THEORIES OF DOCUMENTARY FILM (2023/24)
Documentary film, visual ethnography, and the representation of lifeworlds
TEACHING
SYNOPSIS
What does it mean to observe a reality with a camera — and to vouch for what the camera shows? This seminar reads the theory of documentary film through the lens of media anthropology: not only as a history of forms, but as a history of how film has come to encounter, know and represent human lifeworlds.
It moves chronologically — from the early cinema of the Lumières, Vertov and Eisenstein, through direct cinema and cinéma vérité to the post-documentary image — and takes visual and sensory ethnography as a guiding thread, from Rouch’s ciné-ethnography to the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Each session sets a theoretical text against the films that test it. The documentary comes into view less as a genre than as a practice of access to other realities — and as a question of who may represent whom.