this theme, and to theorize documentary’s place within these discourses.

Part II Migration (edited by Anikó Imre) Easy pathways of and definitive obstacles to economic and political migration define contemporary geographical and representational shifts. Globalization and its receding and replicating borders are definitive problematics for nations, people, and mediamakers who hope to intervene in the world. Migration has many motivations and incarnations, volitional and otherwise, with environmental, geopolitical, technological, and economic forces all playing a role in the increase of both the mobility of populations and the policing of state boundaries. The interactions, as Imre puts it in her introduction, “between moving images and moving people” often enact the phenomena they set out to document, asking documentarians themselves to also move across borders and cultures, bound to a set of ever-shifting laws and regulatory regimes that apply to the camera (and filmmaker) as much as to its migratory object. Thus, in this section of the Companion, we are treated to the thoughts and ideas of filmmakers themselves (Biemann and Bal) as well as those of documentary theorist Leshu Torchin as they, taken together, consider the practices of documenting the migrating subject who travels through today’s hypermediated yet still under-­ documented systems of global transit.

Introduction5

Part III Work (edited by Silke Panse) Once the well-trodden terrain of classical documentary, labor struggles have taken a back seat to many other struggles represented in contemporary documentary, even though they remain a cite of contention worldwide. What are the current demands of labor and what does documentary have to say about them? Indeed, in this era of outsourcing, telecommuting, e-commerce, and virtual environments, what constitutes labor as such? This section interprets labor quite broadly, including, via Silke Panse’s challenging essay, the recognition of the labor of the documentarian and the labor demanded of the subject within the documentary. From the factory to the bedroom, from the laboring body to the virtual worker, the work of documentary is considered as it weighs in on a range of labor disputes and practices, at times, as in the work of Želimir Žilnik discussed by Ewa Mazierska, (re)staging conflicts, and at others, intervening in the distinctions between exploitation and work, as discussed in Anna Ward’s contribution on the representation of sex work.

Part IV Sex (edited by Laura Hyun Yi Kang) Segueing almost seamlessly from the last essay in Part III, the Sex theme finds itself embroiled in the wages of sex, more than directly engaging questions of the representation of pleasure or even the sex act itself. On the documentary agenda since the beginning, notions of sex, sexuality, and gender here find a point of ­fluidity and transformation that would have been hard to imagine just a few decades ago. Documentary both makes and records these changes. As with all of the other themes in this Companion, there were many ways to approach the theme of “Sex,” any and all of them equally valid. In this case, Laura Kang places a heavy emphasis on the consequences of violent conflations of nation, race, gender, and sexuality, through which the body is subjugated (in this grouping of essays, ­generally gendered female, though not necessarily biologically so) in order to be admitted into the sphere of the social, if not also the sexual. We consider it a strength of this volume that the essay that deals most explicitly with sex and the representation of sexuality (Ward’s “Capturing the Labors of Sex Work”) finds itself comfortably inhabiting a place in the previous section on Work, outlined above. Instead, under the rubric of Sex, we find three essays elaborating a range of representations from the mutilated to the transmorphic gendered body, and the class and race implications raised therein.

Part V Virus (edited by Bishnupriya Ghosh) From the macro themes of Planet, Migration, and Sex, we transition to the most micro of phenomena that nonetheless has had devastating transformative effects on all cultures in every part of the globe. As editor, Bishnupriya Ghosh claims, “The

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body – the target of biotech innovations and biomedical interventions – is the final frontier.” No one is immune from the incursions of the countless viruses, both new and old, circumnavigating this earth, nor from their medical, biopolitical, and representational effects. The tiny microorganism that we vaguely know as virus has actually found a most hospitable context in the confluence of topics that precede Virus in this anthology: planetary degradation, accelerated migration, and the increased opportunities of sexual encounter, all facilitated by contemporary global conditions. The biopolitical can find no better vehicle than the virus to expose its excesses and demands. How documentary has negotiated this invisible yet highly consequential phenomena is the subject of this section.

Part VI Religion (edited by Alisa Lebow and Alexandra Juhasz) God is not dead, it would seem, and religious forces of all persuasions have taken on renewed vigor and vehemence in “his” name, proving once and for all that the age of reason has come to an end. How has documentary, a product of rationalism, faced these re-emergent manifestations of belief, the spiritual, the ineffable? One can occasionally glimpse, as with films like Werner Herzog’s apocalyptic Lessons of Darkness (1992), or Alexander Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1993), the possibilities of representing the spiritual. But what we see more commonly is documentary’s attempt to grapple with religious precepts such as vengeance, forgiveness, retribution, or in the case of Tran Van Thuy’s work detailed in Dean Wilson’s essay here, kindness. Religion, as a pervasive phenomenon in nearly every culture known to humankind, finds its way implicitly if not explicitly into documentary, though it is rarely addressed forthrightly. The three essays in this section look at films that do take religion as a central subject. Considering the influence religion has had on our age, whether in terms of extremism, fundamentalism, or sectarianism, we are pleased to introduce these attempts to look at this theme head on.

Part VII War (edited by Jeffrey Skoller) If the start of the twenty-first century is any indication, it may well supersede the twentieth as the bloodiest century ever. How do we represent war, from whose viewpoint, and to what avail? Can documentary contribute to peace, or for that matter to war? War is inextricably bound up with cinema, the documentary image no less than its fictional counterpart. Recent documentaries, especially those about the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of the 2000s, tend toward the subjective observational, often shot from the soldier’s eye view, emphasizing personal experience over political purpose by drawing the viewer into the “action” with little or no analysis. The essays in this section identify this trend while locating cinematic

Introduction7 practices that pose a challenge to its paramilitary effects. A re-evaluation of prior strategies adopted by documentarians of all stripes is taken up, and some new (and not so new) approaches identified. Jane Gaines reassesses film theory’s approach to realism by insisting that the category is indispensable when considering the war (and anti-war) documentary. Nora Alter takes us through a comprehensive tour of all of Harun Farocki’s work on representations of war, too little discussed in ­documentary studies thus far. Alisa Lebow identifies an antidote to the contemporary “paramilitarist” war documentary, claiming a new category in the typology of the war documentary that she calls the “unwar” film. By drawing attention to some radically destabilizing filmic strategies, the section seeks to offer alternatives to the steady beat of war that have been successfully aided and abetted by some of the more successful war documentaries of this age.

Part VIII Torture (edited by Alisa Lebow) Torture has always been with us in one form or another. It is crucial to review its historical manifestations in order to better understand its abuses today. Imaging torture is a particular challenge, for as much as it is portrayed in fiction films and television series (the US television series 24 being the most egregious apology for torture in our times), it often eludes documentary representation, either due to discretion or as a function of modern torture itself, namely its engineered invisibility to the eye, and its calculated elusiveness toward the lens. “White torture” techniques, developed by the CIA but practiced worldwide, emerged precisely in order to escape detection. So how then to represent it? Filmmaker and theorist Susana de Sousa Dias admirably attempts to detail the finer points of her filmic project of representing not torture itself but the residual affect that it leaves in its wake. Yet, since the emergence of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the problem has been less torture’s invisibility than how to deal with its glaring emergence into the public imaginary. Mainstream documentaries, mostly from the United States, have attempted to grapple with recent high-profile incidents of torture, yet they often reproduce the power dynamics they pretend to want to undo. Anjali Nath gives voice to these often overlooked contradictions, while Macarena Gómez-Barris explores more complex representations that uncomfortably confront the viewer with their own misperceptions or misplaced expectations. The perpetrator’s perspective is considered in several of the essays as itself a new turn for documentary. The documentary encounter with the very men who are responsible for crimes against humanity, as discussed by Deirdre Boyle, demands a Levinasian reckoning with the other that poses real challenges for the documentary spectator. The question of gender, with women also flagrantly flouting the Geneva Conventions or turning on comrades under torture, as explored by Gómez-Barris, further upends any easy assumptions we might have in relation to the complexity of the intermingled actions of perpetration, violence, power, and their representation.

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Part IX Surveillance (edited by Elizabeth Cowie) Documentary has long been accused of voyeurism and infringements of privacy, yet in this increasingly camera-occupied climate, “life caught unawares” as Dziga Vertov once enthused, has now potentially taken on more sinister, totalizing, and authoritarian tones, as Brian Winston duly notes in his contribution to this section. But it is equally true that documentary can and sometimes does counter the surveilling gaze by disturbing its seamless projection. What may seem to be an affinity with spying and surveillance can, in the hands of the critical documentarian, also pose a challenge to it. As Elizabeth Cowie suggests both in her introduction and in her extended essay on the topic, one must distinguish between watching and looking, between the Foucaultian connaissance and savoir, between gathering information for purposes of control and gathering information for purposes of communicating ideas. As Sharon Lin Tay observes, and Cowie agrees, biopolitical investments of disciplining societies that reduce the individual to the Deleuzian “dividual,” a set of data that can be identified and more easily controlled, is precisely what is at stake in our surveillance societies. Documentary has both participated in that project and spent its not inconsiderable cultural capital attempting to expose its effects. The resistance to surveillance has given rise to its corollary, “sousveillance,” and Patrik Sjöberg considers the issues that arise when documentaries contend with the desire to undermine, reconfigure, or reappropriate the camera’s surveillant gaze. With its unique structure founded in these nine themes, our volume captures the zeitgeist of the contemporary documentary field, itself a reflection of and upon the culture(s) from which it emerges and which it influences in turn. Certainly, a liability of this more dispersed organizational method is that some films, and filmmakers, not to mention certain important themes and trends, might be over- or under-attended to: an indication, perhaps, of their momentary prominence or maybe simply a matter of happenstance. However, by allowing scholars to cluster ideas and approaches in ways that themselves are illustrative of movements in the field, we have found emerging, without our explicit intention, five intriguing and perhaps unexpected trends, convergences, or challenges to contemporary documentary and its study, discussed below.

Body Sovereignty Documentary witnesses and records broad systematic incursions into the corporeal: through laws and other limits on migration, work, and sex, and horrific indignities and violations via torture, war, and surveillance. Referring specifically to the way in which bodies are contained via the image, Ursula Beimann reminds us in her essay that “Documentary records often serve the interests of the state – to identify, to recognize, to know, to control.” Her own “migratory documentary aesthetic” attempts to record and intervene in such excesses of visual control, rather than reinforcing the bureaucratic power inherent therein. Meanwhile, Rebecca Hodes, in her essay about

Introduction9 a long-running state-run South African television series that focuses upon HIV/ AIDS, writes about how by using “the power of the televisual medium, Siyayinqoba/ Beat It! exposed the harm of the government’s response to HIV.” Documenting, and sometimes empathizing or perhaps acting in solidarity with the body in pain is a frequent concern of these essays, given contemporary ­documentary’s interest in organized cruelty. In the Torture theme, Macarena Gómez-Barris writes about “complex portrayals of the racialized female body as the site of subjectivity in front of various projects of male domination that include empire, counter insurgency, and social control.” The suffering body, empowered by evidence of her pain, can speak back to abusive power. However, according to Anjali Nath, any desire to show physical hurt raises its own formal and ethical limits: “This visual economy of suffering, however, engenders the desire for ‘real’ images of pain, legible evidence of torture, and grievable subjects who are worthy of compassion.” This “transnational production of global feminist subjects” ­represented in the form of women in pain becomes the focus of Patricia White’s essay in Part IV on documentaries that focus on female genital mutilation. She asks: “how do these films, like the NGOs they sometimes are produced or commissioned by, make feminist claims and identities legible by casting women and girls as objects of compassion within models of human rights?” Across the anthology, our authors also theorize the unique power of the documentary not simply to know about, and circulate, the horrific experiences of others’ bodies but to allow us to know with or through the body (including our own, as spectators), through affect, empathy, and sensation: “conjuring the ‘feel’ of real images through dramatizations or by drawing on the emotional impact of prisonguard testimony, in order to render the undocumented into the fathomable” (Nath). The body at work, when represented as an aesthetic object, also inhibits such embodied knowledge, whereas labor represented as work, taking account of the human toil and toll, can precisely enable a productive affective cathexis, leading to a recognition of labor as a site of struggle (Panse). Theorizing past documentary as a cognitive mode, there are also documentaries that ground their powers of persuasion within different, bodily knowledge traditions and practices. For instance, Angelica Fenner explains how the absence of visual proof of Buddhist Tulkus, throughout the religion’s ancient history and continuing into documentary’s more contemporary urge to share this history, pushes documentarians to render “an evidence of feeling.” Meanwhile, feminist understandings of knowing the “other” are matched with documentary theories and practices, like those of Lourdes Portillo addressed in Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s essay or of the emotional persuasion used in some of the Israeli documentaries discussed by Raya Morag. Interestingly, failures of empathy, and their representational aftermath, can themselves become part of a film’s structure, as discussed in Eve Oishi’s analysis of the self-reflexive work of Wu Tsang for her contribution to the theme Sex. Throughout the anthology, this focus on the body in physical and psychic pain asserts itself across the various themes and to the noted exclusion of other bodily experiences that we might have expected, for example most tellingly, pleasure. In

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this way – by noting this telling omission – the anthology’s organizing structure, dispersing authorial authority across many players and planes, does seem to reveal cultural, political, or theoretical inclinations that in themselves seem worthy of further consideration.

The Encounter, or Ethics of Knowing (the Other) The relations between subject and maker – an ongoing concern of theoretically trained and politically motivated filmmakers – across place, race, class, and regimes of power – drives many of the films referenced and the conversations about them. Introducing the theme Migration, Anikó Imre finds in her commissioned essays “a sensual, affective and ethical experience of constant encounters with otherness that requires ongoing cultural translation.” For author and artist Mieke Bal, who writes about her own documentaries for this theme as well, the “relationship between filmmakers and the people whose stories are being represented is primary.” Across social issues, we find our authors considering a “subjective” (Biemann) or perhaps feminist (Fregoso) logic behind the “intersubjective endeavor” (Fenner) that is the o ­ rganizing principle of many documentaries. But Patricia White alerts us to the many ethical contradictions that are raised when “transnational feminist political theory has troubled the call to ‘subjectification,’ cautioning that voice and choice are i­ mperatives consistent with neoliberal strategies to manage human desires in a global capitalist framework.” A similar set of contradictions is raised in documentaries that explore human trafficking, as these films locate the “disjunctions, inequities and lived ­challenges of the new global order” (Torchin). Another contention, here raised by Brian Winston in the theme Surveillance, is precisely to call the filmmaker into a more ethical relation with her subject, something too frequently missing in popular documentary forms. Winston targets filmmaker Eric Steele, whose The Bridge (2007) seems to forfeit any obligation to the “subject” (object) of his camera’s gaze in the service, Winston argues, of spectacle. A very different relationship is engendered between filmmaker and subject in the hands of Želimir Žilnik (Mazierska) whose intimate identification with those before his lens leads to an almost paternalistic sense of obligation. For instance, when shooting the film Crni film (Black Film, 1971), Ewa Mazierska recounts how, after failing to find accommodation for his homeless protagonists, he invites them to stay in his one-bedroom apartment along with his unsuspecting young wife. Yet a third possibility is opened up in Deirdre Boyle’s discussion of Rithy Panh and Thet Sambath’s work, where a palpably complex relational tension, comprised simultaneously of sympathy and antipathy, arises in the encounter between victim and perpetrator of genocide. The possibility of engaging documentary towards expanded relationality need not be with the other. Alexandra Juhasz considers the uses of documentary within an activist community: to stay connected to people who have died of AIDS, to the contemporary practices of AIDS activists, and to scholars who are part of this

Introduction 11 long-term movement. Rebecca Hodes, too, in her essay in the Virus theme, explains how Beat It! functions to consolidate a dispersed and diverse national community. And coming from another angle entirely, Janet Walker considers how documentary allows us to see humans’ relations with the world, asking “What are the conceptual elective affinities or frictions among various cartographies of people and places; their geographical unconscious, if you will?” Meanwhile, several of our authors look to documentary’s capacity to relate humans to the smallest of scales, such as our own molecular interiority. Kirsten Ostherr considers the ways in which molecular animation has “captivated popular and scientific public imaginations … by simultaneously appealing to the indexical qualities of medical imaging and the enduring cinematic fantasy of visualizing the invisible through technologies of r­ epresentation.” Alternatively, the documentaries to which Imre Szeman refers seek to highlight the enormity of the problem of oil by emphasizing the scale of it. They do this, he claims, not only to “add to knowledge” generally speaking, but to “generate an affective response,” in other words, to develop an emotional connection, a relationship, with the problem. Yet, this anthology reminds us that every improvement in visualization practices and processes has its concommitant adverse implications. Many of our authors attest that new technologies allow the state to move ever closer to its subjects, in direct violation of the ethical practices discussed above, through expanded states of surveillance and mapping. Patrik Sjöberg explains: “As the surveillance landscape shifts and moves however, the model founded upon a dichotomy of the Watcher, on the one hand, and the person being watched, on the other, however diverse and dynamic, can no longer house the new actors, technologies and behaviors on the ground and within the field.” The essays in the Surveillance, Torture, and Planet sections are ­particularly focused on these abuses (Cowie, Winston, Tay, Walker, Nath). However, by making this logic the visible subject of their work, contemporary documentaries can also have a counter-function, to “unsettle the viewer and force an ethical ­confrontation with the politics of displaced blame, witnessing, and betrayal that is recreated by prisoner captivity” (Gómez-Barris).

Subverting Referentiality: Beyond Historicity By presenting historic situations beyond the historicity of the event, by seeking to integrate the set of movements and counter-movements which permeate the images (as well as the words), coalescing diverse temporalities into the same moment, we can subvert the principle of referentiality and the logic of the representation – in other words, we can go beyond the idea of cinema as an “open window on the world” (de Sousa Dias). As Jane Gaines asserts in her essay, documentary “uses the world to change the world.” One might reasonably assume that the documentaries under consideration in this anthology, which were largely chosen because they are explicitly committed to changing the world, would be committed to showing that world. Thus, it is

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surprising to see how many of the essays focus upon contemporary documentary practices that negotiate the, shall we say, less apparent, terrain of “representing the unrepresentable,” or seeing beyond the real or the referent. Eve Oishi writes about mobile and political understandings of “realness and realism within documentaries during their historical moments, particularly in terms of the way that queer sexuality, race, and gender function in relation to one another and in relation to documentary conventions.” Jane Gaines discusses what she calls “the two image wars”, the representation of war versus the war over its representation: one ­eminently seeable, the other much harder to discern. Our anthology is rife with such documentaries that can’t or won’t broker in visual evidence. Angelica Fenner notes how documenting Tulkus, who carry a trace of their former selves inside of themselves, forces us to ask a larger documentary question: “Is that which is ­captured on film the real thing? What are we really looking at, and how is its ­veridical status and actuality to be ascertained?” Our authors ask this question in various ways as they consider work that pushes documentary form to represent things that go largely unseen, such as the immaterial labor of global capitalism (Ward, Torchin) or the unseeable of its many workers’ work (Panse). Our authors attend to the visualization of memory (Juhasz) and the vain efforts to document that which intends to elude detection (de Sousa Dias, Sjöberg, Cowie, Tay), or ways in which particular filmic approaches work towards making the invisible visible (Alter, Lebow). By attending to the microscopic, Kirsten Ostherr considers how scientific imaging shows “the invisible real” through an “information indexicality” that is “a computed version of photographic indexicality.” The occlusion of vision is of significant interest to many of our authors who are thinking about representations of violence. Alisa Lebow discusses films that resist the urge to represent the spectacle of war, precisely by turning away from the action. She contends that the best way to undermine the all too seductive relationship between cinema and warfare is to look past its undeniably dramatic encounters to that which can be seen only with particular care and attention, as if ignoring the main attraction and looking at something small to its side. In the same section, Nora Alter similarly encourages us to find where the “unconscious of the visible, appears to be that which is seeable, but can occlude vision,” a process she finds developed in the documentaries about war by Harun Farocki. Seeing, in both of these essays, is in some sense over-determined, where looking for one thing means to miss another. The optics required for this type of visualization of the invisible could be said to be a kind of unconscious optics of the sort alluded to by Walter Benjamin. Meanwhile, many of our authors discuss documentary practices that are bent upon representing experience that has not been recorded, and that cannot be recorded in that it has been structured to leave no visible trace. These are the “military-carceral spaces” that Trevor Paglen has called “dark spots on the map” (Nath) or “the unrepresentable, unseen spaces of detention” that Ursula Biemann addresses in her documentary practice. Filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias, too, finds “blanks, lacunae, and non-sayings,” as the material she must render sensible in her

Introduction 13 film 48. She asks: “in the absence of bodies of evidence, how can the dimension of the violence wrought by the state be revealed?” Meanwhile, Anjali Nath shows how both Road to Guantanamo (Michael Winterbottom, 2006) and Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007) rely on strategies of representation that exceed the promise of the “indexical” image. Given that a political imperative of documentary has long been the production of testimony against atrocity, Deirdre Boyle, also writing in the Torture section, considers how this trend of anti-indexical ­documentary raises a critical question: if documentary documents the unseen, what models of testimony does this raise? Of course, the violence that undergirds state relations is often hidden, so another function of documentary is to visualize regimes of power. Jane Gaines acknowledges that this strategy has been at the forefront of anti-war documentaries for decades, but may in this era be in need of reappraisal. As Raya Morag puts it in her essay on Jewish extremist documentaries in Israel, the process of “[c]reating an alternative to dominant politics and making ‘visible’ of what is hidden provides secular spectators with a format for self-exploration through which they can reassess their identity.” However, they may not always work to expose the operations of power effectively and the tools to do so may also be used for other less reflexive or radical purposes. Nonetheless, the effort is still underway, and it may be worth exploring films not often examined in the field, such as Chilean director Carmen Castillo’s haunting documentary, La Flaca Alejandra: Vidas y muertes de una mujer chilena (Skinny Alejandra: Lives and Deaths of a Chilean Woman, 1994), where a concerted effort to make the operations of state violence, in the form of coercing informants, is made absolutely and painfully apparent (Gómez-Barris). The somewhat more benevolent yet nonetheless repressive operations of state coercion are exposed in Dean Wilson’s investigation of the Vietnamese film, The Story of Kindness (Tran Van Thuy, 1985) which “represents a form of pragmatism under an edifice of socialist power.” There is of course the very visibility of surveillance and its offshoots that purport to see all, like some omniscient electronic panopticon, yet not surprisingly, this all-seeing has its limits too (Tay), and indeed does not ­necessarily translate into all-knowing (Cowie). The ways in which bodies, under surveillance or the relentlessly imaging eye of the documentary, can evade, elude, occlude, or obscure the camera’s lens are elaborated on by Patrik Sjöberg in his exploration of strategies of “surveillance resistance.” Thus, we suggest that many contemporary documentaries are engaged in the creative treatment of the unseeable: whether this is because what they document hasn’t happened yet, what Juan Salazar calls “a creative treatment of possibility” or because it is about some manner of invisible geography occurring on scales beyond our technological capacity to see (micro or macro: Ostherr, Walker, Salazar), or indeed because new technologies have divested from a necessary connection to indexicality altogether: “database art does not have as its primary concern the representation of reality” (Tay). These many “renderings of the invisible world” produce new forms, temporalities, and fields for representing “the real,” what Kirsten Ostherr considers a “magnification and acceleration.” In fact, so many of our authors conceive of

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contemporary documentary as a “geographic practice” (Walker) that metaphors and practices of mapping demand attention as a contemporary documentary trend in their own right.

Mapping the Permeable Borders of Space and Time While several of our authors theorize the documentary as an exchange between people (Bal, Biemann, Juhasz, and Fregoso), many others think about the relations between subjects and place: “a signifying system in which the subject is thought of in connection with place and notions of belonging, borders, transgression, and movement. Geography here is a cultural practice, a symbolic way of redesigning space” (Biemann). Anikó Imre introduces her section on Migration by looking at movements (of bodies in space and the moving image) that evoke metaphors of flow – across nations, inside of bodies, between genres and disciplines – figuring contemporary documentary as invested in a “disruptive cartography [which] is further enhanced by an engagement with the genre-hybridity” (Torchin). Not ­surprisingly, given the concern with national borders within the current incarnation of State Zionism, limits, territorial disputes, and contestations as well as incursions into filmic forms previously unexploited by the Right, find their way into new right-wing Israeli documentaries as discussed by Raya Morag. Thus, border crossings, both actual and metaphoric, could easily be considered another overarching theme of the book. Many of our authors look to documentary engagements at the macro or micro level: geographic, planetary, migration, surveillance, mapping, virus. Flow becomes a verb of choice to describe large (and small) movements of information, people, microbes, and capital: “the ways in which deregulation, free trade agreements, and transnational capital construct and affect the border” (Biemann). Leshu Torchin concurs: “Films about trafficking become means of visualizing these unseen currents, and more importantly, of introducing the human element into the flows of capital, labor, and technology.” Imre Szeman, in discussing the politics of oil, uses the metaphor as well when he says, “oil is only a problem because of the larger systems through which it flows.” The map also becomes a ­metaphor in its own right, one that explains other kinds of experiences. Janet Walker discusses GPS-enhanced visualizations as enabling a “regime that is explicitly ­cartographic.” And Sharon Lin Tay discusses how mapping and tracking in network culture generates something other than control. The “concept of cartography,” when adapted into digital art forms, “often avails itself as a metaphor to characterize the ways in which digital objects function. Adopting cartography as a conceit assumes a particular notion of immanence for the processes and constraints of a technological object” (Tay). Interestingly, in the two pieces in the anthology about (former) communist countries (Vietnam and Yugoslavia, covered by Wilson and Mazierska, respectively) attempts by the state to resist or control entry into the flow of capital are found to be constitutive. Meanwhile, Raya Morag reminds us that there are political, as well as economic, motivations for state regimes to want to control, not release into

Introduction 15 flow: “In the socio-political-ethnic-religious conditions of the second Intifada, crossing ethnic, religious, or gendered borders becomes a staged act, a fraud that leads to the next explosion.” Of course, any changes in conceptions of space render alterations in time. Flow can also attest to types of historical iterations, to a temporal shift and its filmic traces in memorializing something as significant and representationally varied as the history of HIV/AIDS and the liabilities of ready, unobstructed access to images of the dead (Juhasz). New forms of visualization deliver a sense of access to history and the future as more porous. “I think documentary cinemas can play a role in instantiating the future by rendering it present and giving it a concrete form, thus permitting viewers to engage with anticipatory modes of futuring of the planet” (Salazar). Angelica Fenner notes how Buddhist documentaries, once unmoored from indexical accountability, also then take on an “uncanny relation to time.” Susana De Sousa Dias describes something similar in her own documentary practice that attempts to ­represent beyond temporality: “An ‘inside’ presupposes depth but this does not ­necessarily consist of visual planes. In 48 the penetration in shots takes place through duration, that is, montage in temporal depth. This is created by stretching the time in images – which perforce involves a kind of paradox: how does one stretch time in a photograph?”

New Cognitive Tools and Their New Political Aesthetics Finally, some of our authors posit that new technologies can render new ways of seeing and knowing, a techno-deterministic point of view that just as many in the anthology might challenge. Digital technologies “produce images – and sounds – that challenge assumptions of the spaces of visibility as being knowable, as ­inherently knowledge – connaissance” (Cowie). Ursula Biemann explains how she uses her “video camera as a cognitive tool.” And Rebecca Hodes’s intervenes in the logics of scientific epistemology by insisting on its ways of knowing as inevitably politicized. Kirsten Ostherr describes how rendering scientific knowledge through image production allows for a “conceptual, rather than perceptual ‘real,’” while Dean Wilson explains how the work of Tran Van Thuy is a “different way to know ­communism.” This politicized knowing has its resonances in Farocki’s work as brought to light by Nora Alter: that which is a priori, always already implies an unknowing and an unseeing, and it is left to the artist/filmmaker to find strategies to bring other ways of seeing and thus knowing into the realm of the visible. This Rancierian insight, prefigured by Gramsci and others, is echoed in Alisa Lebow’s observations of the “unwar film,” where the task of the conscientious filmmaker is precisely to trouble the commonsense ways of knowing and perceiving war (as inevitable) and thus interrupting its relentless march. Again this approach finds other expressions, such as in the work discussed by Macarena Gómez-Barris, that unsettles the viewer and forces an ethical confrontation with the politics of ­displaced blame, witnessing, and betrayal that is recreated by prisoner captivity.

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New tools, new (and old) possibilities for political action. Ursula Biemann believes hers is a “political aesthetic” where, not unlike Alisa Lebow’s ethical “unwar” ­filmmakers, her “task is to intervene effectively in current flows of representation, their narratives and framing devices.” As we suggested earlier, the new forms, ­practices, and theories of documentaries raised by this anthology are produced with an overt commitment to political change that is matched with alterations and reconfigurations in form. It may also be matched by alterations in theoretical paradigms for thinking about documentary. As Jane Gaines insists, “however enthusiastically we once got on the bandwagon of ‘the crisis of the index’ we should probably now get off,” since the “real historical conditions” depicted in most documentaries have not been “dreamed up.” In fact, for many of our authors, a world overrun by visualization and documentary technologies leads to the need for new kinds of “resistance.” Patrik Sjöberg writes: “resistance should in this context be understood in an inclusive and suggestive manner with regards to what passes for a surveillance situation. I am looking at the interrelated behavioral pattern between someone who deliberately wants to avoid being identified and those who are equally deliberate in installing identification technologies.” But others see documentary films continuing long-held projects of individual and community empowerment: “These films perform an important pedagogical and political function, encouraging the creation of activist identities … for both [subjects] and viewers” (Ward). Beyond constructing activist identities, some documentary theorists and practitioners still put stock in truth. “Without truth, there can be no reconciliation. And documentaries are one means of revealing the truth even when it lies hidden within dubious truth claims asserted by unreliable ­subjects” (Boyle). Other authors in this collection believe the field of documentary can still contribute to a public sphere. Patricia White writes: “The cultural field of documentary – encompassing feminist media organizations like Women Make Movies, funders, broadcasters, and educators, as well as scholars, makers, and audiences – constitutes a public sphere in which activist and theoretical debate, contested reception, and continually renewed cultural production articulate the productively shifting terms of transnational feminism.” Rebecca Hodes, too, understands Beat It! as a powerful form of education and activism: “people living with HIV have used the visual medium of documentary to represent themselves and to foster new political identities and affiliations in post-apartheid South Africa.” There is a way in which many films discussed in this volume can be described as engaging in “political ­pedagogy,” as Imre Szeman suggests, yet often without being overtly political or ­pedagogic. Documentary, even in this post-analogue, beyond the document, era, still seeks to address itself to issues relevant to life on this planet, utilizing techniques that evoke what Jane Gaines usefully refers to as a “same world sensation.” And the role of the documentary film scholar, who may in some cases also be a documentary filmmaker, has an important – and potentially forward looking – role in this process as well. Juan Salazar, whose theme Planet will begin this anthology on a cautionary and even catastrophic register, helps us conclude this Introduction with a description of the documentary critic’s potential for some possibility of political agency:

Introduction 17 “by speculating about documentary film’s potential for rendering an anticipatory futuring of socio-ecological change, documentary cinema [can be seen as] a resource of hope.”

Note 1 See, e.g., Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, eds., Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008); Jane Chapman, Issues in Contemporary Documentary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); Vinicius Navarro and Louise Spence, eds., Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers ­University Press, 2011); Brian Winston, ed., The Documentary Film Book (London: BFI/ Palgrave, 2013).

Reference Heise, U.K. (2008) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

Planet

Introduction Planet

Juan Francisco Salazar

Earth Day took place for the first time on April 22, 1970. It came to materialize an emerging planetary consciousness, fueled by the vitality of anti-war and civil rights movements, where environmental concerns took center stage for the first time. Since then, the date has become a symbol and a worldwide celebration of global environmentalisms. Some of the first images to illustrate this new awareness of a global environment, which later became exhausted by overuse by the environmentalist movement in the global north during the 1970s and 1980s, were the famous images taken by the Apollo missions. First, the 1968 image of the Earth rising on the Moon’s horizon taken by the Apollo 8, but most notoriously, the famous image of the “blue marble” taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. In 1988 the same image was used on the cover of Time magazine to illustrate that year’s Man of the Year (now Person of the Year): “The Endangered Planet Earth.” Environment and global are in fact two notions that have developed forcefully in tandem since the appearance of environmental studies in the 1940s and the development to planetary sciences stemming out of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year. In 1969, reflecting on the initial Apollo images and the first humans to walk on the Moon, Allen Ginsberg (1972) wrote: “No Science Fiction expected this GlobeEye Consciousness.” In fact, these images opened up for the first time a path for a new kind of planetary imagination, a new form of planetary consciousness which took on a new dimension once the planet was able to be “seen” from afar; from outer space; a planetary disposition that computer imaging – also since the 1970s – has been able to powerfully convey through modeling and visualization of a global ecology. As environmental cultural studies scholar Ursula K. Heise points out, these images provide “an apt metaphor for a cultural moment in which an entire planet A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, First Edition. Edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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becomes graspable as one’s local backyard” (Heise, 2008: 4). This new planetary global ecology emerging since the 1970s and fired up by new theories such as James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis quickly became “a new arena of political conflict” (Sachs, 1993) and has recently “become a core concern of social and cultural theory” (Heise, 2008: 4). Hence, when setting out to interpret the theme of Planet for this volume on contemporary documentary cinema, a starting point was to interrogate how do we make sense of the idea of planet at a time when globalism and globality have become the currency of choice in contemporary social and cultural theory. The etymology of the English word planet, as in many other Indo-European derived languages, originates in the Greek word planētēs, meaning “wanderer, drifter.” Astēr planētēs or wandering star thus was a word used to refer to celestial bodies that wander/drift through the heavens (as opposed to the “fixed stars” of the constellations). I am captivated by how this notion of wandering captures humanity’s present moment: a permanent state of movement, of itinerant circumstances, of nomadic and transient acts, of a politics of drifting, of a civilizational wanderlust. Like never before, as DyerWitheford so eloquently puts it, today the whole planet has been opened up “as a field for manoeuvre” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 133). In putting together this section I was interested in conveying a critical perspective on planetarity through a series of commissioned essays that could reflect critically on what Ursula K. Heise (2008) calls a “sense of planet” and what Edgar Morin (1999) has called “Earth identity.” In other words, essays which could develop a critical sensibility on the frictions arising between an “awareness of the planetary whole and the sharpened perception of differences” (Heise, 2008), which mark the form in which the global is presented and represented in contemporary documentary film. As such, when the future of the human species is now situated on a planetary scale and is immanent to the future of the non-human world, we were most interested in bringing together a series of preoccupations around two main vectors to interpret the notion of planetarity in documentary film: the environment and the future. In doing so I have tried to put together a compelling case that documentary cinema is a vital and formidable cultural strategy and device through which to theorize not only how the planet has become perceivable and experienceable as a complex set of ecosystems, but most importantly how planetary futures are being played out, mobilized, and put into practice through differing knowledge practices. Here wandering also attaches its meaning to the notion of wondering. Wondering in this context concerns speculation and conjecture about our relationship with nature and our attachment to an array of possible futures. In relation to the power of cinema in general, not just documentary film, Sean Cubitt has persuasively articulated the view that certain types of cinemas have the capacity to produce films that are “more ethically, emotionally, and intellectually satisfying than much of what passes for ecopolitics” (Cubitt, 2005: 1). It may be fair to say that a planetary politics in documentary film is not necessarily a post-1990s phenomenon, fueled by new understandings of the scale of climate change, mass biological extinctions, irremediable loss of biodiversity and

Introduction 23 the new geopolitics of scarcity. A whole wave of advocacy documentary films, looking at nuclear hazard, the effects of radiation from nuclear power plants, and the imminence of nuclear war surged strongly in the 1970s and 1980s. These in some way also addressed a sense of planet and of planetary annihilation by nuclear war. But in this section the focus is rather on how in the past two decades or so there has been a rush of documentary films that convey a “sense of planet” through a “global-eye consciousness” preoccupied with the possibility of developing an ecocritical perspective in documentary film. One such film is Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home (2009), a $12 million feature-length environmental documentary that became the first film to premiere on YouTube at the same time as in cinemas and on TV. By mid 2012, the film had received more than 32 million views on YouTube. Home, like many other “contemplative” films of this kind, find their role in educating and contributing to “an awareness of our Earth-Homeland” (Morin, 1999). However, films like these do take a rather deterministic and hegemonic planet-wide perspective, in that they fail to signal and address the tensions, frictions, and destabilizing forces of locally embedded planetarity. Ursula K. Heise sees this as “a field of tension between the embrace of and the resistance to global connectedness, and between the commitment to a planetary vision and the utopian reinvestment in the local” (Heise, 2008: 21). This tension in contemporary environmental documentaries connects to broader attempts irrupting in recent years, and more or less coalescing in a wide array of related fields of knowledge and practice: eco-media, eco-cinema, environmental history, environmental humanities, environmental communication, and environmental cultural studies. In selecting the essays for this section, we wanted to invite authors whose work would highlight a planet-wide perspective but which could incorporate a strong critique of bottom-up eco-politics. In searching within a vast sea of possibilities – given the rise to prominence of environmental documentaries in recent times – we looked for essays that could connect to current works in eco-criticism and eco-film criticism and that could develop a critical cosmopolitan perspective without leaving the concern for local eco-politics behind. As Sean Cubitt puts it: “an environmentalism that ignores class, poverty, inequality pestilence, war and injustice is not a political platform anyone would care to follow” (Cubitt, 2013: 279). Broadly speaking, all three essays in this section ponder in one way or another on the environmental crises that are casting a profound anxiety about the future of human and non-human life on this planet. Each essay connects with contemporary critical eco-criticism in order to discuss not one form of planetarity and futurity but “a variety of ecological imaginations of the global” (Heise, 2008: 62). Whether focusing on the scalar aesthetics of oil, the datafication of sea level rise, or the assembling and putting into practice of divergent potential futures, the three essays in this section invite a deep reflection about the profound transformations in the complex dynamics of coupled socio-ecological systems at a planetary scale. As Kathryn Yusoff so clearly sets it: the catastrophe of climate change is excessive and will inscribe all earthly space. It is earth writing writ large (Yusoff, 2009; see also Walker,

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this volume). These profound transformations, which have paved the way for us to conceive of an epoch, the anthropocene, where human intervention has geophysical force, speak of a moment in human history characterized by an agonizing wondering about the future of the planet, our own existence as human beings, and our relationship with “our environment” that is irreversibly changing at an unprecedented scale. The anthropocene lives with a tension that is amplified by the recognition that the planet may be more like “a moving whirlwind with no organizing centre” (Morin, 1999) than a global system. The essays in this section signal a sort of zeitgeist in the emerging and burgeoning field of eco-cinema studies, as they investigate the politics and poetics of documentary cinema’s interventions in contemporary renderings of global change as the “new spectre haunting the ‘globe’” (Szerszynski and Urry, 2010: 1). All three authors are concerned with what documentary cinema, in both theory and practice, has to offer by reflecting upon a consciousness of planetary crisis and the inevitable thought of a tipping point – or irreversible change – to human life on this planet. As the world as we know it is disappearing in front of our very own eyes, can documentary film become something more than commentary and critique; moving beyond textual representation and deconstruction to contribute to an ethos of hope by instigating action on global change? What other ways are possible to visualize and narrativize the scale of planetary change, incorporating the interdependence of the human and the non-human? This endeavor has already begun with innovative new work on the earthy ecomaterialities of media (see, e.g., Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Bozak, 2012). If perhaps not manifest, all essays in this section also propel a latent critique to representation, slipping through the fissures of documentary film studies an attempt to go beyond representation and interpretation of the visible and the indexical, and choosing to focus on the material acts and performances of social life. In the first essay, “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” Imre Szeman resumes his ongoing concern with the simultaneously withdrawn and manifest entanglements of cinema and energy through a rethinking of the history of capital beyond geopolitical terms and more in terms of the forms of energy available to it at any given historical moment. In this particular reprint of his essay, Szeman zooms into three contemporary documentary films that illustrate “the astonishing degree to which human beings have remade a space as big as a planet, and continue to do so in ever more visible ways.” Szeman’s primary goal is to interrogate how the social life of oil is narrated and in doing so he offers a critical analysis of “the range of ways in which these films frame oil as a problem for their audiences, and what resources they offer as possible solutions to this (historically unprecedented) social and ecological problem.” In this way, his concern with the “scalar aesthetics of oil” connects to Nadia Bozak’s (2012) call to pay more detailed and critical attention to the “hydrocarbon imagination,” signaling that all cinemas are – inevitably – ­ecologically placed and embedded. In the third essay, “Moving to Higher Ground? Documentary Film and Other Geolocative Technologies for Projecting Sea Level Rise,” Janet Walker discusses

Introduction 25 the visualization and representation of climate change, particularly the representation of sea level rise in lowland and coastal communities. Walker suggests that documentary films cannot afford to remain sequestered in the humanities division of the academy but must seek interdisciplinary exchanges and audiences within policy-making venues. In line with a strong tradition of participatory communication for social change, Walker critiques those discourses about climate change that don’t include citizens’ views of owning their own processes of communication, negotiation, and legislation about environmental issues that affect them. She focuses her analysis on two films, both of which are exemplary of environmental documentary’s current wave of advocacy cinema on global warming mitigation. In doing so, Walker discusses the role that strategies of scientific visualization, especially of coastal areas, play in the enactment of documentary film and video as navigational technologies. She goes further and invites us to think about documentary film as a particular mode of audiovisualization and navigation within a wider repertoire including highly technical modes of scientific modeling such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and geowebbased software and applications for digital earth mapping. Her argument concerns the shift from image to data and ties in effectively with Sean Cubitt’s critique of the ongoing preoccupation in film studies with the realist image in light of novel opportunities opened up by data visualization, or datafication. While taking a planetary-wide perspective, Walker’s essay does not shy away from engaging in local eco-politics. On the contrary, her essay brings to the foreground concerns with how small Pacific Islands and coastal areas of the world are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, sea level rise, and other extreme weather events. In doing so she pays attention to the diversity of global eco-imaginations involved in the deterioration of coastal conditions and how extreme weather events affect the human and the non-human world as the livelihoods of hundreds of local communities are at stake. Both Imre Szeman’s and Janet Walker’s essays deploy an eco-critical sensibility akin to an activist eco-philosophy in which documentary films can effectively be regarded as public pedagogic devices capable of inspiring a progressive eco-politics leading to action on environmental issues of planetary scale. This is also partly addressed in the second essay of the section, “Anticipatory Modes of Futuring Planetary Change in Documentary Film,” where I advocate for documentary film to be thought and practiced as more than a creative treatment of actuality, but also as a creative treatment of possibility (or potentiality). My concern is with interrogating whether documentary cinema’s main preoccupation with “representing the past” and “documenting the real” can be tested (or defied) by speculating about documentary film’s potential for rendering an anticipatory futuring of socio-ecological change. In both instances the aim is to propel documentary cinema as a resource of hope in light of current social and ecological predicaments and the propinquity of unprecedented planetary crises. In this essay I take a closer look at three very different documentary films, all of which experiment in form to test ways of developing an affective account of planetary futures in documentary film; futures

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that are perpetually deferred in everyday life. In choosing these films, I moved beyond their evident dissimilarities to focus on how documentary films can attempt to blur that dividing fence between imagining futures and practicing futures. I was interested in querying how documentary cinemas provide an account of a postcapitalist imagination – or fail to do so. In one of the films discussed, for example, The Planet, the filmmakers present a series of apocalyptic imaginaries of potential social and economic disintegration and urge the audiences to put their trust in the hands of the science of climate change. These types of documentary narratives, while important for raising awareness and instigating action, more often than not do in fact risk reinforcing the status quo and transforming the end of days into just one big manageable crisis. As Eric Swyngedouw states, “while the ecological Armageddon points at a universal, potentially species-wide destruction, the economic catastrophe is a particular one related solely to the threatened reproduction of, basically, capitalist relations” (2013: 11). In conclusion, this section hopes to contribute to an emergent cross-genre field of eco-cinema studies, while at the same time calling for an expansion of the horizons of eco-film criticism beyond a humanities-centric and a media-centric perspective. There are more or less a dozen documentary films analyzed in detail in all three essays. All of these films, in one way or another, tackle the conflictive issue – as Szeman eloquently puts it in reference to oil documentaries – “of translating expert knowledges into lay language or by producing accounts of damage to the environment that can be narrated and made visible, moving audiences from the specific (a film or a specific case) to the general (a confrontation with the issues facing the globe as a whole).” As a species with recently acquired planetary identity we know that what we do next (or don’t do) has fateful consequences for life in this planet, and that like never before, we no longer have the option to opt out or step out of civilization to return to it at a later time.

References Bozak, N. (2012) The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cubitt, S. (2005) EcoMedia. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Cubitt, S. (2013) Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere: Data Visualization and Ecocriticism. In Rust, S., Monani, S., and Cubitt, S. (eds.) Ecocinema Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999) Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ginsberg, A. (1972) In a Moonlit Hermit’s Cabin. In The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965–1971. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Heise, U.K. (2008) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maxwell, R. and Miller, T. (2012) Greening the Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morin, E. (1999) Les sept savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du future. Paris: UNESCO. Sachs, W. (ed.) (1993) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict. London: Zed Books.

Introduction 27 Swyngedouw, E. (2013) Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24(1), 9–18. Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2010) Changing Climates: Introduction. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2–3), 1–8. Yusoff, K. (2009) Excess, Catastrophe, and Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(6), 1010–1029.

1

Crude Aesthetics

The Politics of Oil Documentaries Imre Szeman

How does the problem of oil appear in documentary film? In what follows, I examine the manner in which oil is represented in three “feature” documentaries released over the past five years: Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack’s A Crude Awakening (2006), Joe Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), and Shannon Walsh’s H2Oil (2009).1 As might be expected, while 