S Topiary Landberg

The prominent quote on the large poster in the lobby of the theater for the 2015 Academy Award winning documentary Citizenfour (2014) reads “the year’s most hair-raising thriller.”  The description of this documentary film as a thriller is also invoked in A.O. Scott’s New York Times review, describing Citizenfour as “a tense and frightening thriller that blends the brisk globe-trotting of the “Bourne” movies with the spooky, atmospheric effects of a Japanese horror film.”  Released theatrically on October 24, 2014, this documentary provides viewers with a kind of cinematic déja-vu of one of the biggest international news stories of 2013.  Yet, beyond the hyrbid nature of a documentary-thriller, what is most striking about Citizenfour is the way this film fails to meet mainstream expectations of what documentaries should do—failing to provide any new information or personal insights about the figure at the center of its story.  Rather than delivering any introduction or backstory, the film assumes that the viewer already knows who Edward Snowden is and that the American government is collecting and storing huge amounts of electronic data about all of us, around the world. In fact, we get significantly less than what has been reported about Snowden in many other venues. 
In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Citizenfour, a documentary about data and information, frames the story of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA spying program in the context of the aesthetic and political conditions of our post-9/11, globalized landscape of government surveillance.  Presenting itself as a form of ironic pedagogy with a confoundingly “anti-representational” ethos, Citizenfour resists previously held assumptions about the didactic and political functions of visible evidence, and reframing the role of the personal and of identity politics in documentary film practice.  For example, at the end of the film, the audience witnesses Greenwald and Snowden silently passing scribbled notes to each other, while we are, absurdly, kept ignorant of the meaning and details of this exchange.  Placing Poitras’s film in the context of what Paul Arthur called an “aesthetics of failure,” I argue that Citizenfour changes the conditions of documentary representation for our post-9/11, digital age and reverses prevailing progressive ideas about the politics of representation.  In this paper, I will establish a theoretical context for the “anti-representational turn” in documentary and explore how Citizenfour (2014) exemplifies and popularizes this aesthetic shift in documentary film.

In this article, the authors argue that the 2013 omnibus film Valencia: The Movie/s (US) presents a unique approach to collective filmmaking in its adaptation of Michelle Tea's queer coming-of-age memoir Valencia (2000). This approach creates a sense of cultural inclusion, expanding the definition of the subculture Tea so vividly represents in her memoir about the punk-dyke community of San Francisco's Mission District in the 1990s. The omnibus structure of the film, in which every chapter presents a disjunctive shift in the aesthetics and cast of actors, provides audiences with a contemporary vision of queer feminism that embraces a multitude of gender expressions. This approach can be understood in the context of the cultural changes to lesbian and queer communities over the past twenty years, shaped by the growing visibility and inclusion of transgender politics. The authors also argue that Valencia: The Movie/s provides an anti-nostalgic attitude toward the gentrification of Valencia Street and the Mission District today. In representing Tea's Valencia through the lens of twenty different directors filming in multiple locations, the film adaptation resists one of the defining aspects of the book—that subculture is rooted in a particular place and time. Valencia: The Movie/s presents a kaleidoscopic and celebratory vision of Tea's memoir while simultaneously presenting a notion of dyke community that transcends its once-defined physical boundaries.

Covid-19 has reoriented the attention of many to their local environments out of necessity. And while local site-specific and place-based work has been a significant practice long before the pandemic locked us into such monogamous engagements with the hyper-local, this current moment underscores the relevance of the pragmatics and poetics of hyper-local inquiry and engagement. As new media documentary artists each working with place-based subjects, this panel will present three case-studies of approaches to using the hyper-local site as portals to larger (and often multinational) infrastructures. Each of these three site-specific documentary practice-research projects use a different form of interactive media: a mobile app, an augmented reality (AR) piece and a web-based interactive documentary (iDoc). Each of the projects engages with the structural impacts of colonialism and environmental racism to explore themes of migration, mobility and unequal development while problematizing the binaries of “invasive” and “native.” Highlighting and amplifying collective action and collaboration, each work represents complex histories in the context of their present day affects. We are excited by the capacity of non-linear storytelling to engage productively with multiple stakeholders (both human and non-human) and multiple temporalities to produce poly-vocal works that honor the complexity of the past, while facilitating exchange with the present.

This paper explores the dysphoric relationship between the intimate and highly subjective disembodied voice and the seemingly objective, impersonal representations of landscape in queer urban landscape essay films dealing with nostalgia, displacement, gentrification, suburban disaffection. Building on ideas about the function of the voice-over in epistolary cinema as articulated by Hamid Naficy’s in An Accented Cinema, I will focus on a suite of landscape films which explore queer experiences of dysphoria in relationship to place. Comparing works by Chantal Akerman, Jenni Olson, William E. Jones and Diane Bonder, this paper will analyze the temporal dynamics between a retrospective vocal register and the insistent present tense of a mute and narratively unrequited landscape. Using a mix of queer theory and recent work on the essay film form, this paper will explore how the moving image landscape essay film provides conflicting forms of subjectivity and provide a visceral experience of unease and dysphoria for the viewing audience. This paper will compare and contrast works that offer experiences of double consciousness in dealing with feeling of not belonging to the place where one defines home.

The classical city symphony was an experimental, non-narrative film genre structured as a dawn-to-dusk, cross-sectional representation of everyday urban activities in a particular locale. In city symphony films, the city is a collectively constituted entity in which linear film time is placed in dialectic with natural solar time and mechanically manipulated temporalities. Viewed through the lens of film grammar, this genre suggests a uniquely present tense viewing experience, absent the influence of past events and cause-and-effect narrative consequence.  Although much as been written about the city symphony’s relationship to modernism, little has been theorized about postmodern city symphonies and their development on contemporary urban film aesthetics. In this paper, I explore the under-examined film Organism (dir. Hilary Harris, USA, 1975, 19m) a key influence on Koyaanisqatsi (1982).  Demonstrating ways that Organism illustrates key aspects of Jameson’s theories, this paper examines the long lensed birds-eye and panning time-lapse techniques that are synonymous with contemporary city cinematography. It contextualizes Harris’ pioneering and influential technical innovations to examine how Organism expresses an ecological ethos informed by both the Space Age and the “World Trade Center moment” when global neoliberalism was appeared.

Writing about An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), Charles Musser noticed an ironic shift in the rhetorical strategies of environmental documentaries, away from a postmodern “critique of realism” to an embrace of truth and authority reminiscent of an older mode documentary filmmaking.  Ten years after An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar for Best Documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (dirs. Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, 2017) asserts ‘Truth to Power,’ as its answer to Trumpian Age fake news and suggesting this moment as an uncanny political rhyme to the context of the earlier film. Yet, while the first film is credited with inspiring popular environmentalism, the second film might be most useful and interesting viewed as the sequel to an entirely different film: The Island President (dir. Jon Shenk, 2011).  This essay explores the importance aspects of all three films, exploring both the usefulness and problematics of the central hero narrative framework and assert the two more recents films as examples of a subgenre of environmental doc about international climate negotiations.

A work-in-progress presentation about a multi-linear, urban landscape, i-doc: "EXIT ZERO: An Atlas of One City Block Through Time" currently being developed in Klynt.  The project presents at the transformations of a single central San Francisco city block over the course of about 150 years. Representing the complex and shifting realities of a block where the on-ramps to a freeway once stood, replaced by an “interim- use” community garden from 2010-2013, today it is the home to a new “green living” apartment complex, what to many is both a symbol and an example of the hyper-gentrification plaguing San Francisco. This presentation walks you through the work-in-progress iDoc, demonstrating the multiple navigation metaphors the work employs: including an interactive timeline and a metaphor compass. Placing competing narratives about environmental sustainability side by side with discourses about city infrastructure, this i-Doc allows the past to “speak” to the present; using digital media as a provocation for embodied and emotional exploration.

The interactive documentary project Exit Zero: San Francisco Freeway to the Future presents a multi-layered history of the central San Francisco city block where the on and off-ramps to the Central Freeway (Rt. 101) once stood. Placing competing narratives about environmental sustainability side by side with the history of urban infrastructure, this web documentary digs into historical roots of this block, examines the transformative roles of “invasive species,” and plants new seeds of reconciliation and critical engagement with the “hyper-gentrification” synonymous with its surrounding Hayes Valley neighborhood today.  From Ohlone site to Gold Rush acquisition to Freeway exit bifurcating the “blighted” African-American neighborhood, to vacant lot and then “interim use” community garden to the hyper-gentrified, “green living” apartment development found there today, this city block provides a microcosm for the development of San Francisco as a whole.  Highlighting how “The Great Freeway Revolt” of the 1960s shaped the character of Bay Area urban environmentalism, this work will link the history of city freeway design and the anti-freeway activism which rose up against it, to the contemporary debates about sustainable urban planning today.  Incorporating algorithmic indeterminacy and chance operations in the interface design, Exit Zero privileges the ethics and aesthetics of improvisation and non-hierarchical, collective “authorship” and agency into its presentational approach to provide a non-linear experience of this urban environmental history. Arguing for the importance of public access to green space, the work raises questions about how temporariness can be both a subversive tool for activists while simultaneously functioning as a neoliberal strategy for long-term disenfranchisement of public access to what was once common space.  Finally, this work asks, how we can take back the city from its legacy as a landscape in service to the car.

on the Panel:
Multi-linear Landscapes of the Anthropocene: interactive documentary approaches to representing collective forms of resistance to environmental ruin
with Liz Miller & Isabelle Carbonell

This panel will showcase three case studies of interactive documentary projects which investigate precarity and resilience in the so-called anthropocene. The presentations on this panel explore three different kinds of landscapes, each incorporating both temporal and spatial considerations into their interfaces, and conceiving of interactivity differently: Brazil's Rio Doce watershed which is the site of the country's worst environmental disaster, San Francisco's hyper-gentrified urban center, and shoreline communities adjacent to oil refineries who face catastrophic rising sea levels in Canada, Chile and Norway. Can an ecosystem or an infrastructure have subjectivity and agency? Collective, multi-linear and spatial forms of storytelling can provide new ways to understand and value interdependence in communities and environments, large and small.

What does it mean for landscape to be the subject of documentary film rather than simply its setting? What are the cultural implications of focusing on landscape and place for the politics of representation? This paper proposes a theory of landscape for the documentary field, placing the history of the form in relationship to recent collaborative, place­based landscape media projects which incorporate social media and alternatives to traditional ideas about authorship. Seeking to overturn ideas about property and individuality, this paper will explore what kinds of landscape representations function as “anti­-representation” resisting ideas of ownership and individualistic agency and offering new possibilities for understanding different kinds of “collective subjectivities.”

Building upon a collaborative working research group at UCSC focusing on the history and political theories of urban gentrification and the ways in which gentrification and urban displacements have been represented and framed in documentary film, this panel will present a number of new documentary works and papers dealing with current Bay Area gentrification. The participants will present a number of short presentations on their work as academic researchers, political activists and documentarians. The topics will range from questions about urban and public policy, transportation and infrastructure, class struggle and technology, the ethnic and racial components of displacement, and environmentalism and sustainability. Following the short presentations and screenings, the panel will open into a discussion which will address central questions about the role of activism, and documentary film and media in influencing legislation, public policy, community attitudes, and economic conditions.

This presentation explores the loop as both a feminist and an ecological structure.  It looks at the loop as it applies to computer programming, ecology and narrative theory; raising questions about digital and real-world materiality, exit conditions and the representation of recycling and environmentalism.

Chapter 12 of  Reclaiming Popular Documentary (https://iupress.org/9780253056887/reclaiming-popular-documentary/)
by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson

Contributions by Ezra Winton, Patricia Aufderheide, Zoë Druick, Devon Coutts, Sabiha Ahmad Khan, Anthony Kinik, Michael Brendan Baker, Allison de Fren, Jonathan Kahana, Shilyh Warren, S. Topiary Landberg, Landon Palmer, Dylan Nelson, Alexandra Juhasz, Rick Prelinger and George S. Larke-Walsh

The documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars.

Reclaiming Popular Documentary reverses this long-standing tendency by showing that documentaries can be—and are—made for mainstream or commercial audiences. Editors Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson, who consider popular documentary to be a subfield of documentary studies, embrace an expanded definition of popular to acknowledge the many evolving forms of documentary, such as branded entertainment, fictional hybrids, and works with audience participation. Together, these essays address emerging documentary forms—including web-docs, virtual reality, immersive journalism, viral media, interactive docs, and video-on-demand—and offer the critical tools viewers need to analyze contemporary documentaries and consider how they are persuaded by and represented in documentary media.

By combining perspectives of scholars and makers, Reclaiming Popular Documentary brings new understandings and international perspectives to familiar texts using critical models that will engage media scholars and fans alike.
Published by: Indiana University Press