Documentary Across Disciplines eds.

by Erika Balsom and Hila

Peleg (review)

S. Topiary Landberg

Biography, Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2018, pp. 389-392 (Review)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2018.0030

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/699266

Access provided by Martynas Mazvydas National Library of Lithuania (30 Jul 2018 17:55 GMT)
 Reviews 389

This obsession with his taxonomy does seem to me a serious flaw in this in-
teresting project and one that limits the capacity to encompass autobiography
adequately within historiography.
Barbara Caine

Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, editors. Documentary Across Disciplines. Haus Der
Kulturen der Welt and MIT Press, 2016, 328 pp. ISBN 978-0262529068,
$24.95.
In Documentary Across Disciplines, editors Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg have
curated a provocative cross-disciplinary collection of writings that redefine
the idea of the documentary. This is a book that expands the idea of non-
fiction media beyond designations usually found in film studies. It explores
topics relevant to contemporary issues, such as the representation of truth
and reality, the changing forms of legal evidence and indexicality, and ideas
about subjectivity and agency informed by postcolonial theory: topics rel-
evant to contemporary visual art, new media studies, literature, and ethno-
graphic practices in the social sciences. In their introduction, the editors ex-
plain that Documentary Across Disciplines emerged out of a desire to reframe
or redefine documentary practice in the context of what is often referred to as
“the documentary turn” in contemporary visual art. Referencing the prolif-
eration of documentary media projects within the international art exhibition
context, the book grapples with the project of expanding the conception of
documentary practices beyond film studies for the benefit of a wide range of
documentary practitioners. Offering “a corrective to historical myopia” and
challenging “the claims of novelty that sometimes accompany documentary
in an art context” (18), many of the chapters provide reconsiderations of his-
torical works from experimental film, ethnography, literature, and the visual
art world in order to offer new ways of thinking about the definition of docu-
mentary.
Artfully edited by Balsom and Peleg, the entries in this book not only
stand alone as individual pieces but reflect upon each other, sometimes refer-
ring to or even reframing works mentioned in a previous chapter, revealing
ways in which the entries are literally or figuratively in conversation. This in-
tertextuality makes sense, as this book project emerged out of the biannual
Berlin Documentary Forum sponsored by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
under the artistic direction of Hila Peleg. But rather than being a compila-
tion of forum proceedings, Documentary Across Disciplines is a creative and
thoughtful reflection upon the theoretical and aesthetic concerns emerging
at the conferences in 2010, 2012, and 2014. Many of the chapters offer case
390 Biography vol. 41, no. 2, Spring 2018

studies for interdisciplinary and noncanonical understandings of the docu-

mentary form from across and beyond film, to include new media and prac-
tices beyond the moving image. Innovative essays discuss the use of photog-
raphy as an ethnographic tool for anthropological research, archived audio
interviews divorced from their original historical context, nonvisual types of
media such as biometric and atmospheric weather data, new camera tech-
nologies that capture nonhuman and environmental subjects, and police sur-
veillance footage used as evidence in criminal courts. The book also provides
a diverse range of stylistic approaches to writing, from critical essays to tran-
scribed conversations, memoir, and even poetry. In this way, this collection
considers nonfiction across disciplines in both form and content, presenting
a view of documentary not as a category or genre, but as a critical method, an
attitude, a way of engaging and creating that attests to multiple and mutable
actualities.
Of particular interest is the way the book activates the concept of mon-
tage. In one way, the montage of different writing styles and modes of re-
flection throughout the book creates a sense of multiplicity, formal entan-
glement, and interdisciplinary methodology. The concept of montage is also
directly addressed in the chapter “Montage Against All Odds,” a provocative
conversation between the Berlin/Graz-based art historian and curator Anto-
nia Majaca and the Israeli filmmaker and curator Eyal Sivan. The two discuss
Sivan’s 2010 four-part program of screenings and encounters called Docu-
mentary Moments and his 2012 follow-up program entitled Montage Interdit,
which took place at the Berlin Documentary Forums. These programs used
fragments from a variety of canonical documentary films to explore the “lurk-
ing visual narrative of the continuity of extreme historical violence” (193).
Majaca and Sivan propose that the act of montage can be viewed not simply
as an aspect of cinematic technique but as an approach to intertextual analy-
sis, comparing works across both time and geography. This chapter might be
taken as a model for the activity of the book as a whole by naming the act of
montage as a central technique for engaging critically with representational
forms across history and discipline.
Another abiding concern animating the book is an interest in documen-
tary that moves beyond the confines of individual human experience. The
possibilities of ethical representation of both human and nonhuman subjec-
tivities is addressed in a chapter on the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab
film Leviathan by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. In conversa-
tion with environmental filmmaker Ben River, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel
discuss their “sensory ethnography” approach to documenting experiences on
a small-vessel fishing boat using multiple GoPro cameras, which they threw
 Reviews 391

overboard and attached to various elements of the boat. Their techniques de-
familiarize the viewer and gesture toward the possibilities of nonhuman sub-
jectivity by literally providing points of view not previously available with
standard human-operated film or video cameras. In a later chapter, Kris Fal-
lon discusses how new media works, such as Wind Map by Fernanda Viegas
and Martin Watenberg, use data-visualization techniques that dynamically
provide a continually updating visual experience of otherwise invisible forces
in the environment. Fallon makes the point that unlike bankrupted mod-
ernist notions of human universality, air is an element that provides a global
(nonhuman) connective thread for life on the planet. Comparing a number
of environmental data visualization projects that attempt to render visible
otherwise invisible aspects of the environment, Fallon concludes that these
contemporary new media artists are attempting to produce a kind of politi-
cal activism in their audiences, following from the tradition of the politically
committed documentary by activists of previous decades.
Providing a compelling framework for making nonfiction media history
relevant, Documentary Across Disciplines is concerned with engaging the idea
of the history of documentary in a number of compelling ways. Firstly, the
book establishes a sense of continuity between analogue and digital media
practices. Secondly, it attempts to tackle the founding contradictions of the
form: a mode of media practice at once bound to represent the real and at the
same time committed to the creative transformation of that reality. A num-
ber of the historical reframings in this book suggest that our contemporary
cynicism about the authenticity of images has existed for much longer than
the use of digital manipulation tools such as Photoshop. It reminds us that
for at least as long as documentary has claimed John Grierson’s mantle of the
“creative treatment of actuality,” the documentary has been the site of anxiety
about its trustworthiness. Thinking through the very foundational attributes
of the film form, Eyal Sivan reverses the idea of documentary as an ancillary
form to fiction filmmaking, provocatively suggesting that fiction might more
accurately be considered a genre of documentary (197). While not relinquish-
ing the postmodern, poststructuralist critique of objectivity, the editors assert
the need to focus on reality-based practices that intertwine the aesthetic and
the political in this time of global political upheaval. Thus, the works in the
book offer theoretical methods that move beyond timeworn crises about the
relativity of truth to provide ethical orientations toward collective social and
political material realities.
Documentary Across Disciplines stages an ontological turn for documen-
tary, a performance that seeks to redistribute importance onto the role of
the photograph and the essay form, as well as to provide a platform inclu-
sive of many European perspectives and works in the face of a film studies
392 Biography vol. 41, no. 2, Spring 2018

sub-discipline that has been historically dominated by North American schol-

ars and practices. Although many chapters focus on contemporary practices,
some of the book’s strongest entries reevaluate historical works in light of
our contemporary context. One such standout is Ariella Azoulay’s essay titled
“Photography Is Not Served: ‘The Family of Man’ and The Human Condi-
tion,” a reevaluation of the oft-cited photography exhibition The Family of
Man, curated by Edward Steichen and first exhibited at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art in 1955. Azoulay reanimates Roland Barthes’s legendary critique of
the original exhibition by invoking Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition
to confront what she argues is a misconception about the presentation of
universal humanity. Instead, she proposes to read the exhibit’s reception and
interpretation itself as content, enacting a kind of transhistorical documen-
tary practice that asserts a contextual and ever-shifting meaning for the act
of curation. Volker Pantenberg’s chapter about the films of the incomparable
German film essayist Harun Farocki provides another notable act of historical
reframing. In that essay, Pantenberg explores the importance of ambiguity in
rhetoric by analyzing the way that Farocki’s films contain a strangely impartial
quality in which the filmmaker seems neither to side with his protagonists nor
adopt an overly critical attitude. Of special interest for readers of Biography
will be the two separate chapters by Sylvère Lotringer describing his creative
process of “making time elastic.” Collecting oral history for projects that ex-
tend across decades, Lotringer describes how he often shelves material with-
out having exhausted its potential, only to discover the “proper format” for
that material many decades later when new contexts arise.
In short, Documentary Across Disciplines is an artful and relevant prod to
documentary studies within film and media studies. However, its real value
will be for visual artists, curators, ethnographic researchers, and other aca-
demics working in the expanded documentary realm. While undergraduates
may find some of the references and theoretical underpinnings harder to fol-
low, scholars and contemporary creative practitioners alike will benefit from
the depth of inquiry and historical context found in these pages.
S. Topiary Landberg

Mary Jo Bona. Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imag-
inary. Lexington Books, 2016, 158 pp. ISBN 978-1498525855, $79.00.
Women producing, decorating, mending, gifting, and selling cloth is an an-
cient trope indeed. From the Greek muses to the girls and women laboring
in exploitative clothing factories today, Mary Jo Bona links elements of this
enduring image to the sewing women of four culturally and historically dis-
tinct American novels: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Alice