
Documentary Across Disciplines
MIT Press
Published on 1. April 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
328 pages
978-0-262-52906-8 (ISBN)
Description
Artists, filmmakers, art historians, poets, literary critics, anthropologists, theorists, and others, investigate one of the most vital areas of cultural practice: documentary.
Contemporary engagements with documentary are multifaceted and complex, reaching across disciplines to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, representation and reality, truth and illusion. Discarding the old notions of "fly on the wall" immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, critics now understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality but as a way of coming to terms with reality through images and narrative. This book collects writings by artists, filmmakers, art historians, poets, literary critics, anthropologists, theorists, and others, to investigate one of the most vital areas of cultural practice: documentary. Their investigations take many forms-essays, personal memoirs, interviews, poetry.
Contemporary art turned away from the medium and toward the world, using photography and the moving image to take up global perspectives. Documentary filmmakers, meanwhile, began to work in the gallery context. The contributors consider the hybridization of art and film, and the "documentary turn" of contemporary art. They discuss digital technology and the "crisis of faith" caused by manipulation and generation of images, and the fading of the progressive social mandate that has historically characterized documentary. They consider invisible data and visible evidence; problems of archiving; and surveillance and biometric control, forms of documentation that call for "informatic opacity" as a means of evasion.
Contributors
Ariella Azoulay, Zach Blas, Christa Blu?mlinger, Stella Bruzzi, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Kris Fallon, Evgenia Giannouri, Ben Lerner, SylveIre Lotringer, Antonia Majaca, Sohrab Mohebbi, Volker Pantenburg, Veireina Paravel, Christopher Pinney, Ben Rivers, and Eyal Sivan
Copublished with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin
Contemporary engagements with documentary are multifaceted and complex, reaching across disciplines to explore the intersections of politics and aesthetics, representation and reality, truth and illusion. Discarding the old notions of "fly on the wall" immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity, critics now understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality but as a way of coming to terms with reality through images and narrative. This book collects writings by artists, filmmakers, art historians, poets, literary critics, anthropologists, theorists, and others, to investigate one of the most vital areas of cultural practice: documentary. Their investigations take many forms-essays, personal memoirs, interviews, poetry.
Contemporary art turned away from the medium and toward the world, using photography and the moving image to take up global perspectives. Documentary filmmakers, meanwhile, began to work in the gallery context. The contributors consider the hybridization of art and film, and the "documentary turn" of contemporary art. They discuss digital technology and the "crisis of faith" caused by manipulation and generation of images, and the fading of the progressive social mandate that has historically characterized documentary. They consider invisible data and visible evidence; problems of archiving; and surveillance and biometric control, forms of documentation that call for "informatic opacity" as a means of evasion.
Contributors
Ariella Azoulay, Zach Blas, Christa Blu?mlinger, Stella Bruzzi, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Kris Fallon, Evgenia Giannouri, Ben Lerner, SylveIre Lotringer, Antonia Majaca, Sohrab Mohebbi, Volker Pantenburg, Veireina Paravel, Christopher Pinney, Ben Rivers, and Eyal Sivan
Copublished with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
US School Grade: College Graduate Student and over
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
40 s/w Abbildungen
40 b&w illus.; 80 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 140 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-262-52906-8 (9780262529068)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Erika Balsom is a Lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King's College London and the author of Exhibition Cinema in Contemporary Art. Hila Peleg is a curator and filmmaker based in Berlin and the founder and artistic director of the Berlin Documentary Forum.