Abstract
Feminism, documentary film and visual anthropology are the three domains that this study connects. The multifaceted relation between these three fields can be summarised as revolving around the debates on reality, truth, representation of the Other, knowledge production and power. Domitilla Olivieri’s dissertation explores such intricate interrelations through the analysis
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of three films: Kim Longinotto’s Sisters in Law (2005), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Ursula Biemann’s Europlex (2003). To different extents, and in multiple and overlapping ways, these films address the issue of representation(s) of non-Western, and especially female subjects, the relation between sign and reality and the power dynamics implicit in documentary filmmaking. The dissertation shows that the relation between reality and the documentary sign can be understood as one of ‘haunting’. Haunting here refers to the specific indexical quality of the relation between sign and object, the manner in which the object affects or determines the sign (Peirce 1958, 8.177), or the way in which “the world presses on” the cinematic sign (Comolli 1999, 40). Borrowing and expanding upon Mary Ann Doane’s definition of the indexical sign as one that is “haunted by its object” (Doane 2007b, 134), Olivieri presents several examples in which the filmed reality inhabits, intrudes upon, and makes itself continually present in the filmic documentary sign. As the particular focus of this research is on anthropological feminist documentaries, Olivieri considers them as films haunted by reality and regarding feminist issues to do with the politics of the Other and processes of Othering. These films are, to borrow Trinh’s concept, “inappropriate/d” (Trinh 1986, 9). They cross labels and categorisation; explore and perform borders; let themselves be haunted by reality without falling flat into the hegemonic pitfalls of realism; they imagine and represent invisible realities while pointing attention to the power of vision and visuality; they escape rigid definitions while providing the space to redefine meanings and realities; and while these films are determined by the social world, they can also be “transformative of that same world” (Gaines 2007, 19). These are the potential effects of such “inappropriate/d” films, as well as the possibilities opened by a critical perspective that inhabits the space between feminist theories, documentary studies and visual anthropology. Ultimately this is what this research investigates and performs. Exploring the interconnections between the politics and aesthetics of documentary, this study emphasises what audio-visual representations can do, highlights the links between documentary practices and the processes knowledge production and, finally, the critical and transformative promise that resides in the encounters between feminism and documentary
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