Module description
This module will examine how and why a strong documentary impulse has emerged in twenty-first century cinema, with special attention to films that seek to challenge traditional assumptions about the documentary form and its association with objectivity, authenticity, and immediacy. We will explore how filmmakers have interrogated the complex relationships between reality and representation in ways that extend, expand, and contest cinema’s long documentary tradition in light of today’s social, geopolitical, and technological conditions. Contemporary engagements with documentary are multi-faceted and complex, reaching far beyond notions of “fly-on-the-wall” immediacy or quasi-scientific aspirations to objectivity. Accordingly, this module will explore practices that understand documentary not as the neutral picturing of reality, but as a way of coming to terms with actuality by working with and through images. Topics will include: performativity, testimony, ethnography, the essay film, ethics, reenactment, representations of violence and atrocity, the materiality of the digital image, and postcoloniality. Our overwhelming focus will be on feature-length films, but the module will also include brief explorations of documentary practices in the wider media ecology of artists’ film, surveillance and biometrics, television news, and video installation.
Assessment details
Assessment Pattern:
- Participation (10%)
- 1500 word essay (30%)
- 2500 word essay (60%)
Educational aims & objectives
In this module students will closely examine the development of documentary practices in the twenty-first century from the following perspectives: (1) the socio-political and cultural conditions that have given rise to documentary practices that question objectivity, authenticity, and immediacy; (2) the theoretical discourses that inform documentary practice, including questions of witnessing, violence, and cross-cultural representation; (3) the impact of new technologies on documentary practice; (4) modes of spectatorship, particularly concerning the ethics of the gaze; (5) the relationship between historical and contemporary documentary practices; and (6) the place of documentary cinema in a broader media ecology, including television, the Internet, and the operational images of surveillance, drones, and biometrics. The aim of this module is to enable students to undertake advanced study in documentary, with an emphasis on recent practice and theoretical methodologies.
Learning outcomes
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this module, students will be about to demonstrate intellectual, transferable, and practical skills appropriate to a Level 6 module and in particular will have gained:
1. the ability to select, synthesize, and apply diverse theoretical concepts and historical knowledge to the analysis of contemporary documentary;
2. systematic knowledge of contemporary documentary through theory, textual analysis, and contextual research;
3. the ability adjudicate on contesting critical perspectives to generate an original critical position in their essays;
4. a solid command of the scholarly debates in contemporary documentary studies; and
5. enhanced skills in collaboration and oral presentation
Teaching pattern
Ten one hour lectures, ten one hour seminars, ten two hour screenings.