Issue #83 The Reality-Based Community

The Reality-Based Community

Erika Balsom

83_Balsom_6

Film still from Kevin Jerome Everson's Tonsler Park (2017). 80", 16mm, b&w, sound. Copyright: Kevin Jerome Everson; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures.

Issue #83
June 2017










Notes
1

Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004 .

2

Bill Nichols aligns the observational mode with direct cinema and cinéma vérité, characterizing it as stressing the nonintervention of the filmmaker, relying on an impression of real time, the “exhaustive depiction of the everyday,” lacking retrospective commentary, and providing the “expectation of transparent access.” See Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 38–44.

3

For the paradigmatic critique of photographic truth as socially constructed, see John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

4

Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 62.

5

Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitmations (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 243.

6

Linda Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary,” Film Quarterly 46, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 9–21.

7

See, for instance, Linda Nochlin, “Documented Success,” Artforum, September 2002, 161–3; Hito Steyerl, “Art or Life? Jargons of Documentary Authenticity,” Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited, eds. Jill Daniels, Cahal McLaughlin, and Gail Pearce (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 6–7.

8

Paul Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments),” Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 109.

9

This attitude is particularly pronounced in the writings of Ricciotto Canudo. For an extended consideration of this question, see Erika Balsom, “One Hundred Years of Low Definition,” Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).

10

Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories,” 20.

11

Winston, Claiming the Real, 259; and Brian Winston, “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription,” Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1995), 56.

12

Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 76.

13

In his 1999 “Minnesota Declaration,” Werner Herzog calls the truth of cinéma vérité “a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” and opposes to it the “deeper strata” of “poetic, ecstatic truth” that “can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” See Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” .

14

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575–99.

15

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–48.

16

As a practice of love that seeks to repair damage and move beyond negative affects, this attitude shares aspects of Eve Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51.

17

Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 593–94.

18

Volker Pantenburg, “‘Now that’s Brecht at last!’: Harun Farocki’s Observational Films,” Documentary Across Disciplines, eds. Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (Berlin/Cambridge: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and MIT Press, 2016), 153.

19

Harun Farocki, “On the Documentary,” in “Supercommunity,” special issue, e-flux journal 65 (May 2015) .

20

Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl, Cahier #2: A Magical Imitation of Reality (Milan: Kaleidoscope Press, 2011), 20.

21

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1979), 474.

22

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, (1941) 2001), 9.