期刊名称：Cinema : Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image
电子版ISSN：1647-8991
出版年度：2017
期号：9
页码：121-126
出版社：New University of Lisbon
摘要：Documentary films have not only become increasingly popular in the recent years, theyhave also attracted more and more attention as a complex subject of academic researchand critical study. And indeed, their peculiar relation to reality raises manifold questions:asserting a truthful basis in the real, they push us to reflect on the correspondences betweenobjective facts and their subjective mediation, and confront us with the problem of findingan adequate artistic form for carving a truth content out of the empirical reality. Whilemany rather conventional documentary films aim to reproduce and analyze explicitfacts, critical documentaries and essay films often take on a critical stance towards the hegemonicclaim for factual truth and the idea of an unbiased representation. Instead ofcomforting the status quo of that which appears as genuinely real, they examine the underlyingpower structures of reality and the spectrum of experiences and representationsconstitutive of it, thereby interrogating the status of images in the contemporary societyand their performative force of shaping perception. Thinking with, about and through documentaryfilms, especially those with artistic and critical ambitions, thus leads to a problematizingof our very understanding of the world, the way it is represented and legitimated,and the impact of images and sounds in contemporary society. What do documentaryfilms reveal, scrutinize, or destabilize? How do they make us think not only aboutspecific topics, but also about the form through which they become graspable? How doesthe interrelation of form and content affect their epistemological dimension and their criticalforce?
