Image-Documents: Found and Appropriated Images in Documentary Cinema

Abstract

<italic>Image-Documents: Found and Appropriated Images in Documentary Cinema</italic> 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, <italic>Image-Documents</italic> 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.