This paper re-asserts the politically contested status of new media as a site of both conspiracy theories and counterhegemonic narratives through analyses of Dylan Avery’s Loose Change and Adam Cur...

Korean documentary film has historically both been designed as a contribution to political life and also as a creative exploration in the growing film industry. Documentary in the service of politi...

The study is concerned with the possibility of reframing the visibility of migrants onscreen in Želimir Žilnik’s documentary films. It is claimed that Žilnik’s selected works such as the Kennedi tr...

This paper provides an exploration of the creative and ethical challenges that emerged from producing a 360-degree documentary demo, focusing on two Greek drag artists who live in Athens. It introd...

Published in Studies in Documentary Film (Ahead of Print, 2024)

This article approaches first-person filmmaking as a potential home-making practice – a hometactic – that can actively negotiate reality to set forth new modes of belonging. With a focus on negotia...

This paper examines the anti-anthropocentric world-building in documentaries that employ aspeculative mode of inquiry and reckon with the ecological crisis. Dubbed speculative documentaries, they m...

Films Division stands as one of the pioneering institutions in post-independent India that played a crucial role in shaping and envisioning the country's identity as a post-colonial nation. Establi...

The purpose of this article is to show how various modes of representation employed in the Brazilian feature film Jogo de Cena (Playing, Eduardo Coutinho, 2007), are used as a narrative resource th...

Despite the widespread fascination with media content, scholarly attention often overlooks aversion, refusal, or resistance to it. This qualitative study explores the rejection of True Crime docume...

Deepfakes are a technological innovation that might be understood to violate the documentary film’s relationship with the real. Yet documentary makers have been among the first screen producers to ...

This article seeks to redeem the idea that virtual reality (VR) might serve to foster empathy by rethinking both the notion of empathy and the ways contemporary VR films have attempted to generate ...

There is no consensus on the definition of participatory or collaborative practices in relation to audiovisual media. The same term has been used to name a range of similar practices although they ...

News organizations in recent years have embraced documentary film. From streaming ventures to Academy Award nominations, newsrooms are producing documentaries to reach new audiences and maintain th...

What counts as documentary in the twenty-first century? More importantly, is documentary studies capable of contributing to a discourse that can both define the contours of and point beyond the pas...

This paper addresses some fundamental aesthetic (and thus political) questions which arise when faced with the problem of the representation of migratory flows in documentary cinema: how to represe...

This article examines two documentaries that go beyond the audio-visual canon representing the guest worker from Turkey to Germany. Look, Listen Carefully (Özlem Sarıyıldız, 2021) and Gurbet is a H...

This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed...

This article historicizes and theorizes the feminist documentary practice of Julie Gustafson, focusing on The Politics of Intimacy: Ten Women Talk About Orgasm and Sexuality (US, 1973) and Desire (...

Seeing documentary film as an object for remembering and resurrecting the past is a complex issue touching upon questions pertaining to the ontology of photographic capturing, its ways of becoming ...

Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has b...

This article explores the role of the affective experience of shame in Tomer Heymann’s documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life (2018) about internationally successful Israeli gay porn star Jonath...

How can documentary film overcome ‘engagement at a distance' to perceptively express urban experience? In this article, I examine modes of sensory mode of spectatorial engagement in Cities of Sleep...

Published in Studies in Documentary Film (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2023)

This article develops a non-representational queer approach to the analysis of first-person queer documentary. I suggest that a change of the view from investigating queer representations to explor...

Published in Studies in Documentary Film (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2023)

ABSTRACT In the early twentieth century, oil companies transitioned from merchants of light to merchants of movement. A discreet network of pipelines began to crisscross the Australian landscape. By the 1950s, the presence of petroleum was visible everywhere, circulating across a vast cultural infrastructure of sponsored cinema. Oil films extolled fertilisers which turned a wasteland into pasture,

Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from researchers, there are no accounts on how it links to experimental documentary film and avant-doc stor...

ABSTRACT This article discusses a selection of interactive and immersive works from the past twenty years in Australia and argues that these have emerged from a specific cultural and geographical perspective in relation to space and place. In the context of settler colonial or migrant Australians, who have fraught and unresolved relationships to place, technologies that intervene with and implicate

ABSTRACT This research is a creative exploration of transmedia’s ability to offer up a model of distribution and audience engagement for political documentary. Transmedia, as is well known, is a fluid concept. It is not restricted to the activities of the entertainment industry and its principles also reverberate in the practice of political and activist documentary projects. This practice-led research

ABSTRACT Subscription video-on-demand services have been increasingly moving away from licencing content to producing their own content. The ‘original’ label is applied to different types of productions for which streaming platforms own exclusive rights, usually worldwide and for specific periods. This has also been part of Netflix’s global strategy to attract new and existing subscribers. Research

Published in Studies in Documentary Film (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2023)

Published in Studies in Documentary Film (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2023)

ABSTRACT This article examines the potential of the art-installation as a space for experiential and sensory mediation of non-fiction film. Using the installation Commensal (2017) by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor as a case study, I discuss the contribution of contemporary art to discourses on spectatorship and audience experience in non-fiction film. Taking Commensal as a starting point

ABSTRACT Recent cultural representations of the Windrush Generation – economic migrants from African Caribbean nations who were invited to live and work in Britain between 1948 and 1972 – and their descendants have overwhelmingly represented British citizens of African Caribbean descent as ‘victims’. This is unsurprising; the so-called ‘Windrush Scandal’ in the late 2010s saw hundreds of members of

ABSTRACT Focusing on two teenagers grappling with the difficult reality of Naples, Agostino Ferrente’s Selfie (2019) is a powerful depiction of an entire community at a significant time, when limited perspectives and the pervasive presence of organized crime – with a value system that is intrinsic to the Camorra – deeply influence the present and the future of a generation. Shot by two 16-year-old

ABSTRACT While Australian cinema is generally defined by the feature filmmaking tradition, at least since the 1970s, ‘utilitarian filmmaking' represents a significant but barely visible portion of screen culture in Australia, a portion that has had an emphatic but unexamined influence on the media industries, education systems, industrial relations, research culture and national culture. Recent scholarly

ABSTRACT Created for the Uses of Cinema conference (SSAAANZ, Monash University, November 2018), the video Film for a Purpose (13 minutes, 2018) offers a précis of my research with the ARC Discovery project ‘Utilitarian film in Australia 1945-1980'. The video essay ironically deploys certain tropes of the sponsored film - the green screen, the authoritative presenter, the wallto-wall narration, the

ABSTRACT ‘Utilitarian’ films - those not for the purposes of art or entertainment - include instructional films addressing workplace safety. Large quantities of these were made in Australia between WW2 and the advent of video and were viewed by many workers in different industries. Their content, social significance and relationship to a wider dispositif of media and labour is therefore a fertile source

ABSTRACT After WW2, with the onset of the Cold War, by virtue of an Anglo-Australian Joint Venture, Australia became a centre for scientific research into rockets and long-range weapons (including Britain’s atomic warheads) testing. By the mid 1950s a new outback town - Woomera had been created in the Australian Desert to conduct the tests. Each test generated 1,000s of images and 50,000 pictures could

ABSTRACT In the mid-1980s a Royal Commission was established to investigate the conduct of the British nuclear testing program in Australia (1952–1963). It sought to document the impact on military participants, nearby Indigenous communities and downwind rural and urban populations. Amongst the evidence presented were official documents, photographs and films recording the atomic detonations. This

ABSTRACT In film studies in recent years, we have seen the (re)emergence of two fields of enquiry, both of which concern this essay. (1) The interest in what we have termed ‘client-sponsored, instructional and governmental filmmaking existing outside the conventional theatrical contexts by which cinema is usually defined’. We have seen a number of conferences and anthologies appear that attest to this

ABSTRACT The world is precarious and changing, yet we continue to find ways to order and understand these entanglements; taming the complexity out there. In linear documentary, shots by necessity need to be ordered and fixed by the edit, whilst some shots do not make the cut at all. Due to the affordances of the online network, multilinear documentary allows multiple possible arrangements of audiovisual

ABSTRACT While there are several publications in the field of documentary studies that deal with the digital disruption and innovations, the sub-field of emerging media needs constant re-examination as modes of production, dissemination and exhibition are exposed to significant changes and interact with documentary film in its various established and new facets. Smart Storytelling leverages contemporary

(2022). Documentary film festivals Vol. 1: methods, history, politics/Vol. 2: changes, challenges, professional perspectives. Studies in Documentary Film: Vol. 16, Special Issue: Smart Storytelling. Guest Editor: Max Schleser, pp. 189-191.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the frameworks of co-creation between artists and AI in the context of documentary studies. As a result of emerging AI-focused experiments in documentary and transdisciplinary arts practice, we examine the nature and scope of AI as a collaborator with a focus of documentary projects exhibited and showcased at international documentary festivals. An introduction to emergent

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the way experimental documentary film practitioners may utilize the methodology of the bricoleuse in order to create films. I refer to my experiments in documentary film practice – mediations of memory, place and subjectivities – where I deploy hybrid filmic strategies of critical realism and fictional enactment. The bricoleuse may use footage obtained through pocket

ABSTRACT Sound is often recognised as critical to the success of 360° film, but in a new medium fraught with technological challenges and time constraints, there is little research to guide sound designers in their creative practice. As practitioners engage with this new 360° format, the wisdom and techniques developed from decades of documentary sound practice promise more compelling viewing experiences;

ABSTRACT This article draws on my experience creating the film What's With Your Nails? (2018), a film about queerness, normality, slowness, and painting fingernails, and which embraces the affordances of smartphone filmmaking for queer documentary production in Australia. Documentary practices in this field are notable for a ‘privileging of authenticity’ through a subjective perspective, and there

(2022). Radical documentary and global crises: militant evidence in the digital age. Studies in Documentary Film: Vol. 16, Special Issue: Smart Storytelling. Guest Editor: Max Schleser, pp. 186-187.

(2022). Interactive documentary: theory and debate. Studies in Documentary Film: Vol. 16, Special Issue: Smart Storytelling. Guest Editor: Max Schleser, pp. 188-189.

ABSTRACT Questions of political allegiance between India and Pakistan have turned Kashmir into one of the most militarised zones in the world. Although antagonism between India and Pakistan vis-à-vis Kashmir is predicated on territorial disputes, the Kashmir Valley since the end of the British rule in India in 1947 has struggled with the contentious issues of identity, freedom, armed intrusions, often

ABSTRACT This article uses the German idiom fremdschämen to discuss some of the ethical dilemmas posed by the representation of sexuality and mental disability in documentary. Fremdschämen roughly translates as vicarious embarrassment. It suggests that one can feel embarrassed on behalf of somebody else who seems oblivious to the cause of embarrassment. Does the representation of sexual desire in neurologically

(2021). Documentary in Wales: cultures and practices. Studies in Documentary Film: Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 281-282.

ABSTRACT This article examines eco-documentaries that employ the ethics of the face to engage with the notion of a universal human right to a healthy environment. Climate Refugees (Nash, dir 2010 Nash, Michael P., dir. 2010. Climate Refugees. United States: LA Think Tank and Preferred Content. [Google Scholar]) and I Bought a Rainforest (Searle and Woodward, dir 2014 Searle, Gavin, and Aidan Woodward

(2021). The Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: Documentary Studies and Analytic Aesthetics in Conversation. Studies in Documentary Film: Vol. 15, Documentary Studies and Analytic Aesthetics in Conversation. Guest Editors: Mario Slugan & Enrico Terrone, pp. 107-113.

ABSTRACT This article critiques existing textualist and extratextualist (intentionalist and reception-driven) approaches to capturing the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction distinction in philosophical and film scholarship on documentary and offers an alternative extratextualist approach dubbed institutionalism. I argue that textualist attempts fail because no textual element (presentational

ABSTRACT This article refines previously made claims that evocative animated documentaries enable us to gain knowledge about unfamiliar states of mind and mental experiences through prompting our imagination. Building on recent scholarship in philosophy of mind, cognitive film theory and film and animation studies, I argue that it is evocative animated documentaries that do not, counterintuitively

ABSTRACT Assessments of the truthfulness or otherwise of documentaries are best understood as genre conventions which vary historically. Genre conventions are shared between audiences, filmmakers and institutions. Beliefs about the acceptable use of fictional techniques in documentary storytelling, particularly in television, are subject to occasional public controversies. The move from photographic

ABSTRACT I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is a faithful representation of the facts, whilst fiction films merely invite us to imagine what is made up. Instead, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a combination of non-essential features and which influence appreciation