Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary Jihoon Kim full chapter instant download
Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary Jihoon Kim full chapter instant download
https://ebookmass.com/product/critical-distance-in-documentary-
media-1st-ed-edition-gerda-cammaer/
https://ebookmass.com/product/documentary-resistance-social-
change-and-participatory-media-angela-j-aguayo/
https://ebookmass.com/product/beyond-bias-conservative-media-
documentary-form-and-the-politics-of-hysteria-scott-krzych/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-civil-rights-movement-a-
documentary-reader-first-published-edition-kirk/
Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty
First Century 10th Edition, (Ebook PDF)
https://ebookmass.com/product/environmental-policy-new-
directions-for-the-twenty-first-century-10th-edition-ebook-pdf/
https://ebookmass.com/product/governing-california-in-the-twenty-
first-century-seventh-edition/
https://ebookmass.com/product/cognitive-theory-and-documentary-
film-1st-ed-edition-catalin-brylla/
https://ebookmass.com/product/russian-arab-worlds-a-documentary-
history-eileen-m-kane/
https://ebookmass.com/product/militant-aesthetics-art-activism-
in-the-twenty-first-century-first-edition-martin-lang/
Documentary’s Expanded Fields
Documentary’s
Expanded Fields
New Media and the Twenty-First-Century
Documentary
Jihoon Kim
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197603819.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Sun Joo Lee,
Acknowledgments ix
Notes 251
Index 291
Acknowledgments
Documentary’s Expanded Fields. Jihoon Kim, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197603819.003.0001
2 Documentary’s Expanded Fields
the attacks and filmed them with their mobile phone. In so doing, it cross-referenced
the videos with the testimonies of the survivors, converting their images into a 3D
model of the hospital to locate the points and times of the attack. Video evidence
made by activists and professional journalists, too, was also used as a building block
for the group’s collaborative practice of investigation, which invited citizens’ partic-
ipatory acts of media witnessing and documentation. In Herbicidal Warfare in Gaza
(2019, figure I.2), a video report based on its collaboration with local NGOs and agri-
culturalists, the group used videos taken by an activist and their GPS data and jux-
taposed both with digitally processed aerial maps whose color spectrums indicate
vegetation health across the Gaza region over the past three decades of Israeli occu-
pation. In this way, the video demonstrates that the Israel military’s unannounced
aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides on the eastern border of Gaza since 2014
has resulted in the destruction of its farmlands and the loss of livelihoods for Gazan
farmers.
By combining the modes of alternative media activism and reenactment-based
investigative journalism with digital techniques and materials, including the videos
produced and circulated by the citizens equipped with networked digital interfaces
for recording and sharing, Forensic Architecture’s documentations not only inherit
but also transcend documentary’s participatory and performative modes. The latter
aspect enables us to consider the documentations as going beyond the boundaries of
traditional documentary cinema—its form, its components, and its methods of pro-
duction—while also calling upon us to devise an expanded definition of documentary
in the digital media regime of the twenty-first century. This definition, as Selmin Kara
and Daniel Marcus might suggest, establishes documentary “as a type of connector or
creative hub among vast fields of media activity” in tandem with the growing applica-
tion of “the extra-cinematic (such as the data culture, social and locative media, im-
mersive technologies, video games, animation, and graphic and experience design)”3
Introduction 3
Figure I.2 Still from Forensic Architecture, Herbicidal Warfare in Gaza (video
documentation, 2019). Courtesy of Forensic Architecture.
the historical changes of the households, cemeteries, and farmlands on the territory,
were also transposed into a navigable website entitled “Ground Truth: Destruction
and Return in al-Araqib” (https://www.naqab.org/). The interactive platform aims
not only to connect the political and environmental conflicts of the land in the pre-
sent with the history of its repeated destruction but also to update the community’s
ongoing and future acts of resistance against the governmental forces that make its
life precarious (figure I.4).
Forensic Architecture’s practices emblematize the ways in which activists and
protest groups use technologies similar to those exploited by military strategies and
governmental policies to transform our territories and borderlands into a constant
battlefield, turning them in favor of resisting their power. The result has been, as Kris
Fallon rightly observes, an explosion of experimentation with visual representation,
one that has spawned the hybridized forms of nonfiction practice that combine “older
technologies like photography, film, and video with newer technologies like digital
networks, social media, video games, and data visualization.”4 Added to this is that
these “hybridized forms,” encapsulated by the video documentations of Forensic
Architecture, lay claim to, and are indebted to, broader and more profound changes
in the five components of documentary cinema than the upgrade of alternative and
activist nonfiction practices: the aerial photos as documentary’s visible evidence are
manipulated multidimensionally with the help of digital techniques, through which
they are treated as graphic elements that are collated into the virtual model of the
territory; the group’s cameras mounted to kites or balloons and the British aerial
photos are linked to the contemporary proliferation of drones, whose view above
the ground exceeds the vision of the documentary camera as extension of human
Introduction 5
Figure I.4 Forensic Architecture’s online website “Ground Truth: Destruction and
Return in al-Araqib,” screenshot
sensorium; the group’s exhibition activities, which often involve multiple screens and
interactive platforms inside the gallery walls, are associated with the constellations
of moving image installation distinct from the standardized cinematic apparatus on
which theater-based documentary cinema is still built; the group’s interactive plat-
forms render as open-ended the documentary text and its storage of memory objects
and testimonies, their reception hingeing on the interplay of users’ activation and
their underlying algorithms; and finally, the villagers’ participatory production of the
amateur aerial footage is treated as integral to the group’s professional practice of al-
ternative and activist media.
nascent practices refashion and transform, namely, image, vision, dispositif, archive,
and activism, characterizing them as “documentary’s expanded fields.” This rubric
originates from my take on the two ideas of expansion associated with the dissolution
of the doctrine of modernist medium specificity in cinema and contemporary art.
The first idea is Gene Youngblood’s “expanded cinema,” which refers to an array
of nonstandardized cinematic practices in the 1960s and 1970s that problematize
and transcend the traditional boundaries of the cinematic image, apparatus, and
spectatorship. In his seminal and semiprophetic book Expanded Cinema (1970),
Youngblood demonstrates that these practices were derived from and reflective of
the profound effects of then nascent electronic and digital media. The intermedia
network that conditions human beings as their new environment, he argues, “carries
with it the potential of finally liberating cinema from its umbilical to theatre and lit-
erature since it forces the movies to expand into ever more complex areas of language
and experience.”5 For Youngblood, an array of technological and artistic innovations
of the time, such as video cameras and synthesizers, television, analog computers,
and multiprojection environments, do more than destabilize the hierarchies of cin-
ematic components (such as the prerequisite of the drama) and enlarge cinema’s
formal and aesthetic boundaries. The nonstandardized cinematic forms built upon
these innovations, as he envisions, ultimately respond to the new world, perception,
and consciousness that were being restructured by electronic and cybernetic tech-
nologies: the world marked by the global communication network that precipitates
the explosion of information and images; synesthesia as the combination of different
perceptual experiences; and a new ecological system of thinking that expands man’s
consciousness outside of his mind and into his natural and built surroundings. In this
regard, expanded cinema is, for Youngblood, a matter not simply of cinematic form: it
is also that of the cinematic apparatus, cinematic spectatorship, and the reality itself
that the form converts into a particular aesthetic experience. It is in this context that
Youngblood also contextualizes direct cinema and cinéma-vérité within a larger ev-
olutionary process, by which cinema was transforming itself through its embrace of
television that influenced both the human world and its mode of communication: “By
incorporating a kind of bastardized cinéma-vérité or newsreel style of photography
and behavior, the filmmaker has not moved closer to actual unstylized reality itself
but rather a reality prestylized to approximate our primary mode of knowing natural
events: television.”6
Youngblood’s quasi-prophetic observation on the nascent stage of electronic
and computational media, particularly his emphasis on their role in incorporating
new forms of consciousness, communication, behavior, and sociality, seems to have
increasing relevance to more than the expansion of cinematic forms in the domains
of contemporary art and new media art. These forms have gone hand in hand with the
transition to the “post-media condition,” in which the crisis of modernist medium
specificity due to the proliferation of electronic and digital technologies has allowed
“the emergence of artistic practices by which the media’s components have new, pre-
viously uncharted relationships with those of other media in ways that go beyond its
Introduction 7
corresponding materials. Thus, the term “expanded field” refers to the ways in which
postmodern art opens onto multiple sets of formal possibilities in a medium and
the diverse uses of different media rather than insisting on any singular operation of
the medium. It also suggests that the new sculptural practices in the expanded field
emerge from and spread across other places than that of traditional sculpture, for ex-
ample, the white cube. This results in dismantling a group of material and technical
hierarchies that underlie traditional sculpture, and blurring the boundaries between
what sculpture is and what it is not.
Krauss’s idea of the expanded field is pertinent to numerous moving image instal-
lations since the 1990s that adopt and transform cinematic components beyond the
confines of the movie theater and inside gallery walls. As Erika Balsom eloquently
notes, “Cinema becomes a preoccupation of contemporary art precisely at a time
when it is perceived to be in crisis due to the increasingly consolidated hegemony
of new, electronic media—media that would be digitized and networked as the
1990s progressed.”19 A more recent subtendency of the “cinema of exhibition,” “art-
ists’ cinema” inside the black box, or “gallery film”20 since 2000, has been an increase
in works that do not merely take as their theme the realities and subjects of tradi-
tional documentary cinema, but also rework its technical and aesthetic features, its
epistemological and ethical issues, and its modes of practice. This subtendency has
been demonstrated both in the growing popularity of documentary-oriented works
in various international exhibitions, including such mega-exhibition events as docu-
menta and biennales, and in the wide-ranging demography of the practitioners, who
include renowned veteran experimental documentary or essay filmmakers such as
Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah,
to name just a few, and a great number of the artists who have led the trend toward
artists’ cinema. The popularity of documentary installations is considerably indebted
to the “documentary turn” in the contemporary art of the 2000s, through which the
artist negotiates her artistic will with her involvement in social realities and “crosses
back and forth between the domains of reality and fiction.”21 The ways in which these
installations problematize the hierarchies of traditional cinema, however, are not
limited to that of reality and fiction. As art critic Boris Groys rightly points out, the
growing infiltration of moving images in the gallery space subverts two models “that
give us control over the length of time we spend looking at an image: the immobili-
zation of the image in the exhibition space or the immobilization of the viewer in the
movie theater.”22 Just as the moving image that changes over time inside the gallery
walls dismantles both the stability of an art object and the viewer’s freedom to deter-
mine how much time she spends on appreciating it, so too does it, often comprised
of multiple screens and viewing platforms that encourage the viewer’s mobility, de-
stabilize the traditional model of cinematic spectatorship that presupposes her sed-
entary position in front of the single screen. Groys’s insight suggests that moving
image installations, including documentary installations, thus are capable of not only
constructing the formation of screens and their relationship to the viewer beyond
those of traditional cinema, but also challenging the distinctions between cinema and
10 Documentary’s Expanded Fields
other artistic media and redrawing the former’s borders with the latter. The uses of
the term “expanded” in a couple of recent contemporary arts discourses attest to the
two effects of the moving image installations on redefining the formal and expressive
possibilities of documentary cinema. Anna Raczynski, for instance, writes that “the
term ‘expanded’ refers to the shifting role and evolving definition of documentary in
the artistic context and digital age, in which the merging of documentary with other
art forms such as video or performance results in entirely re-invented documentary
practice.”23 Similarly, Evgenia Giannouri calls a variety of documentary practices in
the realms of artistic creativity over the last two decades “expanded documentary.” It
is “understood as expanded not only in view of the diversity of the objects it produces
and practices it combines, but equally in view of the plurality of its objectives,” inas-
much as it is “inseparable from a paradoxical force that pushes the genre as we know it
beyond its established boundaries.”24
Still, the impacts of digital technologies on the form, media, and spectatorship of
documentary cinema in the twenty-first century are too pervasive to be reduced to
the documentary installations that reflect our complex screen ecologies and call for
our renewed understanding of the documentary apparatus. In his 2008 introduction
to the special issue on digital documentary for Studies in Documentary Film, Craig
Hight observed that a crucial challenge that it poses to documentary theorists would
be to redefine documentary itself “in favor of identifying a number of distinct prac-
tices that overlap the digital and analogue, moving and still image, photographic and
graphic, two-and three-dimensional, and distinct practices of engagement centered
on a clearly-defined continuum of interactivity and participation.”25 Hight’s obser-
vation is read as suggesting that the technologies problematize a set of technical and
ontological binaries that have determined the established category of the images in
documentary films and videos, such as lens-based/found images, production/post-
production, inscription/manipulation, observation/imagination, and photographic/
graphic images. For instance, digital technologies are able to challenge the traditional
conception of documentary cinema that privileges the camera’s observation of re-
ality while also downplaying animated, graphically rendered images as less authentic
and more fictional, with their capability of making coexist photographic stillness and
cinematic movement, photographic and graphic components, and lens-based and
manipulated records. It is possible, then, to stretch this idea of documentary expan-
sion as the challenge to the traditional definition of documentary cinema beyond its
images and into how the viewer perceives the images (vision), how she engages its
textuality and its formation of memory (archive), and how its forms and its effects
on audiences are reinvented with regard to social change and movement (activism).
The question can be divided into the following: How do drone cameras, GoPros, and
virtual reality (VR) interfaces undermine the idea of the human camera that has long
defined our anthropocentric understanding of documentary vision? How do inter-
active websites that champion the open, collaborative, and experiential forms of user
participation defy the idea of documentary film as a closed, preorganized text that
stores records of the past? Finally, how do the proliferation of mobile and networked
Introduction 11
devices for filming reality and sharing its records demand our refreshed conceptions
of radical documentary film and video, their producers, and their audiences?
Built upon the idea of expansion suggested by Youngblood and Krauss, this book
develops the following key arguments. First, in line with Youngblood’s line of thought,
what I call “documentary’s expanded fields” indicate the ways in which emerging
documentary practices and artifacts remediate the modes of traditional documen-
tary cinema beyond its standardized form, place, and spectatorship through incorpo-
rating new consciousness, behaviors, and cultural or political climates affected by the
digital technologies for production and postproduction of images and the nontheat-
rical experiential platforms, such as VR interfaces, the gallery, video-sharing services,
and interactive websites.26 Second, deepening Krauss’s idea, the expanded fields also
concern five horizons in which the emergent digital technologies and platforms have
led to inventive ways of recording, visualizing, and observing the real, creating ac-
counts and argumentation of the world, offering knowledge and memory of it, and
confronting new social and political realities insofar as they are geared toward refig-
uring the image, vision, apparatus, memory, and activism of documentary cinema.
between documentary films and other forms of cinema that include nonfiction com-
ponents. As Vinicius Navarro appropriately points out, however, Eitzen’s solution in
response to the elusiveness of documentary could be assessed beyond the problem of
distinguishing between fiction and nonfiction when we think of contemporary dig-
ital media. “Asking when is a documentary,” in this context, he writes, “implies dif-
ferent kind of elusiveness: the elusiveness of the documentary artifact.”38 During the
last two decades, the openness and indeterminacy of the documentary artifact has
been more than a matter of negotiating between fact and fiction, between subjectivity
and objectivity, and, as encapsulated by Winston’s concern with digital manipulation,
between the image as evidence and the image as fake or camouflage. At the turn of
the twenty-first century, Michael Renov argued that a new horizon of documentary
studies has been emerging thanks to the growing impact of new televisual and digital
mediascapes on nonfiction film: “New methods for representing the self in everyday
life (home video, Web pages) have begun to wear away the distinction between home
use and public display, just as the traditional modes of documentary exposition . . . no
longer prove adequate for comprehending the contemporary nonfiction environ-
ment.”39 Here, Renov underscores that the nonfilmic technologies for self-represen-
tation do more than reflect the changes in the ways that people make sense of and
express themselves: that is, they also affect the form, platform, and experience of docu-
mentary cinema so pervasively as to go beyond its “traditional mode” (form), to blur
the distinction between its traditional site and elsewhere (platform), and to embrace
people’s media activities other than viewing (experience).
Built on Navarro’s and Renov’s insights, Documentary’s Expanded Fields proposes
the rubric of the twenty-first-century documentary as a periodizing concept that iso-
lates a wide array of nonfiction media practices impacted by digital technologies
and new platforms of exhibiting and experiencing moving images, such as 2D and
3D digital imaging, digital image manipulation, mobile phones, cameras without a
human operator, the gallery, databases, VR and AR (augmented reality) interfaces,
and social media and video-sharing services. My concept of the expanded fields,
then, establishes two rationales for this periodization. First, the concept contends that
the emergent artifacts of documentary practice and the behaviors and experiences of
their spectators in contemporary media affordances and environments transcend the
story-based, long-form documentary cinema grounded in the movie theater and tel-
evision network. It thus suggests that the artifacts’ potentials for documenting the real
and offering its knowledge, truths, and perspectives are not sufficiently theorized only
in terms of the definitional and epistemological pairs that have undergirded the tradi-
tional documentary cinema, such as fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, and
actuality and its creative treatment. And second, the term also suggests that the con-
tingency of different media strategies and the variety of audience activities across dif-
ferent places and networked platforms have been developed to cope with the shifting
political and cultural conditions of reality in the twenty-first century, including those
structured by digital technologies and affordances. As Fallon persuasively demon-
strates, the digitally enabled experimentations with nonfiction visual representation
14 Documentary’s Expanded Fields
across video games, data visualization, and social media have been driven by the po-
litical instability and national uncertainty of the post-9/11 situation, inasmuch as
they describe “the space of transition from one worldview to another, a space where
the disruption of what once seemed solid and trustworthy (or ‘true’) forced the search
for a new ‘truth’ to replace what was lost.”40 The new worldview that Fallon means can
perhaps be expanded into dimensions of instability and uncertainty other than those
inflicted by the war on terror, given Juhasz and Lebow’s manifesto, which contextu-
alizes the outpouring of nonstandard digital documentary practices within climate
change, migration, authoritarianism, global corporate media, and so on.
All the crises in the twenty-first century, including the COVID-19 pandemic as its
most recent case, have undoubtedly propelled scholars around the globe to ponder
what cinema and its neighboring media have been, as well as emerging forms and
practices aimed to produce records and information, arguments, affects, and soci-
ality. More than structural transformations in the production, distribution, and ex-
hibition of film, the spread of COVID-19 has had far more sweeping and profound
impacts on the time and space that hitherto grounded forms and experience of ex-
isting media, dismantling and restructuring their normative locations and tempo-
rality. It is in this context that scholars have developed the idea of “pandemic media,”
namely, a set of media forms and practices geared toward conditioning the mode of a
crisis and allowing existing modes of culture and communication to operate—albeit
in vicarious ways. The scholars who engaged in the edited collection Pandemic Media
(2020) conceptualize the idea, for instance, to address not only forms and practices
such as film and video streaming, pervasive uses of Zoom for screenings and meet-
ings, the proliferation of charts, curves, and tables depicting infection and death rates,
and drone cinematography for portraying cities under lockdown. The idea also con-
cerns the ways in which these forms and practices have reordered the space and time
of existing media: the popularity of streaming platforms, Zoom, and social media
services has transformed the private space into one filled with a panoply of screens
and windows operated to continue everyday activities in the public space and to be
connected to the external world and communities; similarly, the suspension of nor-
mative media operations, such as the shutdown of movie theaters and museums, has
elicited nostalgia for what they were before the crisis, while also introducing the tem-
poral senses of acceleration and urgency marked by the constant updates of the in-
formation related to the spread of the disease and to the governmental and scientific
control of its medical, social, and economic effects. Associating these transformations
of space and time with the idea of “pandemic media” that has made the pandemic “a
highly mediated event,” the authors of the introduction to Pandemic Media ask about
their modes of production, circulation, and consumption: “How do media render an
invisible virus and its threats visible? What form and format do graphs take to inform
policy makers and the public about the crisis? How and why do amateur media get
distributed transnationally and win transnational popularity?”41
What these questions suggest, in my view, is that several artifacts and practices that
pertain to the “pandemic media,” including drone imagery, data visualizations, and
Introduction 15
the online videos produced and circulated by ordinary citizens, demand a renewed
understanding of nonfiction media forms, including documentary cinema, inasmuch
as they engage and document the unstable and devastating reality of the world under
the crisis. Lisa Parks and Janet Walker’s timely and rich conceptualization of “disaster
media,” too, raises this demand. Thinking about satellite images, graphs and charts,
and people’s massive production and dissemination of posts, GIFs, and videos in re-
sponse to the COVID-19 crisis and other disastrous realities, in the words of Parks
and Walker, “has led us to ask all over again what ‘media’ are and to contend with how,
especially during harmful events, media in various modalities proliferate, transform,
translate, and inevitably sculpt the environment.”42 The notion of disaster media, in
this sense, aims to recognize and analyze the ways in which media forms and technol-
ogies construct natural and human-made disasters, document their reality, convert
records into knowledge and argumentation, and communicate their affective, social,
and cultural consequences. Not only does it enable one to think of documentary in
the situation of disasters as embracing a wider variety of media artifacts and technol-
ogies than a limited set of audiovisual representations organized by the orchestra-
tion of people, profilmic reality, and an expository or persuasive discourse, but it also
suggests that the disasters have been transforming documentary forms and media,
including their definitions and boundaries.
While concurring with the rationales for the ideas of “pandemic media” and “dis-
aster media” and their implications for the ways in which documentary forms and
media need to be rethought in the current situation of the crisis, I also point out that
what the ideas suggest as para-documentary artifacts or practices are never unprec-
edented before the crisis: rather, certain instances of pandemic or disaster media
should be framed within the larger transformations of documentary objects and
media that have occurred with the advance and proliferations of digital technol-
ogies in the twenty-first century. This is in concert with the ways in which all the
crises in the twenty-first century, and the transformations of media that they have
caused, have reconfigured what documentary has been and how it has been practiced
during the last two decades. In this way, this interdependence of “disaster or crisis
media” and “documentary media” lays the groundwork for the “twenty-first-century
documentary.”
From another angle, my use of the term “twenty-first-century documentary”
rhymes with Richard Grusin’s characterization of the “nonhuman turn” in arts,
humanities, and social sciences as an interdisciplinary initiative to engage and un-
derstand the world since the turn of the century: “Given that almost every problem of
note that we face in the twenty-first century entails engagement with nonhumans—
from climate change, drought, and famine; to biotechnology, intellectual property,
and privacy; to genocide, terrorism, and war—there seems no time like the present
to turn our future attention, resources, and energy toward the nonhuman broadly
understood.”43 It, too, is partially inspired by Mark B. N. Hansen’s idea of “twenty-
first-century media,” which asserts that the proliferation of mobile and ubiquitous
computational devices such as GPS, radio frequency identification (RFID), sensors,
16 Documentary’s Expanded Fields
and wearable computing challenges the previous assumptions about media in that
they gather, process, and circulate data without intended action on the part of a
human subject: “If twenty-first-century media open up an expanded domain of sensi-
bility that can enhance human experience, they also impose a new form of resolutely
non-prosthetic technical mediation,” Hansen writes: “Simply put, to access this do-
main of sensibility, humans must rely on technologies to perform operations to which
they have absolutely no direct access whatsoever and that correlate to no already ex-
istent human faculty or capacity.”44 What Grusin and Hansen commonly suggest, in
my view, is less an ineluctable replacement of the human by the nonhuman than the
increased connection or border crossing between the two, or the former’s reliance on
the latter in the construction of its identity, perception, and worldview. The permea-
bility and exchangeability of the two seemingly opposing categories, then, is also the
case with other major phenomena of the twenty-first century—for instance, climate
change and massive migration that connect the local to the global, and the numerous
social movements that have occurred both online and offline—that the emergent
practices of documentary stem from and engage. Their eruptions, with a heteroge-
neous array of technologies, forms, places, and strategies, are accordingly seen to re-
flect and incorporate the conditions of the world in this era.
It is here that my stipulation of documentary’s expanded fields as demarcating
the twenty-first century is also in line with a recently expanding body of work on
digital media practices and artifacts in the terrain of documentary studies. The
Act of Documenting (2017), written by Brian Winston in collaboration with Gail
Vanstone and Wang Chi, argues for the potentialities of digital technologies to en-
courage new forms of documentary, to democratize documentary production, to
reconfigure documentary texts as open and processual, and to reinvent spectators
as cocreators: “Liberated from the demands for realist photographic imagery, the
digital documentary encourages a multiplicity of new forms of documentary,” they
write: “Digital’s easing of the barriers to entry for documentary production is the
key to enabling the emergence of a hybridic filmed/filmer as well as an expansion of
production.”45 Patricia R. Zimmerman is one of the most prominent scholars who
have cultivated the new horizon of documentary studies in the digital age in the same
spirit as that of Winston and his cowriters. Her work with Dale Hudson, Thinking
through Digital Media (2015), features a wide array of case studies on online projects
as well as site-specific gallery installations and live performances, demonstrating how
digital media ecologies based on archives, databases, networks, crowdsourcing, and
user-generated content have developed to engage and document such timely issues
as participation, surveillance, climate change, mass migration, and perpetual war.46
Zimmerman’s theoretical venture into those emergent forms is also the case with
“open space new media documentary,” a term that she coins with Helen De Michiel
to indicate community-based, collaborative projects of documentation and archiving
that harness digital platforms’ connective and participatory affordances: “The term
open contains three interrelated concepts: first, rejecting enclosure; the second, per-
meating borders; and the third, abandoning entrenched positions in favor of dialogue
Introduction 17
Chapter Outline
The five “expanded fields” are geared toward a critical map of the twenty-first-century
documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging and post-
production techniques; lightweight and nonoperator digital cameras; multiscreen,
mobile, and VR interfaces; and websites. While many of the practices classified into
and discussed in those fields produce a wide variety of nonfiction artifacts that exist
and are circulated on nonstandardized experiential platforms, the book also lines up
a number of feature-length documentaries available in the movie theater, television,
and Netflix.52 These two overlapping lines of inquiry are intended to demonstrate
that the expansion of documentary across the technologies and platforms during
the last two decades has been built on and propelled the increasing intersections of
the cinematic and the post-cinematic. Examining the implications of those intersec-
tions on the aesthetic, epistemological, rhetorical, ethical, mnemonic, and political
Introduction 19
dimensions of nonfiction film, this book argues that documentary cinema in the age
of new media and platforms dynamically changes its boundaries while also offering
viewers new aesthetics and experiences of reality in the past and present.
The first two chapters focus on documentary cinema’s most basic components.
Chapter 1 discusses the expanded horizon of documentary images by investigating
a wide array of nonfiction media practices that adopt digitally graphic images or em-
ploy digital postproduction techniques, theorizing what these images and techniques
imply for the documentary image’s epistemological and rhetorical functions. It starts
with recapitulating the debates on the impacts of CGI and digital manipulation on
the indexical and evidentiary values of the photographic image in the domains of
documentary and post-cinema studies. Its engagement with the debates also entails
attention to studies on animated documentary. For, in the words of Nea Ehrlich,
“As animation becomes a regular form of representation used in wider non-fiction
contexts, such as news segments, infographics, medical, geographical and scientific
visualizations, educational and explanatory platforms, animation’s epistemological
capability is changing.”53 In this context, this chapter argues that more than desta-
bilizing faith in the indexical properties of photochemical images, digital technolo-
gies for imaging and postproduction expand the traditional boundaries of what the
documentary image is and does, by dismantling the existing hierarchies between the
photographic and the graphic, between the lens-based and the manipulated, between
still and moving images, and between factual records and investigative or revelatory
approaches. The chapter’s two lines of case studies serve to support this claim. The
first is an array of contemporary data visualization artifacts that are either accessible
on websites or included in feature-length documentaries. If the traditional objectivist,
scientific assumption of documentary reality privileges the preexisting phenomenal
world that awaits the camera’s physical and immediate registration, then data visu-
alizations have increasingly been endowed with the traditional documentary film’s
expository, reflexive, and performative modes such that they document and point to
the chaotic or uncertain realities whose invisible, massive, fluid, or malleable changes
are grounded in the complex intersections of technological and material, and human
and nonhuman, dimensions. The second is a group of investigative nonfiction arti-
facts and experimental documentaries that employ digital manipulation techniques
to reconstruct political events marked either by the absence of key evidence or by
the contested presence of multiple documents (in the cases of Forensic Architecture’s
works), to deepen the viewer’s awareness of the uncertainty immanent to the docu-
mentary record (James Benning), and to provide a refreshed look at the photographic
inscription of reality (Sharon Lockhart). All these cases suggest that their pictures’
blurring of the boundaries between live action and animated images, and between the
recorded and the manipulated, results in satisfying documentary epistephilia (a “de-
sire to know”) and stimulating the viewer’s speculative and pensive engagements with
the photographic trace as possible spectatorial modes of documentary.
The second chapter discusses how new digital recording apparatuses and viewing
interfaces, encompassing drone cameras, GoPros, and VR, expand the visual field of
20 Documentary’s Expanded Fields
documentary practices as well as the viewer’s perception of reality. It starts with map-
ping out two competing concepts of the documentary camera in accordance with the
history of documentary cinema: first, the camera as extension of the documentarian’s
embodied perception, and second, the camera as incarnation of a disembodied vi-
sion that goes beyond the confines of the anthropomorphic gaze. In so doing, this
chapter argues that a more recent trend in digital documentaries has been to acti-
vate the disembodied vision that in turn stimulates the viewer’s embodied percep-
tion and thereby expands her knowledge of our contemporary world. The first part of
this chapter examines several contemporary documentaries and a group of YouTube
videos shot with drone cameras and GoPros, therefore demonstrating that the dis-
embodied gaze enabled by these new recording devices remediates and expands the
visual fields of the observational and participatory modes in traditional documentary
in a nonanthropomorphic manner. Based on the dialogue between the studies on VR
and immersive media, film theory, and the recent discourses on VR documentary, the
second part redefines VR’s vision as characterized by varying negotiations of its dis-
embodied and embodied gazes. Countering the recent hype of immersion and sense
of presence as what VR documentaries guarantee in innovative ways, my investiga-
tion of recent VR nonfiction projects enables me to argue that these two aesthetic
effects hinge upon how the two gazes intersect with each other and what modes and
subjects of documentary practice VR technologies remediate.
Chapters 3 and 4 shift the scope from the forms of documentary image to the
experiential platforms of documentary. There has been ongoing scholarly and crit-
ical interest in the material, technical, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions of the
cinema of exhibition, as well as in the increasing border-crossing of cinema and con-
temporary art thanks to the dominance of the moving image inside the gallery walls
since the early twenty-first century. It has only been in recent years, however, that
the discipline of documentary studies has noticed the sheer visibility of documentary
installations. In his short reflection on this phenomenon, Michael Renov argues that
notwithstanding the persistence of the distinctions between documentary cinema
and art, contemporary gallery-based artists have refueled the “defining conditions
for the documentary film,”54 such as its preservation of reality and landscape, its en-
gagement with the social, and its construction of history, memory, and experience.
Despite the variety of practitioners whose works have demonstrated the possibili-
ties for refueling the “defining conditions for the documentary film” at the juncture
of cinema and contemporary art, there has still been a paucity of works that discuss
them in the domain of cinema and media studies. In this context, c hapter 3 theorizes
how the gallery functions not simply as a new platform for documentary experience
but also as a basis for expanding the apparatus of documentary cinema. For this pur-
pose, it presents the concept of documentary’s “expanded dispositif.” It derives from
theorizing the aesthetic and technical strategies of documentary installations and the
experiences of their viewer in terms of Francesco Casetti’s idea of “relocation” and
Jacques Rancière’s “redistribution.” Developed from the ideas of Thomas Elsaesser,
Raymond Bellour, and Adrian Martin, documentary’s “expanded dispositif” refers
Introduction 21
D
Dagger, double dagger, uses of, 53, VI.
Dash, 34-38;
additional punctuation marks, 38, 1, 2.
Days of the month, 60, VI.;
spring, summer, etc., 61, Rem.
Dates, 22, Rem.
Deity, the, 63, X.;
difference among writers, 63, 1;
First Cause, etc., 64, 2;
King of kings, etc., 64, 3;
eternal, divine, etc., 64, 4;
pronouns, 64, 5; 65, 6;
god, goddess, deity, 65, 7.
Democrat, 60, V.
Dependent clauses, 6, II.;
definition of, 7, 1;
omission of comma, 7, 2.
Devil, 59, 3.
Diæresis, 50, 4.
Diphthongs, how indicated in proof, 110, XIV.
Direct question, 31, I.
Direct quotation. See Quotation.
Divine, 64, 4.
Division of words, 50, III.;
where to divide a word, 51, 1.
Divisions of sentences, 23, I.; 25, Gen. Rem.
Divisions of a statement, 69, XVII.;
how readily recognized, 70, 1;
usage of some writers, 70, 2;
sentences broken off to attract attention, 70, 3.
E
East, when to commence with a capital, 59, 1.
Ellipsis, marks of, 52, III.
Emotion, strong, 32, I.;
unusual degree, 32, Rem.
Emphasis, words repeated for, 17, 3;
use of the dash to give prominence, 37, Gen. Rem.; 35, 1.
Enumeration of particulars, 27, III.;
particulars preceded by a colon, 27, 1;
not introduced by thus, following, etc., 27, 2;
particulars preceded by a semicolon, 27, 3;
comma and dash sometimes used, 28, 4.
Envelopes, addressed, 77;
with special request, 78;
with stamp, 78.
Esq., 74, 3.
Eternal, referring to the Deity, 64, 4.
Example, punctuation of words preceding, 24, Rem.;
first word of, 66, 4.
Exclamation point, 32, 33;
inclosed within parenthetical marks, 40, 3.
Expressions, inverted, 12, VI.;
two brief, 19, 2;
contrasted, 20, XVII.;
complete in themselves, 23, II.; 28, Gen. Rem.;
series of, 24, III.;
negative and affirmative, 21, 4;
at the end of sentences, 22, XIX.;
equivalent to sentences, 57, 2.
F
Father, when to commence with a capital, 63, 2, 3.
Federalist, 60, V.
Figures omitted, 36, IV.;
Arabic, 22, XVIII.
Finally, 9, IV.
First Cause, First Principle, 64, 2;
Father of mercies, Father of spirits, 64, 3.
First word in a sentence, 57, I.;
in expressions numbered, 69, XVII.;
after a period, 57, 3.
Following, 27, III., 2.
Foreign words, 43, 2.
Forms of address, 78-82.
Friend, when to commence with a capital, 63, 3; 90, 2; 96, 2.
G
General remarks, 28, 37, 110.
God, 63, 64;
goddess, 65, 7;
God of hosts, 64, 3.
Gospel, 61, 3.
Greeting. See Introductory words.
H
Handbills, use of capitals in, 62, 3.
Heading of letters, 83;
definition, 83;
punctuation, 84;
large cities, 85;
a small town or village, 86;
hotels, 86;
seminaries or colleges, 86;
position, 86.
Heaven and hell, 59, 3.
Heavenly, applied to the Deity, 64, 4.
Hers, 48, 3.
Hesitation, how indicated, 34, I.
His, Him, referring to the Deity, 64, 5.
His Excellency, 76, 5; 62, IX.;
address of envelope, 80.
Hon., 75, 4; 62, IX.
However, 9, IV.
Hyphen, the, 49-51;
connecting several words, 49, 2;
omitted, 49, 3;
doubt as to the use, 49, 5.
I
I, 68, XV.
If, 7, 1.
Indeed, 9, IV.
Independent clauses, 6, I.;
definition of, 6, 1;
comma omitted, 6, 2;
separation by a semicolon, 6, 3.
Infinite One, 64, 2.
In short, in fact, in reality, 9, IV.
Interjections, 32, II.;
exclamation point at the end of a sentence, 33, 1, 2.
Interrogation point, 31, I.;
inclosed in parenthetical marks, 40, 2.
Introductory words of letters, definition, 90;
punctuation, 91;
position, 91;
forms of salutation, 92;
salutations to young ladies, 93;
to married ladies, 94.
Introductory remarks, 5, 73.
Inverted expressions, 12, VI.;
explanation, 12, 1;
omission of comma, 12, 2.
Inverted letter in proof, 107, IV.
Italics, how indicated, 53, V.; 107, VI.;
words from a foreign language, 43, 2;
written with or without a capital, 60, Rem.
Its, 48, 3.
K
King of kings, 64, 3.
L
Leaders, 53, IV.
Letters or figures omitted, 36, IV.;
3-9 equivalent to, 37, Rem.
Letters omitted, 47, I.;
the apostrophe, 47, Rem.
Letters, care in writing, some facts, 73.
Letter-forms, 71-100.
List of abbreviations, 29, 30; 30, 7.
LL. D., 30, 5; 75, 3.
Logical subject, 19, XVI.;
definition of, 20, 1;
custom of some writers, 20, 2.
Long sentences, 25, I.
Lord of lords, 64, 3.
M
Madame, 93, 94.
Marks of parenthesis, 39, 40;
additional marks, 39, 1;
dashes, 37, V.;
comma, 40, 4.
Mark of attention in proof, 110, XV.
Members of sentences, 25, Gen. Rem.
Miscellaneous marks, 52, 53.
Miss, 74, 1; 93.
Months and days, names of, 60, VI.;
autumn, spring, etc., 61, Rem.
More—than, 21, 2.
Moreover, 9, IV.
N
Name, person’s, 16, 2, d.;
abbreviated, 30, 2; 74, 2; 96, Rem.
period used after name, 29, Rem.
See Signature.
Namely, 9, IV.; 35, 2.
Nations, names of, 59, IV.;
Italics and Italicized, 60, Rem.
Negative expressions, 21, 4.
Nevertheless, 9, IV.
Nor, 6, 1.
Not, contrasted expressions, 21, 4.
North, when to commence with a capital, 59, 1.
Nouns in apposition, 15, 16. See Words.
Numeral figures, 22, XVIII.;
dates, 22, Rem.
O
O, 68, XV.;
not followed by an exclamation point, 32, II.
Of which, 9, 3;
of course, 9, IV.
Omitted, letters or figures, 36, IV.; 47, I.
Omissions, how indicated, 52, II.;
in proof, 106, III.
Or, 6, 1; 18, 2.
Ours, 48, 3.
P
Pages, numbering of, 30, 4.
Paragraphs, quoted, 46, IV.;
sign of, 53, VI.;
in proof, 108, VIII.
Parallel lines, 53, VI.
Parenthesis, 39, I.;
additional marks, 39, 1, a, b, c;
comma and dash often preferred, 37, V.; 40, 4;
doubtful assertion, 40, 2;
irony or contempt, 40, 3.
Parenthetical words and phrases, 9, IV.;
definition of, 10, 1;
when commas are omitted, 10, 2;
parenthetical words and adverbs, 10, 3.
Parenthetical expressions, 11, V.;
distinction between parenthetical expressions and
parenthetical words, 11, 1, a, b;
when commas are omitted, 11, 2.
Parties, names of, 60, V.
See Sects.
Participial clauses, 14, IX.;
sign of, 14, Rem.
Perhaps, 9, IV.
Period, indicates what, 3;
uses of, 29, 30.
Persons and places, names of, 58, III.;
North, South, etc., 59, 1;
words derived from names of persons, 59, 2;
Satan, devil, 59, 3.
Person or thing addressed, 13, VIII.;
strong emotion, 14, Rem.
Personification, 67, XIV.
Phrases and clauses, 18, XV.;
definition of a phrase, 19, 1;
of a clause, 5;
when commas are omitted, 19, 2;
words and phrases in a series, 19, 3;
parenthetical phrases, 9, 10.
Poetry, first word of each line, 58, II.
Political parties, 60, V.
Possession, 47, II.;
singular of nouns, 47, 1;
plural of nouns, 48, 2;
ours, yours, etc., 48, 3.
Prefixes, 50, II.;
definition of, 50, 1;
vowel and consonant 50, 2;
vice-president, etc., 50, 3;
when to use the diæresis, 50, 4.
Prince of life, Prince of kings, 64, 3.
Projecting leads in proof, 110, XIII.
Pronouns referring to the Deity, 64, 5; 65, 6.
Proof-reading, 101-114;
its importance, 102;
preparation of manuscript, 102, 103;
copy, proof-sheet, revise, 104;
wrong letters and punctuation marks, 105, I.;
wrong words, 106, II.;
omissions, 106, III.;
inverted letter, 107, IV.;
strike out, 107, V.;
capitals and italics, 107, VI.;
spacing, 108, VII.;
paragraphs, 108, VIII.;
correction to be disregarded, 109, IX.;
broken letters, 109, X.;
transpose, 109, XI.;
crooked words, 110, XII.;
projecting leads, 110, XIII.;
diphthongs, 110, XIV.;
mark of attention, 100, XV.;
Gen. Rem., 110.
Proof-sheet, definition of, 104;
specimen proof, 111, 112;
corrected proof, 113, 114.
Punctuation, its importance, iii., iv.;
how to teach it, iv., v.;
principal punctuation marks, 3;
other marks, 4;
punctuation marks, why used, 3, 4.
Q
Question, direct, 31, I.;
question and answer in the same paragraph, 36, 3.
Quotation, short, 12, VII.;
long, 13, 5; 26, II.; 27, 1;
expressions resembling a quotation, 13, 1;
introduced by that, 13, 2; 65, 1;
single words quoted, 13, 3; 65, 2; 66, 3;
quotation divided, 13, 4;
quotation in the middle of a sentence, 27, 2;
quotation within a quotation, 45, 1; 46, 2;
parts of a quotation omitted, 46, IV., 2;
first word of a quotation, 65, XI.;
examples as illustrations, 24, Rem.; 66, 4.
Quotation marks, 43-46;
direct quotation, 43, I.;
exact words not given, 43, 1;
words from a foreign language, 43, 2;
quotation followed by a comma, semicolon, colon, period,
44, 4;
by an exclamation or interrogation point, 44, 5, 6;
titles of books, 44, II.;
quotation within a quotation, 45, III.;
paragraphs, 46, IV.
Quoted passage, 41, I.
R
Republican, Radical, 60, V.
Rather—than, 21, 2.
Reference marks, 53, VI.
References, 68, XVI.;
volume and chapter, 69, 1;
to the Bible, 69, 3;
volume and page sufficient, 69, 2.
Relative clauses, 7, III.;
commas when used, 7, III., 1;
when omitted, 7, III., 2;
introduced by who, etc., 8, 1;
exceptions, 8, 2, 3.
Reporter, remarks by, 41, 2.
Resolutions, 66, XII.;
Resolved and That, 66, Rem.
Revise, definition of, 104.
S
Salutations. See Introductory words.
Scriptures, sacred writings, 61, 3.
Sects, names of, 60, V.;
Republican, etc., 60, 1, 2;
Church, 60, 3.
Section mark, 53, VI.
Semicolon, 23-25;
indicates distant relationship, 3, 4;
often preferred to a colon, 28;
semicolon and comma, 25.
Sentence, definition of, 5; 57, 1;
long sentences, 23, I.;
members of, 23, II.; 25, Gen. Rem.; 28, Gen. Rem.;
complete sentences, 29, I.;
broken sentences, 34, I.;
first word of, 57, I.;
expressions equivalent to a sentence, 57, 2;
word following a period, 57, 3;
word following an interrogation or an exclamation, 58, 4.
Series of words, 17, XIV.;
commas, when not used, 17, XIV., 1;
when used, 18, XIV., 2, 3;
last word preceding a single word, 18, 1;
two words connected by or, 18, 2;
series of phrases and clauses, 18, XV.;
of expressions, 24, III.
Short quotations. See Quotations.
Signatures, 29, Rem.; 97, 98.
Since, 7, 1.
Sister, when to commence with a capital, 63, 2; 90, 2; 96, 2.
Sir, 63, 3.
Son of man, 64, 3.
So—that, so—as, 21, 2.
South, 59, 1.
Spacing in proof, 108, VII.
Specimen proof, 111, 112.
Special words, capitalization of, 66, 67.
Spring, summer, 61, Rem.
Stamp, 78.
Star, reference mark, 53, VI.
Strike out in proof, 107, V.
Strong emotion, 32, I.;
unusual emotion, 32, Rem.
Subject, logical, 19, XVI.;
definition of, 20, 1;
subject of statement or quotation, 35, III.;
definition of, 36, 1;
author, 36, 2;
question and answer, 36, 3;
as, thus, etc., 36, 4.
Summary of letter-forms, 98-100.
Supreme Being, 64, 2;
Son of man, 64, 3.
T
Titles, annexed, 16, 3;
of essays, orations, etc., 29, Rem.; 61, 2;
of books, 44, II.; 61, VII.;
of magazines, 45, 1, 2;
of persons, 62, IX.;
sacred writings, 61, 3.
Title-pages, 62, VIII.;
first word of a chapter, 62, 2;
handbills and advertisements, 62, 3.
Than, 21, 3.
That, 8, 1; 13, 2;
quotation introduced by that, 65, 1;
in resolutions, 66, Rem.
That is, 35, 2.
Theirs, 48, 3.
Therefore, 9, IV.
Thus, this, these, 27, III.; 27, 2; 36, 4.
To-day, to-night, to-morrow, 49, 4.
Too, 10, 3.
Transpose in proof, 109, XI.
U
Until, 7, 1.
Unconnected words, 16, XIII.,
comma, when used, 17, 1, 3;
when not used, 17, 2.
Uncle, when to commence with a capital, 63, 2, 3; 90, 2; 96, 2.
V
Verb omitted, 15, X.;
main clauses separated by a semicolon, 15, 1;
comma omitted, 15, 2.
Vice-president, 50, 3.
W
What, 8, 1.
When, 7, 1.
Words, parenthetical, 9, IV.;
in apposition, 15, XI.;
unconnected, 16, XIII.;
series of, 17, XIV.;
repeated for emphasis, 17, 3; 35, 3;
two connected by or, 18, 2;
words and phrases in a series, 19, 3;
from a foreign language, 43, 2;
compound, 49, I.;
division of, 50, III.;
repeated, 52, I.;
special, 66, XIII.
Words personified, 67, XIV.;
caution, 68, Rem.
Wrong letters and punctuation marks in proof, 105, I.;
wrong words, 106, II.
Y
Yours, 48, 3.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAND-BOOK
OF PUNCTUATION ***
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.