CFP [Submissions Open – Jan 19]: Visible Evidence

1. Documenting the North. With Visible Evidence XXII hosted in one of the world’s largest polar countries, it seems fitting to consider anew the long and contested tradition of cinematic documentation of the North, which has played such a generative role in the evolution of the documentary medium. For the past several decades, the “North” has been talking back in films and videos produced by First Nations film and video artists and activists across the polar regions; who have eagerly and ingeniously embraced new digital technologies, satellite transmission and the Internet as key modes of self-definition crucial to the preservation and documentation of evolving cultural identities.

2. Expanded Documentary and Immersive Technologies. Documentary has always evolved in tandem with technological change but perhaps never more kinetically than in our current moment with the profusion of interactive and augmented reality documentary, documentary games, locative and 3D docs. Whether high or low tech, new technologies of production and dissemination are profoundly altering the way in which we experience documentary. What are we to make of the imperative for greater indexical veracity and the intense visceral pleasures of sensory immersion that new technologies seem to promise? Where are the productive slippages between the real and the virtual when presented with the phenomenological fantasy of immersion?

3. The Charge of the Real: Art, Documentary and the Social. Cultural and political issues traditionally addressed in documentary film and photography are now increasingly encountered in gallery contexts. While artists reanimate documentary methods and traditions to ground their speculative works in the actuality of social and political life, documentary makers are also experimenting with open-ended narrative structures, multimodal and diverse delivery platforms that endeavor to create socially charged encounters in new spaces, both virtual and physical, that are not confined to the cinema screen.

4. Counter-Surveillance and Citizen Journalism. As live blogs on ‘Occupy’ protests and footage of Syrian atrocities posted on YouTube attest, anyone with a cell phone is now empowered to bear witness and disseminate critical evidence via visual and auditory media. Contemporary opposition movements have all been amplified and documented by citizen journalists exercising sousveillance by employing mobile cameras, the Internet and Twitter to deliver nearly instantaneous ‘amateur’ and ‘unauthorized’ video footage of evolving dramatic events. To what extent is citizen journalism the obverse of the surveillance society, where the omnipresence of cell phones and digital cameras ensures that the actions of an oppressive state will be documented, witnessed and broadcast to the world via the Internet?

5. Archival Activism. While public archives suffer under neoliberal funding assaults, digitization and the Internet have enabled a flourishing of new archival sources where ripping and stealing, posting and sharing, shape a new dynamic of archival mediations. These trends highlight the fallibility of the archive, revealing its ‘leakiness,’ as an authoritative repository of meaning and uncontested histories. Yet the archive continues to hold a deeply seductive lure for filmmakers and viewers who continue to engage in acts of recovery, re-appropriation and re-combination, particularly where the archival artifact is deployed ‘against the grain’ for the purposes of writing counter histories.

6. Genocide/ Trauma/ Memory Projects. Documenting the trauma of genocide presents a unique set of challenges weighted with profound political, juridical and ethical significance. From the multitude of films on the Holocaust to more recent work on the Rwandan, Cambodian and Indonesian genocides, there exists a complex and longstanding social imperative to develop interpretative frames via explanatory or aesthetic forms adequate to witnessing events that, in their extremity, resist assimilation into conventional modes of understanding. The paradoxical logic of traumatic testimony — whether shared by perpetrator or victim — is governed by obfuscations, repression, and the aporias of memory. Responses to these challenges have ranged from the encyclopedic impulse to the purposeful deployment of enactment and performance as a means to highlight the reality that arriving at the ‘truth’ of any genocide will remain a textually complex endeavor.

Panels, Papers, Workshops, and Screenings