Visible
Evidence XX
Stockholm,
Sweden
August
15-18, 2013
The
2013 edition of Visible Evidence – its 20th anniversary! - will convene August 15-18 in Stockholm, hosted by the
Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, and organized in
collaboration with the Royal Library, Filmform The Stockholm Archive of Art
Film and Video, and the Swedish Film Institute. In line with the previous
conferences, Visible Evidence XX will address the history, theory, and
practice of documentary cinema, television, video, audio recording, digital
media, photography, and performance.
Proposed panels and presentations may address any aspect of
documentary film and documentary screen cultures, or any theoretical or
historical approach to documentary. At the same time, demarcating its 20th
anniversary, Visible Evidence XX will pay special attention to a set of
problems that have been subject to recurrent articulation during these two
decades of conferences and related scholarship. These are salient issues that
call for further exploration, new theoretical and historical insights in
scholarly work, and which reverberate, or are subject to conceptual work, in
film and media.
Proposals for panels and presentations to VE XX may address, but
are not limited to, the following themes:
Experimental
Ethnography
Ethnographic
film is traditionally described as a cultural practice connected to the social
sciences, a branch of anthropology, as well as an aesthetic practice within a
category of cultural production, a subgenre of the documentary tradition. While
the ethnographic relies heavily on the implied truth claim of photographic and
filmic representation, experimental work in film and media resonate with
conceptual explorations of sound-image materiality, the visceral impact of
rhythm in moving images, or of film images simulating dreams and desires. These
are practices that often bring attention to the devices of camera inscription,
mediation, or projection through which the represented motifs are bound to
transform. Experimental film also in the sense of avant-garde practices engaged
in a polemics to provoke material changes to the practices and products of
cinema.
Looking
back at the previous editions of Visible Evidence, panels, presentations and
screenings have often related to “experimental ethnography”. Attention has been
paid to the historical intersections of documentary and avant-garde cinema, to
the ethical and ideological implications in filming the other. Catherine
Russell’s Experimental Ethnography. The Work of Film in the Age of Video
(Duke University Press, 1999) stands out as a recurrent reference. In line with
Russell’s account of experimental ethnography as “a critical method produced in
and through film and video”, we encourage historical and contemporary
approaches to these intersections of experimental form and anthropology, while
also reassessing related concerns of subjectivity and self-representation, of
drama documentary and social representation. For VE XX, we suggest more broadly
to acknowledge “experimental ethnography” as a hybrid form in historical and
contemporary media practices, foregrounding the productive (or problematic)
meeting of seemingly oppositional impulses.
Possible
topics may include, but are not limited to:
· Postcolonial
perspectives on cultural identity and representation in moving images.
· Life stories in
re-enactment (first person docs, longitudinal docs, drama documentary,
animation).
· Social representation in
video art and film installations.
· Cultural representation
and social media.
· Film as a tool in social
research.
· Documentary concerns of
visual anthropology and social psychology.
Affect,
Agency and Social Mobilization
In
Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (2011), Elizabeth Cowie defines the
documentary as “an embodied storytelling that, while a narrativizing of reality
in images and sounds, engages us with the actions and feelings of social
actors, like characters in fiction”. Highlighting the importance of emotional
engagement with the seen, Cowie proposes a return to the concept of
identification in order to understand how, as “a matter of knowledge” “we must
identify with facts and recognize their meanings”. Inspired by Cowie and
others’ approaches to “documentary desire”, we propose, for Visible Evidence XX,
a special attention to the consequences of the interdisciplinary affective
turn, or die Wende zur Emotion, for the study of documentary cinema.
While
inviting further theorizing of documentary viewing beyond problematic dualisms
between rational understanding and emotional response, the affective turn in
cinema and media studies also occasions a rethinking of the debates around
instrumentalization of affect. It urges to re-examine the legacies of
‘committed documentary’ and, more broadly, the variety of affective rhetoric
(from melodrama, to shock, trauma and spectacle) in documentary practices and,
conversely, uses of documentary for mobilizing affect. Whereas historical
studies of affective mobilization often have focused on state propaganda, we
especially encourage investigations of historical and contemporary cases of
mobilizing affect for political agency and social activism. These may include
the extensive, ubiquitous documentation of ongoing social and political
actions, movements and insurrections as well as the uses of documentary
practices to articulate contemporary and historical structures of feeling:
experiences of injury, hurt and violence, vulnerability and precariousness.
This occasions, furthermore, investigations of affective strategies for
preventing engagement as identification.
Papers
may address but are not limited to the following topics:
•
Documentary
viewing as affective engagement
•
Aversion
to attachment: mobilizing affects in documentary practices (independent,
institutional, historical, contemporary)
•
Documentary
in/as activism (e.g. histories of feminist, queer or antiracist activism)
•
Affective
politics of documentary (e.g. histories and practices of ‘committed
documentary’, critiques of instrumentalization of emotion)
•
Melodrama
and documentary aesthetics of emotion
Documentary
Art; Documenting the Arts
Implied
in this theme is the recurrent overlaps in the history of cinema between
artists’ and filmmakers’ experimental approaches to camera perception, and the
various modes of forging and orchestrating people, places, and past events,
which characterize the aesthetics and attractions of documentary narratives in
moving images. There are simply, and have never been, any clear division
between experimental film and video, and documentary filmmakers’ creative
treatment of actuality. We encourage theoretical perspectives and conceptual
approaches to innovative form, elaborate soundscapes, montage, or alternative
platforms for the display and experience of recorded sound-images.
Live
art events are founded on a philosophy and aesthetics that emphasize the
ephemeral and singular of the here and now, yet documentation has proven
central. Anything from spontaneous informal documentation by the audience, to
professional filmmakers hired to document the event, these often scattered and
overlooked records are central for the understanding of these art forms as well
as for their repeatability, for establishing a canon, and the possibility for
writing the history of the live arts. Documentary Art; Documenting the Arts encourages
contributions that also may help to fill this blank in the history of
documentary cinema.
Another
facet of this theme concerns the postwar genre of the “Arts documentary”. In
postwar Europe films of contemporary art developed into a creative venue of
documentary filmmaking where experimental cinema merged with educational
narratives, broadcasting media, and the poetics of the film essay. Critics of
the time observed the aesthetic experience of viewing paintings and sculptures
animated by means of the camera eye, the moving image, and the cinematic
montage. Reviewing Van Gogh (Alain Resnais, 1948), André Bazin famously
celebrated Resnais’ exploration of the canvas, “stripping Van Gogh of his
yellows.”
In
the light of the ongoing discussions of the migration of a documentary
sensibility, or mode of address, into new arenas, Documentary Art aligns
with documentary images and the appropriation and transformation of film in the
art gallery. We would welcome theoretical and case-oriented considerations of
installation film and video art, including the ways in which installations and
performances engage conceptually with documentary problems of, for example
spectatorship, affect, collective memory, or veracity.
Papers
may address but are not limited to the following topics:
· Tensions and conflicts
articulated in the encounter between art and documentary practices
· The filmic and
photographic documentation of live art events, such as, performance art, art
happenings, dance, street-art activism, or certain site-specific art.
· Portraits of individual
artists, individual artworks, or the documentation of the creative process.
This includes both educational documentaries, works for television and experimental
approaches to the art documentary where the documentary form follows, or
confronts, the subject matter.
· Artworks that engage, or
are informed by documentary discourse.
Alternative
Archives
The
material and philosophical aspects of the moving image as a temporal object,
and of cinema as a “technology of memory” (Bernard Stiegler), suggest that in
due time every film and media representation turns into a document. This
implied archival status of moving images are not less compelling today,
although “the record” seems often to be detached from its traditional
materiality and physical location. The production and re-production of media
memories has always been at the core of documentary theory, and the potential
allegory of the film as an archive tends to be even more pronounced in
documentary filmmakers’ committed outlook on the present and the past.
Previous
Visible Evidence conferences have brought attention to the multiple
signification of the archive in the different practices and technologies of
documentary; how archive traces are being used to express historical truth
claims, to infuse narrative imagination, or even to contest the testimonial
functions of archive material in media culture. Presentations and screenings
have reminded us of the overlooked archives of recorded sounds and voices, or
how animated films and video installations may stress documentary experience
beyond the visual. Institutional and ideological perspectives of the archive
have been accounted for in case studies on the potential articulation of memory
in moving images, of memory work and trauma, or of untold life stories beyond
official versions of History.
The
suggested conference theme refers to “alternative” in the sense of emancipatory
counter-cultures or complementary archive practices, but also in the sense of
“subjugated film histories”, a term coined by Patricia Zimmermann in Reel
Families. A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana University Press,
1995). To this may be added that even major national archives, which indeed
contain material of considerable cultural and historical significance, are
being overlooked or disregarded, destroyed or closed down, protected from
public access, or simply devoid of scholarly attention. For example, as
elsewhere in Europe, the national history of public television fuses with that
of documentary filmmaking and, yet, the importance of a major archive such as
that of the Swedish Radio Corporation has only briefly been acknowledged.
Papers
may address, but are not limited to, one of the following topics:
· Private archives: Amateur film, home movies and Internet
cultures of domestic representation and private archives.
· Historical and contemporary perspectives on
preservation, regulation, and cultural heritage.
· The reuse of archival material or “found
footage”: strategies of compilation and orchestration.
· Broadcasting media and educational film
· Explanatory abstractions and the spectacular in
science films.
Panel,
Workshop, and Paper Guidelines and Deadlines
We
especially encourage pre-constituted panels in order to strengthen the thematic
coherence of the conference, but you may also choose to send a proposal for an
individual paper. These are the options regarding your proposal for VE XX:
(1) You may propose a
pre-constituted panel, or be one of the three suggested presenters of a
pre-constituted panel.
(2) You may to send in a
proposal for an individual paper presentation.
(3) You may propose a
workshop (4-5 people) in relation to one of the suggested conference themes.
Panels
may consist of 3 speakers with a maximum of 20 minutes speaking time each. All
presenters are encouraged to provide a title, an abstract of max 150 words, 3-5
key bibliographical references, name of the presenter and institutional
affiliation.
Workshops
may consist of 4-5 people, and the idea is to copy the constructive workshop
model used at the conference in NY 2011, according to which workshop presenters
can present up to thirty minutes collectively of prepared or informal material.
However,
the emphasis of workshops is on the open, unstructured exchange of ideas
between all workshop participants.
Please
note that as a participant you may submit only one paper proposal, either to
the open call or as a part of a pre-constituted panel. As for rejected panel
proposals, individual papers will be considered for the open call and may be
accepted as such. Participants in workshops may also propose individual papers
or contribute to a pre-constituted panel.
Panel
and workshop organizers are asked to submit panel proposals including a
panel/workshop title, a short description (up to 100 words) of the
panel/workshop and information on all the presenters/papers as listed above.
If you prefer to send a proposal for an individual
paper presentation, please make sure to provide a title, an abstract of max 150 words,
3-5 key bibliographical references, name of the presenter and institutional
affiliation.
Please
submit your proposal before January 31, 2013. We will make sure to have
a conference website by the beginning of January, where you may submit your
proposal in a submission area by filling in a form. For questions regarding VE
XX: Conference assistant Sofia Bull and organizer Malin Wahlberg will receive
your e-mails at the following address: vexx2013@ims.su.se
Best
wishes, the Stockholm Conference Committee:
Malin
Wahlberg (Department of Media Studies, Section for Cinema Studies/Stockholm
University)
Anu
Koivunen (Department of Media Studies, Section for Cinema Studies/Stockholm
University)
Patrik
Sjöberg (Cinema Studies/Karlstad University)
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