From city symphony to global city film : documentary display and the corporeal

In the introduction to his history of the relationship between the body and the city in Western civilisation, Richard Sennett includes an anecdote about attending a cinema in New York. Sennett uses the story of watching film as a way of commenting on the place of the body and senses within urban settings and is concerned to document 'physical sensations in urban space' as a way of addressing what he sees as the 'tactile sterility which afflicts the urban environment.'[1] While Sennett's work performs an important task by drawing attention to various historical conditions implicated in urban and metropolitan experience, it is possible to rework the categories he deploys - bodies, the city, and film - into a very different argument concerning representations of the city. Indeed the three categories coalesce in the so-called city film - works which include the 'city symphony' of the 1920s and subsequent documentary representations of urban spaces, among them the New York City films of the 1940s and 1950s, and films of non-Western cities produced in the decades from the 1960s to the present - within which the city is realised through a focus on people.

Queensland Arts Council road trip : an examination of in-schools touring productions (2005-2008)

This research project explores the nature of In-School Touring Productions that are presented in Queensland classrooms by Queensland Arts Council (QAC). The research emerged from my background as a drama teacher working on secondment at QAC in the Ontour inschools department. The research follows the development of a new production Power Trip: the Adventures of Watty and Volt. The research was guided by the key question: What are some of the production and pragmatic issues that relate to In-school Touring Productions and in what ways do QAC’s Ontour inschools productions offer learning experiences? This research involved the creation of three intersecting elements: (1) a 45 minute personal documentary film, 8 Times Around the Equator. The film follows my enthusiasms for this hybrid form of theatre which developed from my childhood, teaching practice and finally in my role at QAC; (2) a multimedia DVD, Queensland Arts Council 2008 inschools Season, which presents a series of short video clips promoting QAC’s Ontour inschools program; and finally (3) this exegetical paper, Queensland Arts Council Road Trip: an Examination of In-Schools Touring Productions (2005-2008). This exegesis supports the multimedia presentations and provides additional descriptions of QAC's Ontour inschools productions which are contextualised within the history of QAC and the field of Youth Theatre generally. During the project I observed 37 QAC productions and analysed them against set criteria and as a result four types of learning experiences were identified: • Category X: X-periencing the Art Form – providing students with exposure to traditional forms of main stage theatre; • Category L: Learning Through the Art Form – communicating information using an art form to educate. For example using comedy, clowning or slapstick to teach science; • Category U: Unpacking the Art Form – deconstructing art forms and providing students with increased awareness and appreciation; and • Category M: M-bodying the Art Form – workshops and artist residencies that allow students to create their own work. The creative works (documentary film and DVDs) combine to make up 65% of the project. This exegetical paper concludes the final 35% required for submission.

Modes et approches du cinéma documentaire : réflexion autour du projet American Utopias.

Ce mémoire de recherche-création prend comme point de départ le film documentaire American Utopias que j’ai réalisé en 2014-2015. Le film nous plonge au cœur du quotidien de cinq communautés alternatives et expérimentales des États-Unis et réfléchit aux multiples défis et enjeux que vivent leurs membres. Organisé autour du thème de l’utopie, ce récit de voyage documentaire nous fait connaître tour à tour une communauté de mini-maisons à Washington D.C., une communauté « Earthship » à Ithaca, une communauté vivant sans électricité et sans pétrole au Missouri, un laboratoire urbain dans le désert de l’Arizona et le festival Burning Man au Nevada. La portion théorique de ce mémoire s’organise quant à elle autour de la question des approches du cinéma documentaire. Prenant comme appui la typologie de Bill Nichols, il s’agit ici de voir comment chaque approche privilégiée par le créateur de documentaire renvoie au réel d’une manière qui lui est propre. Grâce à une approche autopoïétique et un travail d’analyse de films, ce mémoire cherche également à circonscrire les forces et les limites intrinsèques à chaque mode. Ce faisant, le lecteur est amené à mieux comprendre les motivations qui soutiennent certains choix de création dans American Utopias.

Narratives of judgement: representations of 'privileged' Jews in Holocaust documentaries

Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential essay, “The Grey Zone”, explores the taboo issue of “privileged” Jews, those prisoners who were forced to cooperate with their Nazi captors in order to prolong their lives or the lives of their families. Levi argues that moral evaluations of privileged Jews should be suspended; however, judgements of these liminal figures have permeated representations of victims’ experiences. Taking Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” as a point of departure, I analyse the ways in which a number of Holocaust documentary narratives construct problematic judgements of privileged Jews; nonetheless, it will be shown that some films engage with the issue in a nuanced manner. While Levi singles out the medium of film as particularly predisposed to simplistic judgements, I argue that documentary film has considerable potential to offer a complex representation of the extreme ethical dilemmas that privileged Jews faced.

As possibilidades estéticas e narrativas do dispositivo documental

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Kulturwissenschaftliches Filmen im Umbruch: Die Filmarbeit von Edmund Ballhaus

Der Autor untersucht die Strategien und Konzepte des Göttinger Kulturwissenschaftlers Edmund Ballhaus, der mit seiner Filmarbeit die Entwicklung des wissenschaftlichen Films seit Mitte der achtziger Jahre maßgeblich beeinflußte. Detaillierte Analysen seiner ersten zwölf, in den Jahren 1986 bis 1996 entstandenen Filme verdeutlichen seine Abkehr von überholten inhaltlichen und methodischen Standards und die Entwicklung eines eigenständigen Typus des kulturwissenschaftlichen Films. Dieser rückt den Menschen in den Mittelpunkt der Betrachtung und erteilt den Gefilmten selbst das Wort. Damit wurde sowohl dem klassischen Erklärdokumentarismus des Fernsehens als auch dem distanzierten Dokumentationsstil des Instituts für den Wissenschaftlichen Film (IWF) ein neues Modell gegenübergestellt. Darüber hinaus löste sich Edmund Ballhaus von der traditionellen Arbeitsteilung in Hinblick auf Recherche, Konzeption und Umsetzung und ersetzte sie durch den selbstfilmenden Wissenschaftler, der für alle Arbeitsschritte einer Filmproduktion allein verantwortlich ist. Seine bereits 1987 veröffentlichten Forderungen verwirklichte er nicht nur in seinen Filmen, sondern auch mit der Gründung der Gesellschaft für den kulturwissenschaftlichen Film (GfkF) und der Einrichtung eines Studienganges Visuelle Anthropologie in Göttingen. In die Untersuchung einbezogen wurde eine im Anhang des Buches wiedergegebene Befragung des Filmautors, welche die Analyse um interessante Details sowohl in Hinblick auf die Entstehungsbedingungen einzelner Filme als auch auf seine persönlichen Überzeugungen und Beweggründe ergänzt.

Documentary as history, memory, dream and film

A century ago, as the Western world embarked on a period of traumatic change, the visual realism of photography and documentary film brought print and radio news to life. The vision that these new mediums threw into stark relief was one of intense social and political upheaval: the birth of modernity fired and tempered in the crucible of the Great War. As millions died in this fiery chamber and the influenza pandemic that followed, lines of empires staggered to their fall, and new geo-political boundaries were scored in the raw, red flesh of Europe. The decade of 1910 to 1919 also heralded a prolific period of artistic experimentation. It marked the beginning of the social and artistic age of modernity and, with it, the nascent beginnings of a new art form: film. We still live in the shadow of this violent, traumatic and fertile age; haunted by the ghosts of Flanders and Gallipoli and its ripples of innovation and creativity. Something happened here, but to understand how and why is not easy; for the documentary images we carry with us in our collective cultural memory have become what Baudrillard refers to as simulacra. Detached from their referents, they have become referents themselves, to underscore other, grand narratives in television and Hollywood films. The personal histories of the individuals they represent so graphically–and their hope, love and loss–are folded into a national story that serves, like war memorials and national holidays, to buttress social myths and values. And, as filmic images cross-pollinate, with each iteration offering a new catharsis, events that must have been terrifying or wondrous are abstracted. In this paper we first discuss this transformation through reference to theories of documentary and memory–this will form a conceptual framework for a subsequent discussion of the short film Anmer. Produced by the first author in 2010, Anmer is a visual essay on documentary, simulacra and the symbolic narratives of history. Its form, structure and aesthetic speak of the confluence of documentary, history, memory and dream. Located in the first decade of the twentieth century, its non-linear narratives of personal tragedy and poetic dreamscapes are an evocative reminder of the distance between intimate experience, grand narratives, and the mythologies of popular films. This transformation of documentary sources not only played out in the processes of the film’s production, but also came to form its theme.