Experimental Documentary

This article explores two films that represent, at least in the Czechoslovak context, the first gesture towards the possibility of animating archival material on Nazi crimes. The two films in focus here employed drawings and paintings made by Jewish children imprisoned in Theresienstadt between 1941 and 1945. The article seeks to provide a film-historical analysis of the works that has been missing in the Theresienstadt film studies context as well as in studies of documentary film on Holocaust. It examines the history of the films’ production as well as their reception by the public, press and official cultural establishment. At the same time, it explores the films’ cultural-political significance in the context of late 1950s and early 1960s Czechoslovakia. The analysis is based on original research at the Archives of the Jewish Museum in Prague, on contemporary press critic and oral history sources including two interviews with the survivors who participated on making of the films, Helga Hošková-Weissová and Anna Hyndráková, conducted by the author throughout 2019.

The director Maria Kourkouta and the writer Niki Giannari were working on a film about the Greek Civil War of the 1940s when, in February 2016, they decided to film the living conditions of displaced people from Syria, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other, at the Idomeni camp on the border to Macedonia. By covering the work of the two artists, this article develops the idea of a “spectrology of the border”. As the frontiers of the European continent are subject to surveillance devices and transit across them is contained and controlled, cinema investigates the specific quality of these spaces and the memorial depth of the actions taking shape there. Thanks to the obstinacy of the cinematic gaze, it becomes privy to a surplus of vision, which allows it to show spectators certain aspects that are not visible to the naked eye as well as forms of continuity in the discontinuity, between the present and the past.

This paper discuss a digital video project I have done, which results from a visual ethnography project about my own life in the past thirteen years. The project began as one to document others, and gradually grew more and consciously in the direction of autoethnography as I became increasingly interested in questions of visual anthropology, ethnomethodology in Cultural Studies, historiography, and women’s writings and autobiography. Alongside, the works of Chantel Akerman, Su Friedrich and John Mekas have opened up questions of performativity, automatism and editing as a concentrated phase of making senses of oneself via organization. While these are also core issues in my project, my concern with the epistemological character historiography, the material emphasis of ethnographic research, and the notion of automatism as a creative impulse/principle/method from my tangential relation to these seminal works. A traveling self of an Asian woman in world cities would be deconstructed as to how useful ethnic identities are in these self journeys.
***The presentation was accompanied by the screening of an excerpt from the author's video work I TOLD THEM MY CAMERA WAS ON (final revised version 2005)

In November of 2015, I presented my research on "City Symphonies in Reverse" for the Symposium on experimental cinema, "Symposium: créer/montrer/conserver," at the Cinémathèque québécoise. It was then translated into French for the online publication, Hors Champ.

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This paper explores the last three documentaries made by Japanese filmmaker Sato Makoto before his early death in 2007. Self and Others (2000), Memories of Agano (2004), and Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said (2005). They are not only a prime example of his uniqueness in the recent history of Japanese cinema, but also a triptych that, albeit in retrospect, could put Sato on the international documentary map and give him the rightful place in the history of cinema. This is at least one of the goals of this essay. These works also reflect and partially crystallize some of the main developments undertaken by Japanese documentary in the last fifty years. In addition, I analyze how Sato was also a very “international” documentarian: Curious and aware of what was going on in the documentary scene around the world and always open to exploring and charting new territories, as he was also a theorist who authored some very important volumes on nonfiction cinema, his last movies have an ess...

Marie-Josèphe Angélique was a black slave in New France (Montreal, Canada) tried for setting a fire, burning down much of what is now known as Old Montreal. She was brutally tortured and hanged, her body eventually burned to ash in 1734. In recent years, there has been an increased national interest in the figure of Marie-Josèphe Angélique, however, scholars and authorities have not come to an agreement about her hanging. Some speculate that the authorities, under pressure from an enraged population seeking a scapegoat, took the easy way out and condemned Angélique. Others believe that Angélique was determined to undermine the slave system and started the fire as revenge against her owner.

I explore these racial anxieties through my video piece "Anna O and the Case of Displaced Memory" (2017). I employed found footage as a mode of inquiry and aesthetic exploration into notions of appropriation, documentation and intertextuality. The hanging of Marie-Josèphe Angélique provides an entry point to explore the relationship between the constitution of a racialized self, racial representation and the construction of collective memory.

The chapter discusses how film and the Anthropocene are closely entangled. Given that the Anthropocene addresses all realms of life also the aesthetic become eco-political. The paper addresses recent films by German filmmaker and activist Elke Marhöfer. By drawing on the concept of subjectivity beyond human individuals and following philosopher and psychiatrist Félix Guattari the text explores what could be sites of subjectivation rooted in film viewing. New modes of subjectivity are necessary to face major challenges of societies in the active resistance of the contemporary climate regime. Documentary films, as discussed in the text, are able to work far beyond the transmission of information and content but bear the potential to explore new ways of perception, experience and perspective creating the texture of possible ecological subjectivities. Not only nature and culture, but living and nonliving, human and environment need to be thought anew. Film can contribute to this ongoing reconceptualization of subjectivities as humans are searching for new ways of being with the world.

Filem dokumentari. Semestinya apa yang sedang berlegar-legar di fikiran anda ialah suara pencerita (narrator), sejarah, kisah benar, hidupan liar, teknologi, dan alam semula jadi. Tetapi, pernahkah anda terfikir untuk melihat satu dokumentari dalam bentuk eksperimental untuk menyampaikan sesuatu cerita atau fakta sejarah atau sesuatu cerita yang kita tidak tahu. Apa itu dokumentari? Dokumentari ialah fakta dan sumber fakta tersebut tidak diolah atau tidak dibuat-buat. Berdasarkan kisah benar kemudian di visualkan semula untuk tontonan umum. Sumber diperoleh daripada keratan akhbar, orang sebagai sumber rujukan, sejarawan, cerita-cerita dari orang sekeliling seperti mitos, sejarah tempat mahupun orang penting. Selain itu, dokumentari juga dapat memberi informasi kepada penonton. Manakala, ekperimental ialah sesuatu yang sukar untuk di klasifikasikan, sukar difahami, mempunyai visual-visual yang pelik dan selalunya di gunakan untuk mengekspresikan emosi atau perasaan terhadap sesuatu. Namun, apa itu surrealisme pula? Secara umumnya seperti yang kita tahu, surrealisme adalah sesuatu idea atau pemikiran untuk menggabungkan atau mencantumkan gambar-gambar lain dengan gambar yang lain.

“The stories these women tell envision a radically different moment in art-world history, one in which questions of career
    and market are barely mentioned, and philosophical arguments are firmly grounded in street-level politics.
    Braderman’s take is unabashedly utopian and celebratory but looks to the past for lessons rather than
    nostalgia.”
    -ARTFORUM


    “gives a joyful sense of what it was like to be a feminist in the 1970s, a time when everything seemed possible.”
    -New York Times

    “The animation in THE HERETICS breaks new ground and adds a terrific element to this otherwise fascinating portrait of a generation of important artists and women.”
    -Abby Ginzberg

In the following paper I will seek to illustrate how four documentaries made in recent years by young Tai-wanese filmmakers, Le Moulin (2015), Wansei Painter – Tetsuomi Tateishi (2016), Letter #69 (2016) and 3 Islands (2015), display a fresh and original approach in the landscape of contemporary non-fiction cinema both on the island and in Southeast Asia as a whole. These works not only embody the hybrid and transitional quality that has been an essential part of Taiwanese cinema since its beginning, reflecting the colonial past of the island since the seventeenth century, but also explore the aesthetic boundaries of documentary by crossing into the field of contemporary art. Mapping the formal thresholds of non-fiction cinema, and pointing to relatively uncharted cinematic territories where archival material, poetry, written texts and reen-actment intertwine and blend, these documentaries also reveal the complexity and black holes of the visual representation of history.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Forgetting Vietnam traverses time and space of the filmmaker’s country of birth, North and South, land and water, sounds and images. The film marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and commemorates its survivors. And yet, in 90mins., the Vietnam War is felt and evoked though never “seen.” That is why the role of images and cinematic representation in remembering and forgetting is one of the concerns of this film, but by no means the only theme nor the subject-matter of the film. While profoundly immersed in Vietnamese life, imagery and history, it also interrogates the power of cinema, seeing and recording, and the relation between inside(r) and outside(r). More prominently than in any of her works—with the exception of Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989), which is the only other film Trinh made that is concerned with Vietnam—the modes and sites of memory and forgetting are central to the film. The film asks, “Who remembers? Who conceals?” a...

MOVING ANTS ON A PAINTED TREE is an image that we – an artist (Iris Blauensteiner) and an anthropologist (Christine Moderbacher) – stumbled across while attempting to film container villages built during the so called “refugee crisis” in 2015 at the Austrian Slovakian border area. As in many border regions of Austria, Germany and other EU-countries, people were temporarily accommodated in containers at the parking lot of the old tollhouse at the former border station. The containers symbolized inclusion and exclusion at the same time. In the meantime, almost all of these temporary villages, including the one near to the small village of Berg, have been dismantled. Through participatory workshops with the local population, we aimed to question what traces have remained in an area that is marked by the continuous opening and closing of borders. But nobody came to our workshops and very few people wanted to talk to us at all. “Refugees, borders… nobody is interested in that anymore!” we heard many times. What remained from a one-month residency on site were many images -  one of them was this image. And the question: “What do you see?"

(A project supported by Viertelfestival, Otto Mauer Fonds, Gemeinde Berg, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle.)

The paper was an introduction to the screening of my experimental video work VOICES SEEN, IMAGES HEARD, which raises questions of the use of sight and sound in history-writing. My presentation and screening of my work was followed by a response paper/citation by Prof. Alf Luedtke, Chair of the historians' workshop

In the following paper I will seek to illustrate how four documentaries made in recent years by young Taiwanese filmmakers, Le Moulin (2015), Wansei Painter - Tetsuomi Tateishi (2016), Letter #69 (2016) and 3 Islands (2015), display a fresh and original approach in the landscape of contemporary non-fiction cinema both on the island and in Southeast Asia as a whole. These works not only embody the hybrid and transitional quality that has been an essential part of Taiwanese cinema since its beginning, reflecting the colonial past of the island since the seventeenth century, but also explore the aesthetic boundaries of documentary by crossing into the field of contemporary art. Mapping the formal thresholds of non-fiction cinema, and pointing to relatively uncharted cinematic territories where archival material, poetry, written texts and reenactment intertwine and blend, these documentaries also reveal the complexity and black holes of the visual representation of history.

REVIEWS
“This is a brilliant and important book. The application of theory is exemplary, and - ever attentive to production contexts, neo-colonial tensions and the subtleties of each film text - Wallenbrock engagingly reflects on the ambiguities of recent trans-historical representations of the Franco-Algerian War. A fascinating meditation on memory, violence and cinema.” –  Guy Austin, Professor of French Studies, Newcastle University, UK

“The Franco-Algerian War Through a Twenty-First Century Lens provides a rich analysis of contemporary filmic representations of the war and opens new avenues of inquiry into transnational processes of remembrance.” –  Jennifer Howell, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Illinois State University, USA

“The centrality of cinema in the Franco-Algerian relationship called for Nicole Wallenbrock's The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens. This wonderful scholarly intervention offers a fresh and important look at cinema as a the most visible site in the contest and transmission of the colonial, anticolonial, and post-colonial histories in France and Algeria. Her ability to deploy rigorous historical research, rich and thoughtful analysis of film and filmmakers over the past 70 years, and a personal touch that comes through her sustained oral histories with many leading directors, puts her into a unique class of film scholars. This book illustrates how how film and cinema interacted with the past and how our present is informed by the media and art in this increasingly influential transnational arena.” –  James Le Sueur, Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA.

Por medio de un motivo tripartito -inspirado en la geometría- pretenderé presentar la película de los cineastas y artistas Ben Rivers y Ben Russell, “A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness” de 2013. Basándome en una estructura dividida en la forma, espacio-tiempo y narrativa.

8:15 – 9:45 Can Blackness be Loved?

A screening of Dreams are Colder than Death (Arthur Jafa, 2013, 52 min) a lyrical mediation on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which gives way to a philosophical reflection on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the possibility of love in the context of the “afterlife of slavery.” 
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Arthur Jafa, Kara Keeling (University of Southern California), and George Yancy (Emory University).

An event organized by liquid blackness and the Department of Film and Media Studies, Emory University (Matthew Bernstein)