Browsing by Subject "Documentary"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    The documentary encounter:memory, materiality, and performance in contemporary visual culture
    (2013-02) Aldarondo, Cecilia Isabel
    My dissertation is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural study of what I call the `documentary encounter': that moment when human beings come upon the material objects--such as photographic material, places, and personal effects--through which we are accustomed to constructing our sense of the past. Philosophers such as Jacques Derrida (1995) and Pierre Nora (1989) have contended that the twentieth century was characterized by a need to archive objects. If that is the case, then we could say that the twenty-first century is characterized by a rather different relationship to materiality, one of `waste management.' As our worlds are glutted with more and newer material objects, we are afflicted by a parallel concern for loss and obsolescence. Objects appear out of date as soon as we possess them. Decay suffuses the material world, and proliferates faster than we can stop it. The accelerated obsolescence of technology, global anxieties over toxic dumping, and the widespread recycling of personal effects all indicate that we have entered an age in which the objects that surround us are volatile and resistant to mastery. Rooted in the comparative methods of visual cultures, my research is the first attempt to draw together two fields, Film and Performance Studies, that have been similarly preoccupied by the historiographical concepts of `memory' and `archive', but which have remained largely isolated from one another. Employing a cross-cultural, multi-media approach--focusing on the installations of German-born, Canada-based artist Iris Häussler, a photographic archive depicting my mother's childhood in Puerto Rico, and the ruined architecture of Havana, Cuba--my dissertation weaves together these discourses on memory and the archive and brings them to bear on a chaotic material landscape. In investigating the effects wrought by a changing materiality on contemporary life, I seek to account for a concomitantly shifting landscape of memory, in order to provide an enriched and expanded set of terms for thinking about material culture and memory practices in the present.
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    Gita Mehta
    (Voices from the Gaps, 1999) Soderberg, Erin
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    Image-Documents: Found and Appropriated Images in Documentary Cinema
    (2014-05) Stork, Benedict
    Image-Documents: Found and Appropriated Images in Documentary Cinema is a conceptualization of the use of found and appropriated images--ranging from home movies to Hollywood films, from archival footage to television news--as the core of an immanent theory of documentary cinema. Through a series of conceptual encounters with central terms in documentary history and scholarship, this dissertation counters the rote critique of found footage as merely a convenient spectacle onto which documentaries graft their arguments. Combining readings of film theory, documentary criticism, continental philosophy, and contemporary theory with close analyses of specific films, Image-Documents at once lays bare the apparatus of documentary and its use of images to make truth claims, while redefining documentary outside the imperative to "represent reality." In place of the reified oscillation between critiquing documentary's rhetoric of objectivity and embrace of reflexive tactics and ethical witnessing, this dissertation argues for an understanding of documentary as a mode of expression irreducible to the accurate capture of "real" events. Image-documents are the unruly theoretical objects that articulate the documentary potential immanent to all images.
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    Silha Bulletin, Fall 2020, Volume 26, No. 1
    (University of Minnesota, The Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, 2021-01) University of Minnesota: Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law; Kirtley, Jane, E.; Anderson, Jonathan; Memmel, Scott; Hargrove, Elaine
    The Silha Bulletin is a publication of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, a research center housed within the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Bulletin is published three times a year.
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    Struggle for social position in digital media composition
    (2013-06) Doerr-Stevens, Candance
    This study investigates the processes and products of multimodal and multi-authored digital media composition. Using ethnographic case study and Mediated Discourse Analysis (Norris & Jones, 2005), this study focuses specifically on the digital media composition of radio and film documentaries, examining struggle among students, media, and technology as vehicles for knowledge construction and social position. (Erstad & Silseth, 2008; Holland, Skinner, Lachiotte, & Cain, 1998). Drawing on the work of Bakhtin (1981, 1986) and Nelson and Hull (2008), struggle is theorized as a diverse "heteroglossia" or "many-voiced-ness," inherent in all acts of communication, in particular digital media texts. Conducted in an diverse, urban high school, data was collected from a variety of sources including field notes, class work, final media projects, and several hours of audio and video footage of students' collaborative process. Findings reveal intense engagement in the digital media composition process, often fueled by struggle surrounding media selections. Analysis of both the collaborative production process and final media products reveals a series of multimodal struggles in which students appropriate certain modes of communication within the documentary (e.g. sound, video, interviews, or voice over) in order to express nuanced views on the issue that may or may not be shared by the whole group. In gaining a deeper understanding of the struggles involved in the process of collaborative digital media composition, it becomes clear that literacy practices involve a continual negotiation among the various people, technology, and media involved. Such nuanced depictions of literacy provide theoretical infrastructure and frameworks both for researchers, who seek to impact policy related to literacy instruction, and teachers who continually guide students in their search and appropriation of a media voice.
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    Toni Cade Bambara
    (Voices from the Gaps, 2004) Schirack, Maureen; Curtright, Lauren