230631 Theorizing Documentary: Blues and Black Music (S) (WiSe 2009/2010)

Theorizing Documentary: Blues and Black Music

This seminar will pursue an intermedia approach and explore the intersection of film and musical discourse in documentaries on music such as Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and The Soul of a Man (2003). Exploring theories on documentation and documentary film and analyzing film techniques used to represent music aesthetically as well as historically, this seminar aims at exposing the dynamics and tensions emerging from limits and possibilities of film (Renov 1993, Nichols 2002, María Luisa Ortega 2006, Bransford, 2008) to capture both the here-and-now of music in the moment of performance and to represent music in its historical development. Through a close analysis of narrative technique, camera technique, and the collage of representation and reconstruction of musical performance in various documentaries on blues music and other black musical forms this seminar intends to provide answers to three key questions: How is authenticity fabricated in documentary film? How is the gap between the here-and now and the historical captured in documentary film? How is the fluid aesthetic quality of musical improvisation and performance translated into the freezing form of documentary film?