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The politics of inscription in documentary film and photography
Abstract
This dissertation deals with the politics of cultural production in documentary film and photography. The axis of contemporary documentary production has shifted significantly, as people of color, women of all races and ethnicities, post-colonial peoples, and gays and lesbians, all of whom were traditional objects of documentary representation, have become active producing subjects. Yet post-structuralist cultural theory, which has significantly influenced film and photography studies, fails to account for, or support, acts of cultural production, focusing instead on the critical potential inherent in the moment of reception. This dissertation argues that an adequate theory of documentary production requires a producing subject, as well as a realist theory of language. It finds in Mikhail Bakhtin's writings on the novel a basis for theorizing the inscription of experience in language, and the practice of identity as the orchestration of the heteroglossic discourses that converge upon the self. It then links these reformulations of language, identity, and experience to key 20th century debates about realism, aesthetics, and the politics of image-making practices. Finally, the dissertation offers an extended critical analysis of photographer Anne Noggle's Silver Lining, and of the film Two Laws, a collaboration between an indigenous Australian community and two white Australian filmmakers. Silver Lining and Two Laws offer significant challenges to the politics of documentary production, and each in its own discursive mode shifts the basis of documentary practice from a mode of representation (the organization of pre-existing experience) to the active performance of reality.
Subject Area
Motion Pictures|Art History|Mass media
Recommended Citation
Fischel, Anne Beth, "The politics of inscription in documentary film and photography" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9219430.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9219430