Introduction: Experiments in Documentary
Millennium Film Journal, 2009, no. 51, p. 10
This work opens with discussion about how documentary is inherently contradictory, and explores the documentary/experimental film hybrid. The author looks at forms of video art that challenge the widely accepted norms of the documentary form. Through a discussion of the work of a number of contemporary and historical works in the genre, the author explores and catalogues the potentiality of the experimental documentary. Hilderbrand suggests that it functions as a medium that can offer historical revisions and open up space for representation. Hilderbrand states: "experimental documentaries allow for -- maybe even necessitate -- critical subjectiveness, humanist connections, recognition of historical wrong doings, and speculation towards more progressive ways of being and representing."
ITEM 2009.170 – available for viewing in the Research Centre
Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited
John Grierson
Jonathan Kahana
Maya Deren
Stan Brakhage
Man with a Movie Camera – Dziga Vertov
Night and Fog – Alain Resnais
Sans Soleil – Chris Marker
Reassemblage – Trinh T. Minh- ha
Tongues Untied – Marlon Rigg
History and Memory – Rea Tajiri
diaries (1989-93) – Sadie Benning
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take One – William Greaves
Far from Poland – Jill Godmilow
The Thin BlueLine – Errol Morris
L'hippocampe – Jean Painlevé
Acera – Jean Painlevé
The Witches' Dance – Jean Painlevé
RE: The_Operation – Paul Chan
Apple Grown in Wind Tunnel – Steven Matheson
How to Fix the World – Jacqueline Goss
Isle of Flowers – Jorge Furtado
Blue – Derek Jarman
Lost Book Found – Jem Cohen
My Life in Five Minutes – Allyson Mitchell
The Third Memory – Pierre Huyghe
Sad Disco Fantasia – Steve Reinke
Black and White Trypps Number Three – Ben Russell
An Injury to One – Travis Wilkerson
The Casting – Omer Fast
Walid Ra'ad
The Atlas Group
Daughter Rite – Michelle Citron
Inextinguishable Fire – Harun Farocki
Peggy Ahwesh
Caroline Koebel
Chie Yamayoshi
Liza Johnson
Julia Meltzer
David Thorne
RocketKitKongoKit – Craig Baldwin
Greg Youmans
Là-bas – Chantal Akerman
Walid Raad