Rehabilitating Observation: The Persistence of Observational Documentary in the Age of Post-Truth Politics

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Nanna Rebekka Jensen

Abstract

With the postmodernist realignment of our epistemological foundations, contemporary documentary has come to be marked by the idea that problematizing the relationship with the real is inherently good and progressive, and that the core quality of contemporary documentary has come to be its suspicion towards its own relationship to the real (Steyerl 2011; Rangan 2014; Takahashi 2015). In a time, which the assertion of the indiscernibility between fact and fiction has been appropriated by discourses of power I will argue that the facticity of reality needs our attention and care more than our suspicion. Thus, following philosophical proposals for a new empiricism (Latour 2004; Haraway 1988), and a Bazinian ontologization of cinema (Bazin 2005a, 2005b), I will argue for the persistence of observational documentary and a new critical realism set in the vein of contemporary observational documentary practises like Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012) and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park (2017).

Keywords: Documentary theory, Truth production, Observational documentary, New empiricism, Situated knowledges, Reflexivity, Lens-based capture, Representation

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