Documentary Film

Guiding and transforming our creative practices, this paper argues for a critical investigation of the techno‐material affordances at play in doing visual research with digital media. It interrogates how software and skill might interact to mediate creative engagements with digital materialities. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies of and with the Korsakow System – an authoring system for creating generative multiple links between media assets – I show how software combined with other imaging technologies can (re‐)focus attention and action towards the intangible workings of digital code. Three exercises will demonstrate how a skilled mediation with relational media systems challenges and complements ethnographic filmmaking through the adoption of iterative software and design methodologies. Rather than gaining control over code, the aim is to gain control over the loss of it in the field and in front of the screen. In the context of an advancing digital visual ethnography, such a skilled mediation affords an experiential and responsive mode of knowledge production sensitising us to the complexly layered affordances and constraints of digital materialities and the dynamic density of relations in which they are entangled.

This article stems from a panel we jointly convened at the i-Docs 2018 Symposium, where we presented a series of provocations with a view to generating a new theoretical framework for i-docs. These provocations were inspired by all aspects of Mikhail Bakthin's concept of polyphony, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. This article presents these provocations and reflects further on them. A number of key issues are documented, expanded and commented upon, as a potential framework for further research, including multiplicity, the chronotope, dialogism and interaction. We propose that these lead to new ways of approaching complexity. With the aim of using juxtaposition, nonlinearity and layering to break down binaries, the article demonstrates how complexity can be embraced and, crucially, how the simplicity within it can be revealed. In other words, a key proposition here is that we should accept and celebrate complexity as the natural order of things, without needing to deny simplicity. By investigating several theoretical aspects of Bakthin's wider idea of polyphony, this article identifies some areas for potential development and offers input for further research, particularly in relation to the concepts of heteroglossia, carnival and aesthetics. This article is an expanded version of our " provocations " , a series of ideas and stimuli designed to provoke debate and set the scene for a collaborative panel session on " The Poetics and Politics of Polyphony ". We organised and hosted this session at the i-Docs 2018 Symposium held in Bristol, UK on 21–23 March 2018, based on our combined long-term and ongoing research into the subject (Aston and Odorico). 1 In the spirit of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, our provocations were designed to start a dialogue between us, our guests and the audience, through which we endeavoured to create an equal and open platform for the generation and exchange of ideas. A number of key issues came out of this dialogue, which we document and comment upon here as framings for further research. The structure of this article is based on the order in which we presented our provocations, using our set of six slides from the symposium, followed by a list of keywords that emerged from the ensuing discussion. As we use this structure to talk through our ideas, this is not a typical linear essay, but a series of inputs for further analysis, with certain aspects focussed on in more detail. The article also includes a few additional slides, where we have expanded upon points we first made at the symposium. Overall, the aim of the article is to explore areas of synergy with Bakhtin's thinking on polyphony, and to begin to reflect on the theoretical and practical contribution of a dialogic approach to the field of i-docs.

This thesis is a historical and filmic analysis of the Black Panther Party, using two documentaries, All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party and Beyond (1996) and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015). It is first stated what the documentary film should set out to achieve when framing a political narrative. The films will be looked at separately, in regard to the context of their production and release. Power to the People was a reaction to the Rodney King riots. Vanguard of the Revolution was filmed alongside the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The Black Panther origins as a movement are briefly considered to allow for a base understanding of the party’s precepts and aims. This includes the roles of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and an introduction to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The content analysis begins by looking at the main ideologies of the party and its operations. The empowerment of women but also hyper masculinity within the party is then discussed. This follows on to social and survival programs set up by the party. Primarily using two significant cases, the deaths of Bobby Hutton and Fred Hampton, there is an examination of concerted efforts by police and FBI to mobilise and neutralise the party. Comparisons and contrasts are then made between the style and content of the two films. It will be concluded that the films serve two purposes, to give the positive work of the Black Panthers a legitimate platform, but also to address the criticisms levelled at the party. The overarching conclusion will be that the Black Panthers were involved in a vicious cycle. Once they brought any semblance of solidarity to their communities, the FBI and Police would move against them leading to reactionary violence which caused the party’s eventual disbandment.

Drawing from longitudinal research with newcomer communities in Ireland, anthropological literature, and film theory and practice, Alexandra argues for a re-conceptualisation of the participatory media genre of Digital Storytelling (DS). Rather than understanding images and sound as “secondary concerns” disconnected from broader filmic practices, the chapter places DS in conversation with documentary and ethnographic arts. Arguing for the importance of both the audiovisual artefact and the intensively collaborative process that facilitates its creation, the finished artefact is conceptualised as an “embodied object”. Through inquiry, exchange and montage, this object is imbued with the knowledge, longings, and sensorial experience of a particular moment in the emergent practitioner’s life. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the connective tissue between DS and ethnographic and documentary film and video.

The evolving representations of queer people in moving ima­ges have taken the form of a homecoming, especially in light of recent law changes that pertain to same-­sex marriage in the United States, and the media’s concurrent readiness to recast sexual minorities in the roles of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children. In an effort to investigate the formation of queer chosen families, independent of, or in opposition to, heteronorma­tivity, the paper approaches director Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning as an intertextual object in order to situate queer kinship at the inter­ sections of gender, race, sexuality and genre.

In recent years, “the archive“ as both a concept and an object has been undergoing a transformation. The increased availability of still and video cameras, analog and then digital, has led to a proliferation of indexical documents outside of official archives and prompted questions about what constitutes an “archive,“ and, hence, what constitute “archival documents.“ At the same time, filmmakers are appropriating sounds and images from various sources, thereby breaking down the distinction between “found“ and “archival“ documents. This situation calls for a reformulation of the very notion of the archival document. This article reframes the archival document not as an object but as a spectatorial experience or a relationship between viewer and text. I contend that certain appropriated audiovisual documents produce for the viewer what I call the “archive effect“ and that this encounter endows these documents with a particular kind of authority as “evidence.“

In diesem Buch wird erstmals der Stellenwert der audiovisuellen Medien für die Herstellung und Popularisierung von Wissen aufgezeigt. Der historische Rahmen der Studie erstreckt sich dabei von den kinematographischen Bewegungsstudien in Psychiatrie und Physiologie Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Einsatz von Video in den sozialpsychologischen Experimenten der 1970er Jahre. Mit dem Gebrauch von Bewegtbildern zu Zwecken der Kontrolle, Aufzeichnung und Demonstration veränderte sich die gesamte Experimentalkultur der Wissenschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund flexibler medienkultureller Kontexte transformiert sich das Labor zusehends in ein Filmstudio des Wissens, in welchem die Versuchsanordnung am Storyboard entworfen, die epistemischen Gegenstände in Szene gesetzt und die Probanden gecastet werden.

This article examines a cinematic artefact from 1957 titled The Housing Program of Iraq, which contains rare footage of sarifa (reed and mud) settlements inhabited by rural migrants in mid-century Baghdad. The film, which was never finished, was produced as a collaboration between the Greek architect Constantinos A. Doxiadis and the director Demetrios Gaziades, who shot and edited the footage between Baghdad and Athens. Through this film Doxiadis intended to complement the Doxiadis Associates’ (DA) entry for the Iraq National Housing Exhibition and also to promote the modern housing projects designed by DA. In this period, various statist actors used the representational medium of documentary film in an attempt to redefine the boundaries of Iraqi citizenship. This film, thus, offered a cinematic portal into an other Baghdad, which was staged as the problem of development. Subsequent scenes narrated the solution to these neighbourhoods and positioned a family in a modern low-income house to animate the film’s developmental fantasy. The film projected universal Iraqi home ownership as a form of citizenship where the house was an instrument to facilitate financial, legal, and social agreements between rural migrants and the Iraqi state. By interrogating the methodological question of how to assemble an archive of ephemeral and subaltern places, this essay suggests expanding our notion of historiographic evidence to understand the intertwined relationships between the politics of development and architecture, and their representation in media.

Friedrich Nietzsche is presented in this essayistic documentary film as a fascinating, questionable and sometimes repulsive philosopher whose influence goes far beyond the boundaries of the academic world. As a representative of perspective thinking he is regarded as a pioneer of modernism and postmodernism. Of utmost importance for his life and work was the tiny Swiss village Sils Maria, the only place that he visited again and again during his nomadic years and where much of his work was created. The film conveys a tangible impression of the area and how this charismatic place must have influenced Nietzsche's thinking and feeling. For the first time in a film are shown some of the scribbled sheets from the time of Nietzsche's mental derangement at the clinic in Jena. The majority of the interviewees in the film are academics related the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria.

"'Performance, the Body, the Home: Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine' is a major contribution to understanding 21st-century transnational film history. Looking at key documentary films by Arab and Mizrahi filmmakers living within the contested borders of Israel-Palestine, Shirly Bahar develops an argument for the vital place of documentary within contemporary politics and identities…In this profound study, we see how documentary and its critics mediate a uniquely performative and affective politics in Israel-Palestine, but also elsewhere and everywhere." (Paula Rabinowitz, University of Michigan)

This is a collaborative work with my colleague at the Department of Communications UII, Muzayin Nazaruddin, and other colleagues outside the academia. This book was published as a lesson learnt and a theoretical reflection of a one-year research-cum-project we conducted as part of a national research grant scheme from the Research and Technology Ministry, Republic of Indonesia (Kemenristek RI) in 2010. The research-cum-project is entitled “Digital Repository Development for Local and Traditional Artworks by Using Community Media, Audio-visual Production, and Open Source Software Applications”. Order and purchase of this book can be made directly to the publisher, Penerbit Komunikasi UII, contact details: Phone: +62-274-898444 ext. 3267 Email: komunikasi@uii.ac.id

See more info and table of contents here:

http://catalinbrylla.com/cognitive-theory-and-documentary/

This edited collection explores the intersection between cognitive and documentary film studies in light of the latest discoveries in the affective and cognitive sciences. Given that most Western societies are mass-mediated cultures in which “reality” is understood through factual media, documentary film has significantly informed the consolidation of the audience’s emotional and cognitive understanding of the world. This understanding is informed by the interplay between two dimensions inherent in the reception of documentary film texts: Firstly, the extra-textual dimension, where truth assertions establish a strong indexical link between representations and their real-life counterparts, and secondly, the intra-textual dimension, where narrative and aesthetic strategies are employed to achieve emotional and cognitive engagement. This interplay has arguably resulted in documentaries exhibiting a far greater potential than fiction films to impact on our attitudes towards, and interaction with, the world, but also on the construction of our own social, cultural, and individual identities.

There has been little convergence between cognitive film theory and documentary film studies. Cognitive film scholars have largely focused on the analysis of fiction film, whilst documentary scholars have deemed cognitive models too limited in that they address only the hardwired attributes of audience reception, thus hypothesizing a universal body of spectators and dismissing individual, social, cultural and historical contexts of authorship and spectatorship. However, a new wave of cognitive film theory has moved from neo-formalist and purely cognitive concerns towards the study of emotional and embodied film engagement, taking into account practical, social, cultural and individual aspects; these in turn can explore fundamental questions within documentary film theory and practice. Thus, cognitive and emotional models have the potential to examine not only narrative-driven and expository documentaries, but also more contemporary and experimental formats, such as essay films, participatory documentaries, docu-dramas, and docu-musicals. In our opinion, this enables an alternative and more scientifically rigorous pursuit of issues central to documentary film studies in areas as varied as ethics, performance, character engagement, mediation and realism.

The book explores a cognitive framework for understanding documentary film texts, production practices, institutions and spectatorship. It seeks an empirically grounded understanding of the reception of documentary films, as well as their production and exhibition, establishing the practitioner or institution as a socio-cultural entity driven by similar emotional and cognitive mechanisms that inform the audience before, during and after the viewing process.

Emerging between Documentary film and Fiction film, “Hybrid” film attempts
to bridge the divide that has long separated the two. Mixing reality with fiction,
noticeably or sometimes less so, these hybrid narratives use filmic techniques from both
sides of the divide to create a unique narrative that can serve quite varied storytelling
purposes. From works like the Canadian films Stories We Tell (Polley 2012) or My
Winnipeg (Maddin 2007), which apply fictional elements to personal stories
experienced first-hand by the filmmakers as a means to comment on the unreliability of
Memory or Sensation, to the films of several Iranian filmmakers, such as Abbas
Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, or Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to name just a few, which poetically
deconstruct the illusion of filmic narrative, through metacinematic devices that
obliquely allude to the political censorship and control exerted by the Iranian
authorities, to the magical realism of directors like Miguel Gomes or Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, the Hybrid form offers a wide range of creative solutions for a
filmmaker to address any subject matter.
This essay will attempt to propose a general delimitation of what “hybrid film”
is and is not. It will consist of a journey of sorts through some films which sit on what is
generally considered to be the border line between Documentary film and Fiction film.
By comparing and contrasting the stylistic elements in the chosen films, it is expectable
that tensions will emerge and, consequently, offer valuable ideas towards a delimitation
of the topic of the essay.
As I will further expose below, there is a lack of clear, decisive academic
knowledge about Hybrid films. This gap has spread to film criticism, journalism, and
programming, realms in with the term “hybrid” is used indiscriminately. A few of the
films analysed in this essay were taken directly from film reviews, film festival
programmes, and articles where they were defined as hybrids; as argued below, most
times wrongly so. Notwithstanding this, one must nevertheless recognize that these
more informal texts reflect a tension that is deeply rooted in the hearts and minds of
casual filmgoers when confronted with a film that defies characterization. Moreover, as
proposed below, the way the audience engages and perceives these films is an aspect
with an important contribution to the definition of “hybrid film”.
Despite the lack of any substantial academic framework surrounding Hybrids,
there is an outstanding number of authors working mostly from within the Documentary
field who have written about the issues of Reality, Reconstruction, Intervention, and so
on, in Documentary practice. One of these authors is Brian Winston, whose recap of the
spectrum between fact and fiction (2013) has been central to the analysis present in this
essay as a first step towards a taxonomy of documentary and fiction techniques that can
be used to attempt a definition of “Hybrid film”
At any rate, and due to the fact that, as I will begin by addressing in the next
chapter, the Hybrid form is ever-changing, highly adaptable, and generally elusive, this
essay cannot purport to be an exhaustive survey of the reach the Hybrid form has;
rather, my intention is that it can offer a general road map on the subject, identifying the
main questions that can, after further study, contribute to a definitive delimitation of the
form, while leaving the door open for whatever the evolution of this subject might
bring.

Abstract

In this work, I aim to examine the 'figure of the father' within the context of the European Journey Films and within my own journey film. Through the analysis of these films, I aim to deconstruct the archaic myth of contemporary manhood that has its roots in the story of Odysseus.
There are two main research methods used in this thesis.  The first is the Lacanian – Zizekian interpretation, utilised to analyse narratives and characters. The second is a Deleuzian – Frampton reading that concentrates on the cinematic language and form, that examines the effect on the viewer.
There are seven chapters in this thesis, besides the Introduction. Chapter 1 maps out and creates the research surface. Chapter 2 applies a Lacanian interpretation and its background. Chapter 3 adopts a Deleuzian interpretation, and describes how this theory can be used to read the effect on the viewers’ perception. Chapter 4 deals with the Odyssey. Here I draw on this ancient myth as a reference to the archetypal figure of a father in the European culture. Chapter 5 is engaged with fathers who try to return to their homes, like Odysseus, but as opposed to him they fail. Three main films are analysed in this part: The Return (Zvyagintsev 2003), Paris Texas (Wenders 1985), and Voyage to Cythera (Angelopoulos 1984 ). Chapter 6 concentrates on the wandering fathers who leave home in an attempt to find significant meaning to their life. Three main films are analysed in this part: The Bee Keeper (Angelopoulos, 1986), The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975), and Nostalgia (Tarkovsky, 1983). Chapter 7 analyses my own journey film, Brazilian Diary, that currently is a work in progress. It is a journey of both wandering and an attempt to return home from a personal journey that follows the footsteps of my father.
This thesis attempts to look beneath the surface of the iconic image of the father and views these heroes, who seem initially to be failures, as an alternative hope towards a manhood that may do less and observe more;  one with a tendency to learn and find the strength in "weakness", and display more compassion in this world.
I regard this thesis as a contribution primarily within the field of film. This analysis utilizes two different methods, and the cultural issues raised within this work sheds a new look at the place of father/manhood in modern society.

A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema – which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

Television Studies is an established field within media studies, and with the dominance of reality television in particular, a research emphasis on this style is growing exponentially. Reality television and documentary film have important relevance for sociological studies because of their assumed but tenuous relationship to the real world as well as creative and strategic use of social representation. In this course, students will explore the world of reality television, documentary, and digital storytelling: the categories, sociological & consumption messages, audience interaction, and media coverage. In addition, students will learn important aspects of the history and theories of screen culture, as well as how to analyze and interpret a wide variety of media texts using key film and TV studies concepts and vocabulary.

ABSTRACT: G. D. Mumford list of 260+ dvd documentaries as supplementary aids for teaching courses/topics spanning Prehistory, historical times, and diverse cultures, societies, and regions across the globe (e.g., Ice Age; Egypt; Aegean; Anatolia; Syria-Palestine; Arabia; Persia; sub-Saharan Africa; Rome; Celts; Vikings; India; China; Japan; Easter Island; Inca; Maya; Aztecs; North America).  This list is arranged by cultures/societies, periods, and regions and is updated periodically.  Some of the listed documentaries still await viewing and instructor rating (I tend to place the best, or most appropriate, documentaries for viewing in-class [see separate pdf documentary response question sheets and web-links in my academia course folders]).  The listed documentaries also encompass various documentary producers and commercially available programs on past civilizations: Acorn Media, Allegro, Ambrose, Athena, BBC, Cinema Epoch, DeAgostini, Discovery, EVN, GoodTimes DvD, History Channel, Koch Vision, Kultur/Cromwell, Monterey, National Geographic, NOVA, PBS, TimeLife, TLC, and Washington National Gallery of Art.  In general, BBC and NOVA programs tend to represent the highest quality, but many of the other production companies have produced quite good programs as well (any/all other recommendations are very welcome).  Please note: Even the "best" documentaries contain inaccuracies/errors, especially from non-specialist narrators and/or presenters, but otherwise many undergraduate students appear to appreciate documentary viewings as a generally effective, supplemental media (either in-class or as an online assignment) for providing students with illustrations/footage of various sites, periods, issues, specialists (usually via on-screen interviews), and different view points in an otherwise static classroom/lecture setting (UPDATED: Dec. 30, 2014).

Essay that tries to explore the force that pushes and motivates two different documentary directors :  Frederic Wiseman and Werner Herzog. in the core it is about the essence of film-making, which is inspiring these two types of documentary practices. It has been written in my second year of film studies at UCA (Farnham).

Bulletin Description: More than any other tradition of image-making, documentaries are invested in notions of truth, authenticity and objectivity. To what do they owe their capacity of persuasiveness? This course will introduce students to the history and theory of documentary cinema, examining the ways our willingness to be convinced has been shaped by different forms of institutional and discursive power. Readings will span work on moving and still documentary images, but will remain focused on the analog era.

The crisis of documentary representations that began in 1980s has resulted in the reemergence of reenactments-documentary strategies that had been excluded from documentary film practices in 1960s due to their tendencies to intervene to the reality instead of capturing the life as it is. Reenactments act as the fictionalized reconstruction of the past events. They tend to show a subjective point of view and challenge the sense of believability that is strongly associated with documentary cinema. The goals of this paper are to explore the role that technological changes have played in the development of reenactments in the film; to analyze how reenactments communicate real past experiences without representing reality itself, and to answer the questions if there's a place for reenactments in contemporary cinema.

Chapted co-authored with Simon Blanchard.

Edited by Laura Mulvey and Sue Clayton (with research and editorial assistance from C.M. Holdsworth) Other Cinemas (I.B.Tauris) brings together voices, established and new at the cutting edge of research into radical British cinema and the moving image, to explore theories, politics and works important to this diverse context.

The Independent Film Makers’ Association (IFA) was founded in 1974 to promote the interests shared by a diverse coalition of ‘independent’ filmmakers working in Britain. The Association’s campaigns helped to bring new voices and visions into film and television at the time and provided a forum in which to meet, debate and campaign. Prepared by Simon Blanchard, who was a member and participant/observer at IFA meetings and a National Organiser at the IFA from 1980, in conversation with archivist and researcher Claire M. Holdsworth, this chapter offers a Commentary and brief Chronology of this cultural network, with some reflections on its significance.

This chapter is supplemented by other contributions on Channel 4 and the Workshop Declaration as well as a separate chronology, also published in this book.

https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/36198/

Scene text recognition brings various new challenges occurs in recent years. Detecting and recognizing text in scenes entails some of the equivalent problems as document processing, but there are also numerous novel problems to face for recognizing text in natural scene images. Recent research in these regions has exposed several promise but present is motionless much effort to be entire in these regions. Most existing techniques have focused on detecting horizontal or near-horizontal texts. In this paper, we propose a new scheme which detects texts of arbitrary directions in natural scene images. Our algorithm is equipped with two sets of characteristics specially designed for capturing both the natural characteristics of texts using MSER regions using Otsu method. To better estimate our algorithm and compare it with other existing algorithms, we are using existing MSRA Dataset, ICDAR Dataset, and our new dataset, which includes various texts in various real-world situations. Experiments results on these standard datasets and the proposed dataset shows that our algorithm compares positively with the modern algorithms when using horizontal texts and accomplishes significantly improved performance on texts of random orientations in composite natural scenes images.

The unprecedented economic growth and immigration that Ireland experienced between 1995 and 2007 did not only challenge national but also ethnic, social, and gender identities. The contributions to this volume explore how films tackle these challenges and help to make sense of Ireland’s altered position in a globalised world. Among the films discussed are some of the most critically acclaimed Irish films of recent years, including Once (2006), Adam & Paul (2004), Garage (2007), and The Secret of Kells (2009), as well as the work of Oscar-winning director and writer Neil Jordan. The volume is completed by an extensive interview with award-winning director Lenny Abrahamson, and his collaborator, screenwriter and actor Mark O’Halloran.

The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes decryption of "copy protected" digital content, even if the decryption itself serves lawful purposes that do not infringe on copyright. However, temporary exemptions to this prohibition are granted triennially if communities of practice can demonstrate that the encryption ban adversely affects noninfringing uses. This study explores to what degree members of communities with existing exemptions for audiovisual work (1) are aware of the DMCA ban on encryption and (2) are aware of the relevant exemptions, and (3) whether they believe they can use the exemptions with confidence. We find that existing knowledge of DMCA exemptions is low, but that creators may employ the exemption reliably if given the exemption language. This empirical evidence demonstrates creative and productivity costs of narrow exemptions, as well as the importance of education. Results are relevant to discussions about international treaty intellectual property discussions, about the function of exemptions in intellectual property law, and about the consequences of criminalizing decryption.

Over the last two decades, documentary filmmakers have increasingly turned their attention to environmental issues, whether the climate crisis,  pollution, threats to the biosphere and its species or the effects of mining and extraction. Women consistently play key roles in environmental documentary filmmaking, whether behind or in front of the camera. This essay explores the nexus of documentary filmmaking, women and environment. It examines the Australian documentary sector, tracking changing pathways of opportunity for women working in documentary production, particularly in relation to the causal connections between the rise of philanthropic funding and environmental documentary. The discussion investigates two recent examples, Wild Things (2020) and The Leadership (2020), exploring how they might reward an analysis that connects environmentalism and women. Tracking the convergence of a number of factors, including the gendered composition of the documentary sector, the rise of "impact documentary" with its changed conceptualisation of audiences, and the gendered profile of environmentalism, this article argues that contemporary documentary filmmaking is a significant site for understanding the environment as a feminist concern.

En este ensayo, abordaremos dos documentales recientes de los directores brasileiros João Salles y Eduardo Coutinho: Santiago (2007) y Jogo de Cena (2007) respectivamente. Denominamos 'actuation' a relation entre el mundo (que incluye objetos y personas actuando) y el sujeto que encarna la cámara artefacto. La 'mise-en-scène' designa el modo por el qual la 'actuación' está presente en la toma, teniendo en cuenta diversos aspectos materiales que componen la escene y su disposición narrativa futura (en planos). Repadando la historia del cine documental, advertimos dois variantes estructurales de la acción de las personas para el sujeto-de-la-caméra: la 'actuación-construída (accion/expresión previamente preparada por el sujeto-de-la-caméra; et la 'actuación-directa', cuanda la indeterminación de la acción compone la cena. En 'Jogo de Cena' se disponen diversas modalidades de actuación que se relacionan entre sí de manera deconstructiva. En 'Santiago', Salles contrapone dos modos históricos de actuar que se enfrentan en un movimiento por la falsa conciencia.

Der Begriff des Interface kategorisiert die Ausprägungsstufen einer kommunikationsstabilisierenden Schnittstelle als Interaktionsmechanismus, wobei die Interaktion von maschinellen Komponenten (Hardware, Software) sowie die vielfältigen Interaktionen zwischen UserIn und Maschine zur Geltung gebracht werden.

La revolución del 68 transformó los modos de pensar. En los países del centro las motivaciones fueron postmaterialistas, mientras en la periferia fue el acceso a la educación, vivienda... Estas particularidades fueron plasmadas en el cine que cuestionó su propio rol y salió del estudio para retratar la realidad. El cine se transformó en un instrumento político que ayudó a ser visible situaciones que parte de la sociedad desconocía.

"Even though I am poor and I have AIDS, I am happy. Each day brings hope." Ximei

Ximei, a documentary filmed in China over a seven-year period by Andy Cohen and Gaylen Ross, follows the HIV-positive titular protagonist and plain-spoken community leader named Ximei, a local "peasant" woman in her thirties. Ximei is filmed as she negotiates the government bureaucracy in remote Henan province while acting as a community activist and advocate for the 300,000 other people in the region that developed HIV/AIDS as a result of a national government program during the 1990s, whose goal it was to increase blood bank reserves at a minimal cost. The program offered a month's wages (about five dollars) to blood donators. Tragically and stupidly, the public health workers in the province didn't decontaminate their transfusion equipment. As a result, many local residents that took advantage of the opportunity to earn extra money, contracted HIV, either from coming in contact with contaminated medical equipment or by receiving transfusions of untested, tainted blood during treatments for an accident or disease.

The author’s aim is to come back to the term “horizon of expectations” proposed and described by Hans Robert Jauss in his article Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory (1970). According to the author, Jauss’s approach (derived from the studies of Karl Mannheim, Karl Popper and the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer)  introduces new, interesting aspects of discussed problem: how to recognize the role and identity of the viewer in the communication between the documentary filmmaker, the film and the viewer in contemporary documentary film. In the first part of the article, he presents arguments included in the anthology Film Audience Studies – History and Methods published by Konrad Klejsa and Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska in 2014. In his opinion, the discussion provoked by the theory proposed by many authors reveals wide facets of the reflection of the documentary, since it refers to its position in contemporary epistemology and social sciences. The author answers the question what place a viewer of film occupies in the communication situation, stating that he is both within this situation as he is “involved” in a film and above it – he is capable of placing himself in a certain distance – “the horizon of recognition”. In the final part of this article a proposition of the theoretical integration of the epistemology and ethics in the viewer’s horizon of expectations based of the work of semiologists as well as a Polish literary reception exponent Ryszard Handke and French philosopher Jean-Jacques Wunenburger is being discussed.