230110 Documentary (S) (SoSe 2022)

What makes a documentary a documentary? British documentary pioneer John Grierson famously called the documentary “the creative treatment of actuality,” a phrase that resonates with the genre’s paradoxical premise: on the one hand, its claim to reality and authenticity, on the other, the filmmaker’s creative manipulation of their source material. How can the documentary contribute to our making sense of the world and challenge us into new ways of seeing? How do the documentary’s performative dimensions contest and complicate its claim to “truth,” and how does the documentary hold its ground in a world purportedly rife with so-called “alternative facts”? As a genre with a long history of reinforcing asymmetrical power relations (such as its lineage with ethnographic film), what is the documentary’s propensity to expose and subvert inequity?
In this seminar, we will ponder these and other questions and discuss our findings along with some of the theoretical foundations of the genre, including Bill Nichols’s six modes of the documentary and Stella Bruzzi’s writings on performative documentary, back-to-back with extracts from a number of classic and contemporary international documentary films and hereby delineate the possibilities and boundaries of cinematic documentary forms.

A note on language: This seminar will be conducted in English and the majority of readings are in English as well, though the selection of films may be more varied.

Target groups / Zielgruppen:
Kulturvermittlung, Modul 38-M2-KV / Theoretische Grundlagen, Modulelement: VM 2 Kulturtheorien (Seminar)

Anglistik, Modul 23-ANG-AngVM6 / Vertiefungsmodul 6: Media, Arts & Communication, Modulelement: VM 6.1 Theoretical and Historical Contexts (Seminar)

Requirements for participation, required level

While in-depth film analytical proficiency is not a requirement, newcomers to film studies are requested to acquaint themselves with some basics, such as by way of this brief introduction: https://filmanalysis.yale.edu/

Bibliography

Literature: To be announced.