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A poke in the gnosis — reimagining documentary: a phenomenological analysis of the reappropriation of meaning and the politics of disruption

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A poke in the gnosis — reimagining documentary: a phenomenological analysis of the reappropriation of meaning and the politics of disruption

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A POKE IN THE GNOSIS – REIMAGINING DOCUMENTARY:
A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE REAPPROPRIATION OF MEANING AND
THE POLITICS OF DISRUPTION

By

Allison Renée Greer Ross

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

December 2022

Copyright 2022 Allison Renée Greer Ross
ii

Epigraph

“Documentary is not a thing but an experience.”
(Vivian Sobchack, n.p., my emphasis)
iii

Acknowledgements
Throughout this journey, I have benefited from and greatly appreciate the financial
assistance of the Annenberg Foundation and the University of Southern California’s Cinema and
Media Studies program for funding, by way of Fellowship and TAship, my education. A
dissertation about reimagining media would not be complete without an acknowledgement of the
people, places and perspectives that have shaped this experience. My advisor, chair of my
committee, and to whom I am most indebted, Dr. Michael Renov’s guidance and patience have
been invaluable while I navigated through the forest of film theory into which I wandered. As I
explored avant garde and experimental works of the ‘90s, he prompted me to challenge the
characterization and classification that traditionally defined the documentary form. Our first
discussions and our constant exchanges have fueled my enthusiasm for the discipline. Thank
you to all on my committee, Drs. Holly Willis, Kara Keeling, Akira Lippit, and Amelia Jones,
for your encouragement, suggestions, notes, and questions throughout this process. My writing
reflects the though and considerable consideration each of you invested in helping me refine my
discourse.
Early on, feedback from Drs. Karen Tongson, Ellen Seiter, and David James on the
content I created in seminar papers and for conference presentations forged what was to follow.
Dr. J.D. Connor’s comments on an early draft helped to clarify the direction I ultimate pursued
regarding the distinction between concepts of truth and representations of truth. My work with
Drs. Kiki Benzon, Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn allowed me to explore digital and new
media. In addition, the curricula of professors Richard Lemarchand, Margaret Moser and Peter
Brinson covered procedural and game design, which became crucial to my nuanced
understanding of spectator engagement. Finally, I am indebted to a fantastic cohort of graduate
iv

students who challenge me to think critically. To this robust academic community of faculty and
peers at USC, my diligence as a learner and my acumen as an instructor, have benefited
immeasurably from each and every one of our conversations.
As I defined my research, I have drawn on resources both within and outside the
University. Michael C. Oliveira and Loni Shibuyama at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive
at USC Libraries have provided me with a wonderful repository of mid-century, queer pulp
fiction, as well as extensive materials from Outfest’s past years. The staff at Canyon Cinema
have afforded me crucial access to hard-to-find experimental films and materials, as well as the
experience of viewing many of these materials in their original medium. Interviews with
Alexandra Juhasz and Zoe Leonard have given me valuable firsthand insights into key aspects of
Watermelon Woman and the Faye Richards Photo Archive.
Prior to arriving at USC, my early film studies courses at the University of Washington
played a critical role in launching this investigation. I celebrate the influence of Dr. Jennifer
Bean, who pointed me in the direction of hybrid forms of scholarship that explore dialogic media
from the vantage point of a phenomenologist. Dr. Tamara Cooper’s Queer Theory class literally
introduced me to Zanele Muholi, whose vision continues to inspire my analysis. And special
recognition goes out to my parents and friends who have watched films, listened to my theories,
reviewed my manuscripts, and have been invaluable sources of moral support along the way. I
hope to enjoy many documentary films – however you define them – together for years to come.

Allison R. G. Ross
September 2022

v

Table of Contents

Epigraph .......................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... vii

Preface............................................................................................................................................ ix

Chapter 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 1
By Way of Introduction ...........................................................................................3
Theories of the Documentary Experience ................................................................7
My Analysis and a Brief Introduction to Phenomenology ......................................9
Phenomenology......................................................................................................10
Applying Phenomenology to a Reimagined Documentary Form ..........................13
A Hypothetical .......................................................................................................16
Looking Ahead.......................................................................................................19

Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................................................20
The Presumption of Authority and the Assumption of Veracity ...........................20
The Viewer.............................................................................................................24
Reception and Perception ......................................................................................31
Engagement............................................................................................................35
Interactive Engagement .........................................................................................38

Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................................43
Resonance ..............................................................................................................43
Interpolation ...........................................................................................................48
A Note About the Way I Am Using Politics..........................................................52
The Narrative .........................................................................................................55
In Conclusion .........................................................................................................59
Before I Start ..........................................................................................................61
Housing Problems ..................................................................................................61
Post Script ..............................................................................................................68

Chapter 4: The Viewer ..................................................................................................................69
If Every Girl Had a Diary ......................................................................................69
Gone Home ............................................................................................................76
The Hunting Ground ..............................................................................................81
Until Dawn .............................................................................................................86

vi

Chapter 5: The Presumption of Authority and the Assumption of Veracity ................................ 93
Highrise / Universe Within ....................................................................................93
Autoetnografía .....................................................................................................100
The Novice ...........................................................................................................106

Chapter 6: The Somatic .............................................................................................................. 113
Leviathan..............................................................................................................113
The Watermelon Woman / The Fae Richards Photo Archive ..............................117
His Mother’s Voice ..............................................................................................126
LA 92 ....................................................................................................................132

Chapter 7: Contextualization ......................................................................................................138
She, Puppet ..........................................................................................................138
Chronicle of a Lying Spirit ..................................................................................144
How to Survive a Plague / Beats Per Minute (BPM)...........................................147
Sea in the Blood ...................................................................................................152

Chapter 8: Symbolism that Disruptions and Reappropriates .......................................................162
Blue ......................................................................................................................162
Forbidden Love ....................................................................................................168
“what don’t you see when you look at me?” .......................................................180

Epilogue .......................................................................................................................................188

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................195

vii

Abstract

Whereas a viewer does not come to a fictional narrative wondering if the material is
veridical or whether it might be making a false representation, non-fiction media sets an
expectation of veracity before the first frame. When it comes to determining its documentary
value, the disciple offers multiple methodologies to formulate this assessment. Two dominant
modes remain fundamentally at odds in terms of their respective approaches. Jerry Kuehl, Tom
Gunning, Bill Nichols and others base their discussions upon the content’s indexical relationship
to the pro-filmic: if an image records an actuality, it is considered veridical or possessing
veracity. Alternatively, theorists, such as Vivian Sobchack, take a phenomenological view of
documentary experience: if observing media evokes cognitive and visceral associations linked to
nonfiction, then that representation of actuality has documentary value. Rooting documentary in
the profilmic often privileges the visual and can exclude experiences absent from dominant
archives. While determining veridicality based upon phenomenological experience often invites
the debate as to what is the truth of what has been witnessed. I pose a theory that bridges these
two approaches and provides significant insight regarding a spectator’s relationship to
documentary media and the truth it purports to represent.
Accounting for both the experience and the assessment of veridicality and veridical, at
the moment of viewing, I expand upon the scholarship of Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology
and Tavia Nyong’o conception of the world already false, to analyze how content is reinterpreted
and reimagined via the context of a given observer. This determination is performed anew at
each instance of viewing for each spectator and suggests that the actuality being represented may
be experienced and assessed as both true and false, documentary and not documentary. Such a
dynamic is exemplified in projects ranging from videographic essay to video games. By

viii

applying my theory via close readings to a spectrum of media types and styles of representation,
I argue that when content is experienced, it forms the basis upon which memory and imagination
reappropriate the representation of actual people, places and events. Content, once engaged,
objectively cannot be experienced again for the first time. It is forever transformed and only can
be received and perceived in the context of the media’s narrative and from the unique
perspective of an observer of this media. This reappropriation becomes discrete points of
references upon which present and future observations are contextualized and assessed. “A Poke
in the Gnosis: Reimagining Documentary” is a call to action that manifests in the questioning of
so much of what society assumes to be truthful representations of actuality in media conveyed
through the medium of the documentary form.

ix

Preface
This preface is an opportunity to describe why I study media.
My story, like so many, begins with anecdotes.
I always have enjoyed reading Shakespeare’s plays, literature in general, and the lexicon
of language. My family regularly attends the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and, from an early
age, I would memorize and perform Twelfth Night for anyone willing to indulge, and to be fair,
tolerate, the passions of an only child. In my first year as an undergraduate at the University of
Washington in Seattle, I declared Latin and Classical Studies my majors, as I became immersed
in the subjects of Greek and Roman Antiquity. I translated Ovid and Virgil, Homer and Horace.
And lots of Lucretius. What fascinated me most was the multiplicity and ambiguity of meanings
that a student could derive from a diverse range of scholarly transcriptions of texts.
In a course on the Ancient Novel, I was entertained by the adventures described in
Daphnis and Chloe and Apollonius of Rhodes. The journeys of swashbuckling heroes featured a
wide range of exploits, requiring rescuing maidens from pirate abductions and inadvisable
excursions into the Underworld. These were stories reconstructed from artifacts. One source of
texts was Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, edited by Susan A. Stephens and John J.
Winkler (Princeton University Press, 1995).
1
Among the tales explored, Stephens and Winkler
analyzed what remains of the Babyloniaka (A Babylonian Story), attributed to the Greek author
Iamblichus.
2

1
Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, edited by Susan A. Stephens and John J. Winkler (Princeton University
Press, 1995).

2
Ibid, page 179-246.

x

The personas of the protagonists, Sinonis and Rhodanes, were constructed from
excavated and disjointed segments. To my surprise, the pieces painted a picture of sexual
identity other than what I had learned from works I had been studying from the period. This was
the first occurrence I had found of what I interpreted to be a heroic portrayal of a woman who
today would be considered queer, and a sympathetic supporting cast. Additionally, the plot
included what I and others have highlighted as a “marriage” between two women, a relative
rarity in Classical literature.
3
Eventually, the Babyloniaka became the subject of my Capstone
honors thesis in Classics.
Though I devoted my first two years mastering Latin and studying Greek, in between
translating, I watched movies. Lots and lots of movies. Eventually, when I discovered I could
get credit for how I spent much of my spare time, I added Cinema Studies to my schedule and
my list of majors. I enjoyed film noir, modern romantic comedies, and documentaries. I also
was drawn to experimental and avant garde cinema circa the late 1980s through the early 1990s.
Among the films I screened were portions of Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah (1985)
which recreates the history of the Holocaust through first person interviews.
Growing up, I listened to stories told by my parents who talked about how their parents,
my grandparents, escaped Poland and Russia in the late Nineteenth Century to come to America.

3
Helene Morales. (2006) “Marrying Mesopotamia: Female Sexuality and Cultural Resistance in Iamblichus’
Babylonian Tales,” Ramus 35: 78-101.

Brigitte Egger. “Women and Marriage in the Greek Novels: The Boundaries of Romance,” in James Tatum and
Brigitte Egger eds, The Search for the Ancient Novel, 260-280. (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1994).

And

Bernadette J. Brooten. Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).

xi

On one occasion, I spoke with my dad’s cousin, Kathy, a descendent of Polish Jewish
Americans. I remember sitting on the couch across from her and questioning if we had relatives
who had remained and still live in Poland. Actually, what I was asking, uncomfortable saying,
but Kathy understood, was, “Were they sent to the death camps?” She paused, and after a long
moment, replied, “My parents never talk about it. I stopped asking.” It was then I realized I was
inquiring about a history so enshrouded in traumatic memories that our families would not allow
themselves to speak about the fate our Eastern European ancestors had endured.
For many of my peers, their initial exposure to the history of the Holocaust was from
what we learned reading The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) by Anne Frank and watching The
Diary of Anne Frank (Stevens 1959), the movie inspired by the 1955 play of the same name. As
a class, we researched and wrote reports that introduced us to the vitality of these individuals,
their families, and their communities. We explored media which captured the sentiment of this
period, viewed newsreel footage produced and proudly archived by the Third Reich that
celebrated their systemic hatred of others. By the time I entered college, I had seen Steven
Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) at least three times.
As a Junior, in addition to the films the department required, I decided to watch Shoah in
its entirety. I chose a weekend, specifically a Saturday, because I was determined to screen the
entire work in one sitting, and I knew if I stopped, I would not have the stomach to return. So,
with only breaks to catch my breath and refill my coffee cup, the nine-plus hours movie
marathon lasted well into the evening. In the film, Holocaust survivors and witnesses
memorialize the humanity of so many who lost their lives. I listened to their testimonials as they
recall the unforgettable, unimaginable crimes that were committed at Auschwitz, Buchenwald,
Dachau, and the many other concentration camps. By the end of the documentary, while being

xii

viscerally exhausted, I lacked the experience to truly comprehend the profound magnitude of the
genocide and the grotesque atrocities perpetrated by those who carried out these executions.
For the rest of the evening, I felt a sense of both guilt and remorse, along with a flood of
unsettled emotions. These were people I didn’t know, but I had an undeniable connection to
their history. Yet, theirs was a reality so unfathomable, a world so foreign to me, I struggled to
connect to their personal narratives.
This reaction differed sharply from my reading of the Babyloniaka, a story that was
obviously fiction. I readily could identify with Sinonis as someone who challenged authority
and normative institutions. I believe she did this not as a conscious act of rebellion, but because,
in an attempt to explore her passions apart from the role that was determined by society, she
made choices that reflected the life true to her desires. I saw myself in her character. The
contrast in my reactions further fueled my interest in exploring my relationship to the
presentation of both fact and fictional content in media.
As part of a class on Queer Cinema, the professor introduced me to Zanele Muholi, a
South African filmmaker, photographer, and activist. When I watched the documentary Difficult
Love (Muholi and Goldsmid 2010), I felt it brought into public view the humanity of Black
South Africans cast out of post-Apartheid white and heteronormative culture because of their
gender identification or sexual orientation. In voiceover, against a backdrop of art and live
footage, Muholi describes the process of working in the studio.
These scenes highlight the individuality of the lives portrayed, as well as expose the scars
of the violence the activist’s community survives on a daily basis. Unlike the sensationalizing
force which so troubled Susan Sontag in her writings on the exhibition of the sufferings of
distant others in Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag 2003), Muholi’s work reflects an

xiii

immediacy, intimacy, and honesty that stems from the connections to the people photographed,
who live outside the boundaries of social acceptability. While many documentary films that I
have watched attempt to make a single, directed call-to-action argument, I feel that Difficult Love
is unique in its open-ended political messaging, which I would posit increases its impact.

Portrait of Miss D'vine I (from Michael Stevenson Gallery website,
http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/dvine1.htm)

Pictured is Miss D’vine, a trans woman. In Difficult Love, Muholi speaks about how
Miss D’vine requested to wear traditional Zulu prayer beads. The filmmaker states that those
personal touches reflect the subjectivity of the model. Muholi selected the rough background of
the promontory, the location of the photo shoot, illustrating the coordination of consideration
between Miss D’vine’s choice expressive of her own identity and Muholi’s selection of setting.
Muholi’s project suggests a communal process of healing through the reappropriation of images
associated with oppression and Apartheid. By inviting an audience to experience and question
what Difficult Love portrays, and by drawing attention to how Muholi produces these images, the
filmmaker creates an alternative mode of viewing.

xiv

This dynamic rejects polemic in favor of a discourse emphasizing the individuality of
each participant being photographed. It prompted me to think about media, in this case the
explicit and implicit messages conveyed in images of South Africans before and after Apartheid,
as a process of intellectual and visceral viewing. Difficult Love, as an art form, has the power to
give expression to the physical and emotional trauma experienced by a generation. It was after
that autumn class junior year and my conversations with Muholi, I decided to go on to graduate
school in documentary film studies.
At the University of Southern California, my coursework included analyzing cinema of
the late Twentieth Century that reflected the politics of the times. With the proliferation of
deconstructive videographic, autobiographical, and essay projects, what interested me about this
media was their open-ended structures that challenged discourses of “curing” disability, opposed
conventional “treatments” of anti-normative behavior, and depicted personal accountings of
“gender dysphoria.”
4
These works also drew attention to under-represented events and to
people who were absent from dominant records and archives. Engaging with this media, I was
reminded of Robert Stam’s writings where the author applies Bakhtinian dialogism to the
structure of film. He explores the significance of storylines that lack closure, which, when
applied to documentary media, suggests a redefinition of the form beyond a dialogic discourse. I
also read David Bordwell who writes about the interpretation of meaning, Vivian Sobchack who
regards the viewing of documentary content as an experience, and Michael Renov who expands
upon traditional analyses of a viewer’s engagement with the content to consider an emotional, as
well as cognitive connection to the subject matter and to truth.

4
“Curing” and “gender dysphoria” both are terms I am using in quotations, since they are, in different ways,
contested by some due to their associations, respectively, with disability as illness and with trans identities as
medical conditions requiring diagnosis and potentially connected to a history of pathologizing trans experiences.

xv

If I were to argue that the determination of truth is left to the discretion of each viewer
and that a range of subjective meanings can be ascertained from a single word of text, it might be
said I am echoing the types of relativist thinking put forth by poststructuralist thinkers in fields
such as ethics and anthropology.
5
This is a criticism I avoid by not addressing the existence of
truth or “what is truth” in media. These questions no longer are relegated to the esoteric purview
of the poststructuralist or postmodern skeptic. Truth in documentary film at once is highly
praised and hotly contested. This reaction is not novel; it has a history in multiple strands of
philosophy. From Benjamin Page’s 1976 article in the American Political Science Review,
which states that phrases introducing ambiguity into politics served politicians’ “rational self–
interest,” to Simon de Beauvoir’s argument that ambiguity is the “leitmotif” of contemporary
political thought, the concept of ambiguity has long been both at the center of debates around
political utility and essential to feminist discourses, which hold embodiment and subjective
experience at the locus of spectatorial response and political calls to action.
However, “A Poke in the Gnosis: Reimagining Documentary” is not a philosophical
discussion regarding the existence of either objective or subject truth or truth in media. In my
analysis, I make no distinction between content that is considered traditional documentary or
fiction or mockumentaries. I do not treat fiction and nonfiction, or truth and ambiguity as
oppositional. A fictional narrative can employ both fact and fabrication to tell its story.
Likewise, documentarians can incorporate fiction and ambiguous truth to tell a factual narrative.
Instead, I discuss the treatment of the cognitive and visceral meanings appropriated from
the representation of documentary content in media. It is about evidence that engages with a

5
Moral relativism as a philosophical concept sometimes is traced back as far as ancient Greek philosophy (calling to
mind, for example, to Heraclitus’ claim that one never steps into the same river twice among others). However, here
I am focused on the iteration that found traction throughout Twentieth Century cultural anthropology, most
commonly associated with Franz Boas and his students.

xvi

viewer’s desire to know more about the persons, places, and events depicted by this medium. It
is about alternate narratives for communicating traumatic moments that, when expressed using
traditional filmic formats, lack nuance. It is about those documentaries that leave viewers with
questions, multiple or ambiguous solutions, or no resolution whatsoever. It is about media that
disrupts normative assumptions of identity and wellness, as well as reimagines history and
reclaims forgotten pasts.
“A Poke in the Gnosis: Reimagining Documentary” builds a conceptual bridge between
relying upon an objective assessment of content as a means to evaluate the documentary form
and treating the subjective experience of viewing the form as a necessary and sufficient means to
determine its probative value. As a theorist, I set out to better understand this viewing process
and the meanings we derive as a result of this cognitive and visceral engagement with multiple
presentations of multi-referential and multi-sensory experience. This experience includes works
that redefine notions of health, history, the normative assumptions that influence our identity and
our responses to events in our lives that shape our perspectives on the world. It is about offering
a vocabulary to describe the process of dissolution and reappropriation of content. This process
has significant political implications, because it is a call to action that manifests in the
questioning of so much of what society assumes.
By analyzing the significance of this content, including reenactments, restored footage,
and symbolic representation of subject matter, I consider material that often blurs the lines
between fact and faked, that tests the limits of credibility. In my discussion of this material, I
draw upon readings in cinema and narrative studies, queer and feminist theory, gender and
disability studies, decolonial projects and phenomenology. To assess what qualifies as

xvii

documentaries, I examine how this media explicitly and implicitly, literally and figuratively
define, and, in some cases, reimagine, actuality.
I reference sources that many might assume are unrelated and argue for a more inclusive
definition of this media to exemplify my reasoning. Beginning with John Grierson, Bill Nichols,
and Jerry Kuehl, the theorists who laid the foundation for studies in this field, I expand upon
traditional conceptualizations of the form. From the perspective of a phenomenologist, I provide
a roadmap as to how content from a wide range of examples via diverse modes of representation
and formats, once viewed in context, could be assessed as documentary, thereby diversifying the
sample of media from which I draw. Having validated their addition, I explore the
reappropriation of meaning that these works explicitly portray on screen, what implicitly they
suggest between the frames, and what unique narratives the process of engaging with this
material inspires. These reappropriated meanings interact within a viewer’s network of
knowledge that is constantly and continuously in the process of reformulation. Their
reformulation is fueled by the infusion of new meanings given the presence of new context.
I look at the role the spectator plays in the making of meaning to understand the ways in
which logocentric definitions of epistephilia can be nuanced and complicated when considering
both experimental and experiential forms of visual, avisual, and sensory engagement. By not
prioritizing one sense over another, I highlight the influence of all modes of reception and
perception, operating in tandem with cognitive and visceral awareness, analyzed in the historical
context of existential and feminist phenomenology. By emphasizing the experiential, I view
documentary-as-experience, to borrow a term from Vivian Sobchack. As many of these works
have their origins in the anti-normative politics of 1980s cinema, I turn to feminist conceptions
of embodied cinema and queer notions of reoriented viewing practice to examine the potential of

xviii

dialogic, experimental, and experiential documentary to challenge the normative assumptions
that shape our knowledge of the world.
This reimagining of documentary content draws on the scholarship of multiple authors
and relates theories from their respective disciplines: in narrative studies,
6
in phenomenology and
phenomenological film studies,
7
in studies of documentary and the archive,
8
in queer, feminist
and disability studies and the intersections thereof,
9
in alternate approaches to viewer reception
and cultural studies,
10
and for broader cultural contexts in classical cultural theory.
11

To illustrate how these diverse fields of study, in consort with each other, manifest in
media, I have chosen to discuss a wide range of examples that suggest content which is both felt
and intellectually known, resonant with a viewer on visceral, as well as cerebral levels. I draw
from avant garde and experimental work from the late Twentieth Century, by artists such as
Peggy Ahwesh, Sadie Benning, and Derek Jarman. The form and content of these projects,
complement one another, drawing audiences into nondidactic affective experiences, as spectators
become participants in the reappropriation of the meaning of text during the moment in which it
is observed, challenging conventional discourses which hold the documentarian as auteur. I

6
In narrative studies: Peter Brooks, Heather Love, Paul Ricoeur, Robyn Warhol, and Tim Whitmarsh.
7
In phenomenology and phenomenological film studies: Sara Ahmed, Edmund Husserl, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Laura
U. Marks, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Vivian Sobchack.

8
In studies of documentary and the archive: Jaimie Baron, Giuliana Bruno, Dick Eitzen, Allyson Nadia Field, Jane
Gaines, John Grierson, Katherine Lawless, Andre Lepecki, Kate Nash, Bill Nichols, Carl Plantinga, Pooja Rangan,
Michael Renov, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Michael A. Unger, and Brian Winston.

9
In queer, feminist and disability studies and the intersections thereof: Derek Burrill, Eli Clare, Ann Cvetkovich,
Lee Edelman, Amelia Jones, Alison Kafer, Kara Keeling, Robert McRuer, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o,
Allan Sekula, Judith Jarvis Thompson, and Iris Marion Young.

10
In alternate approaches to viewer reception and cultural studies: David Bordwell, Stuart Hall, Robert Stam, and
Linda Williams.

11
For broader cultural contexts in classical cultural theory: Louis Althusser and Charles Sanders Peirce.

xix

examine media makers such as Robin Campillo, Cheryl Dunye, Richard Fung, Lauren Hadaway,
Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin, and Zanele Muholi who use open-ended narrative strategies to
reference preexisting knowledge shared by maker and audience. These artists create experiences
of visibility and solidarity in both cinema theaters and, in the case of Zoe Leonard, a gallery
space. I also footnote historical examples of documentary such as the works of Kirby Dick and
the British Realist Film Unit in order to explore how the examples and arguments I formulate
align with and differ from existing analysis. In addition, I consider new media and transmedia
creations that make their arguments across multiple platforms, intensifying the potential for
multi-referentially and polyglossia, while also diffusing the spectatorial experience. Finally, I
exemplify these theories in a fictional exploration of the collisions, consorts and conflicts
between unwritten public and personal archives, community and meaning making in the works
of Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman, Iván Reina Ortiz, and Cauleen Smith, among others.
In my discussion of this content, I make reasoned links between subjects that others
might suggest are unrelated. To accomplish this, I tie my theoretical discussions to specific
scenes from the media I study, with the intention of making transparent my own threads of
analysis. As someone who cautiously identifies as a phenomenologist, I appreciate the influence
of experience in the determination of meaning. This is a process that is sustained by the books
that fill my shelves, the industry memorabilia I help catalogue and research at ONE National Gay
and Lesbian Archive at USC Libraries and USC’s Moving Image Archive. It also is indulged by
the historically-grounded and experientially-based video and interactive media I play, often when
I should be reading more authors, reviewing more movies, and exploring the origins of more
artifacts. All these sources have and continue to shape my perspective and inform the next
projects I screen.

xx

I have divided this volume into two parts, an approach that reflects a blend of
presentation styles. Part One – In Theory (Chapters One through Three) is an overview of my
analysis. By briefly introducing theorists, their theories, and the media that I explore in later
chapters, I offer a vocabulary and framework upon which the media I cover in Part Two – In
Practice (Chapters Four through Eight) can be associated with my perspective on a reimagined
conception of the documentary form. Reading this subsequent material, absent the opportunity
to experience media as it is being referenced, in order to clarify the thing (to challenge the
distinction that Sobchack makes) that is created during the process of sensorially engaging with
this content, I have tried to capture in italicized text the essence of these examples.
Consequently, Part Two – In Practice is intended to provide the phenomenology experience of
"seeing" these media samples in the context of this vocabulary, theorists, and their theories. No
one work nor one theory conveys the whole story. The Epilogue (In Conclusion) summarizes
my analysis.
As you read on, I hope you will consider and seek out documentaries that question
traditional societal norms. These challenges remain significant, as politically correct media
becomes increasingly more of a cliché than a call to action. In the same way I made a visceral
connection to the context of the Babyloniaka, in the same way I resonated with the subject matter
produced by Muholi, in the same way that Shoah is a part of my history, these narratives must
remain germane, as their themes become relegated to chapters in dissertations. These works
must be personal and engage us both cognitively and viscerally if they are to continue to be
impactful.

1

Part One: In Theory

Chapter One

Against an image of a LAPD Precinct 714 Sergeant’s Badge and a background score that
takes itself way too seriously, a deep male voice, in measured public service monotones that no
one watching would dare to question, introduces the television show Dragnet. “Ladies and
gentlemen: the story you are about to hear/see is true…”
12
Based upon the foreshadowing
explicitly stated in this preamble, an expectation had been seeded among viewers that the
evidence which would follow will be credible, the retelling will reflect real events, and, as “…the
names have been changed to protect the innocent,” the actors portray actual people. In
retrospect, as I looked at reruns of these episodes in preparation to write this chapter, I mused
that to suppose a caricature of police embodied in the character, Joe “just-the-facts Friday (Jack

12
Dragnet, 1967-1970, famously began each episode with this opening title quotation, featured on a card followed
by the words, “the names and drawings have been changed to protect the innocent.” This formulation is interesting
for a number of reasons. First and foremost, “truth” is not only tied to the declamation of an authoritative narrator
(here, the maker of the title card that frames each episode of this ripped-from-the-headlines docu-drama), but also
connected to a state agency, namely the police who form the focal point of the show (dragnet being a police term
neologistically coined from two and popular expressions of the time). The purported authority of the narrator
mirrors the purported authority of the state institution that is the show’s focus. The “true” stories are about state law
enforcement, itself an agent of authority imbued with the ability to determine “guilt” and “innocence” and “to serve
and protect ,” just as the narrator/arbiter of truth introduced in the title card both determines what is a “true story”
mediates facts, changing names to “protect the innocent”).

2

Webb), was ever believable, today tests my limits of what “you are about to see…” and the
boundaries of actuality.
“A Poke in the Gnosis: Reimagining Documentary” is about the reappropriation of the
cognitive and visceral meanings of “what you are about to see…” It is about documentaries that
do not offer a sense of closure. Instead, they suggest multiple or ambiguous solutions, or present
no resolution whatsoever. It is about innovative formats for representing trauma. It is about
narratives that disrupt normative assumptions of identity and wellness. It is about reclaiming
forgotten histories that institutional archives have failed to preserve. The works I discuss engage
with a viewer’s desire to know more about the persons, places, and events depicted by this
medium. This engagement is political because documentaries that reappropriate and reimagine
existing normative assumptions of behavior, health, and our recorded past enrich our
conversation about and perception of how we view our selves.
Because in the scholarship I reference, dichotomies such as normative and nonnormative,
able bodied and disabled, straight and queer, are delineated for the purpose of analysis, I also
incorporate the same terminology. In doing so, I recognize I am perpetuating the polarizing ends
of the spectrum of possible relationships of one to the other implied when referencing what
distinguishes one from the other. This is antithetical to a corollary of the argument I pose, which
suggests, often, the way these communities are addressed undermines our intent to avoid
defining an individual’s identity in relation to a norm and can enforce ideas of “deviance,”
pathologization, and other historical forms of harmful stereotyping.
As a place to start, I proactively differentiate and justify my criteria as to what defines
documentary media. The discussions that reference scenes from this media make no distinctions
between content that, from the outset, is self-proclaimed fact or well-crafted fiction, or by

3

consensus is either screened as documentary or mockumentary. I chose a broad range of
presentation formats to generalize the process of meaning-making that occurs as a function of the
relationship a viewer has with documentary content. Against the historical backdrop of
cognitive, documentary, and narrative film theory and existential and feminist phenomenological
analysis, I revisit and expand upon the scholarship that addresses the experience of documentary
to theorize a process of engagement that highlights the potential for political appropriation of
knowledge via its virtual representation in media. Though phenomenology shapes my
methodology, the conclusion I pose, with apologies to Vivian Sobchack, is that documentary is
indeed a “thing.” “A Poke in the Gnosis: Reimagining Documentary” is a description of what
that “thing” is …

By Way of Introduction
By most accounts, the author who coined the term “documentary” was John Grierson, an
Scottish filmmaker and critic who worked for British documentary film units in the early
Twentieth Century and would go on to establish the National Film Board of Canada.
13

Biographers such as Jo Fox, John Izod, and Rosaleen Smyth point out that early in his career,
Grierson argues that, distinct from traditional fiction, the purpose of documentary cinema is to

13
Specifically, the text I am referencing is Grierson’s review of the 1935 film Moana, anthologized in Johnathan
Kahana’s book on The Documentary Film Reader (2015) as the first work to use the term “documentary.”

4

convey a “creative treatment of actuality.”
14, 15
Grierson goes on to be credited with
acknowledging that the process of editing this subject matter, whether it concerns an object,
individual, or event, is an inherent and essential element in the representation of the topic. In
1981, Jerry Kuehl stated that what distinguishes documentary and makes the “profilmic” an
intrinsic form is the concept of “the truth claim.”
16, 17
Kuehl writes, “At the heart of
documentaries lie truth claims, and these claims are based on arguments and evidence.”
18

“Evidence,” for Kuehl, is rooted in the profilmic, and his reference to “argument,” echoing
Grierson, suggests that referents are never unvarnished, but often curated in context. He writes
about media based in actuality, such as the kind described by Grierson and assumes there exists a
profilmic object that can be recorded (for example, a subject to interview, an event to preserve).

14
For biographies of John Grierson and his documentary film work in Britain cf. Jo Fox’s “John Grierson, His
‘Documentary Boys’ and the British Ministry of Information, 1939-1942.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and
Television. 2005. Vol.25 (3), p.345-369; John Izod’s , “Arthur Dulay and John Grierson: Fitting Drifters (1929)” in
Visual Culture in Britain. (2019) Vol.20 (3), p.261-277 and Rosaleen Smyth’s “Grierson, the British Documentary
Movement, and Colonial Cinema in British Colonial Africa” in Film History (2013) Vol.25 (4), p.82-113.

For “creative treatment of actuality”, see Grierson, quoted in Johnathan Kahana and Charles Musser’s The
Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism (2016).

15
Grierson is oft-quoted as using this phrase; an instance of this quotation and its association occurs in the 1985
article “Film View; Documentaries, Limitless Eyes, Recording Civilization” by Vincent Canby for the New York
Times (Nov 3, 1985), which also quotes Paul Rotha’s modification of Grierson’s term, which further reflects the
focus on creatively treating and recording reality by organizations like the Realist Film Unit as a hallmark of their
documentary practice and what came to define the form in general.

16
Kuehl does not use the word profilmic, though most early documentary scholars and scholars in the 1980s and
1990s such as Nichols and later Winston do. The reason I am using it here is a semiotic one. Kuehl’s argument is
rooted in a reality both technological and epistemological. Documentary truth, and specifically the kinds of
actuality filmmaking that can be connected to documentary, is produced via a photographic technology that has the
capacity to capture an object that once existed in the real world. The truth claim, therefore, is also an index (in the
sense of the term used by Charles Sanders Peirce) – the photographed object gesturing toward a referent that exists
in the real world. The profilmic object, that photographed thing that preexists the camera, and to the existence of
which the camera’s capturing capacity is a testament, is vital to this relationship. Without a profilmic object and
indexical referent, the logic of this type of definition goes, there can be no ascription of veracity or truth.

17
Jerry Kuehl. "Truth Claims." Sight and Sound. London. 50.4 (1981): 272.

18
Ibid.

5

The camera, therefore, captures a form of testimonial – this was here, this was photographed, this
happened, and this was real. For now, central to Kuehl’s affirmative assessment of content as a
representation of actuality is an assumption of alignment of this evidence with a viewer’s
experience. Given this establishment of referential credibility, this evidence becomes a point of
reference or index which by association grounds the balance of a filmmaker’s argument in truth
or a truth claim. Kuehl bases this line of reasoning on the additional assumption that a unified
understanding of meaning exists from which a singular argument is formulated. Nichols, whose
analysis of cinema references Kuehl, describes this line a reasoning and by extension, the form,
as a “discourse of sobriety.”
19
For Nichols, this discourse is well-reasoned and verifiable.
20

Building upon Grierson’s notion of “creative treatment” and Nichols’ requirement of
“verifiability,” I propose that two viewers respectively might perceive creatively treated
documentary content differently and vary in their interpretations and assessments of the evidence
represented and argument presented. Consequently, they might emerge with irreconcilable
sobering narratives. Evidence for one observer might disrupt an accepted norm, yet still be
credible and verifiable, thereby satisfying both Grierson’s and Nichols’ description of the form.
The other spectator might question the veracity of the story’s claim and dismiss the content as a
fable couched in the formula of a documentary to pass itself off as truth. Based upon the same

19
When I say, “for Nichols,” here, I am referencing his earlier work from 1991. It is important to note that in
subsequent papers, books and presentations Nichols has complicated and challenged his own assumptions that
documentary is a discourse of sobriety. I draw on this earlier definition because of its role in foundational
documentary studies and because of the role the notion of sobriety plays as a point of departure for authors like
Michael Renov and Jane Gaines central to the latter portion of my analysis.

20
See, Introduction to Documentary (first edition 2001, revised edition published 2017, though I also reference the
original publication from as it pertains to my discussion of the state of the field in the 1980s and 1990s) and
Speaking Truths with Film (2016), both by Bill Nichols, and Liars, Damn Lies and Documentaries by Brian
Winston (2000) for examples of how Kuehl’s thinking, if not Kuehl’s specific essay, influence thinking around
truth, veracity and ethics.

6

criteria, the second viewer might conclude that the media is fictional. Acknowledging that
perception and interpretation are subjective processes, using this process as a means of
evaluation warrants further discussion.

Consistent with Grierson, Kuehl, and Nichols, to determine whether media is a
documentary, according to Carl Plantinga and Dirk Eitzen, a viewer assesses the veracity of the
media’s subject matter, and this assessment is possible if and only if its content is verifiable.
Upon first reading, I felt that this is a reasonable methodology for narratives that follow a
dialectic argument, where all evidence points to a singular conclusion. But as I screened avant
garde cinema circa the late 1980s and early 1990s, I challenged this mode of assessment, as
many of these documentaries are open-ended in their structure and portray content that reflects
dialogic narratives. Other documentary projects employ filmic techniques that experiment with
representations and presentations of evidence as an alternative means to narrativize their
arguments. Viewing this media, I was aware that much of it is unverifiable. After the final
credits, in many cases, I did not know where to begin to assess its treatment of the subject matter.
Regarding some works, the only mode of measuring a project’s veracity was in my experience of
its viewing.
To better understand my role in determining veracity, I turned to the scholarship of
Vivian Sobchack, Sara Ahmed, Michael Renov, and others who approach the experience of
engaging with media from the perspective of a phenomenologist. I looked critically at the
process of interpretating documentary content and the meanings and narratives that viewers
evolve from this act of engagement. My goal was to design a conceptual bridge spanning the
experience of multiple forms of documentary media that still meets the cognitive theorist’s
criteria as to what defines the form.

7

Theories of the Documentary Experience
My discussion of what determines documentary media begins with an introduction to
Plantinga and Eitzen, the cognitive theorists I mentioned earlier. This introduction is by no
means a survey of the literature or a detailed analysis of prior theories. In writing about criteria
that distinguish documentary media from fiction, Plantinga introduces the concept of
“veridicality” or the assertation of truthfulness as a litmus test to judge the veracity of the
media’s representation of subject matter.
21
Similar to Kuehl’s references to truth claims, but
more perceptual when discussing evidence and argument, the idea of the veridical relates to the
existence of assessable evidence and the veracity of this evidence. A work that proports to be
documentary must contain evidence that is credible, verifiable, and tangible. If its content meets
these criteria, then audiences can assess its veracity. After assessing its validity, if the content
proves to be truthful, then the media is a documentary.
Plantinga acknowledges that audiences hold world perspectives, and these perspectives
influence their assessment of the veracity of evidence. But he distinguishes himself from
phenomenologists by suggesting his language describes the form, not the experience of viewing
it. He also argues that if a viewer assumes a work is fictional, then assessing the authenticity of
its content is moot relative to the story the narrative conveys. My concern with Plantinga’s test
is that, whereas viewers can objectively validate written or photographic evidence, there are
visceral experiences when an individual’s emotional response to a traumatic event or
impressions, recollections, and oral histories might be difficult to quantifiably measure.

21
See: Carl Plantinga, “What a Documentary Is, After All.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63:2.
(2005): 105-117.

8

To explore this further, I turned to Eitzen, who, in his essay “When is a Documentary?”,
suggests that if media professes to be a documentary, then the viewer should ask the question,
“might its contents be lying?”.
22
While Plantinga’s and Eitzen’s arguments are distinct from one
another, their scholarship is related by a shared interest in the definition and determination of
what constitutes documentary media. Referencing Plantinga, Eitzen also believes documentary
is a perception-based classification of media and that diverse cultural backgrounds across
audiences influence a film’s assessment. He, like Plantinga, recognizes that, with respect to
fictional content, knowing if the content he is about to see or hear “is or is not lying” is not
relevant to the media’s characterization.
23

However, unlike Plantinga, Eitzen considers the intentions of the documentarian and
discusses the importance of contextual meanings when assessing if evidence is “not lying.” To
exemplify this distinction, Eitzen refers to the opening scene in Ken Burns’ The Civil War
(1990), a project that uses actors to depict the history it recreates. The first sequence features the
reading of a letter, dramatically performed in voiceover, written from a solider to his wife,
speaking of his impending death. Eitzen asks, if viewers respond to this work emotionally,
moved by the words of a man or music that plays behind his narration, what makes this film a
documentary and not a melodrama? Eitzen acknowledges that Burns fabricated the
correspondence and the contents of its text. In actuality, the evidence is a composite of letters
written by soldiers to their wives. Because the meaning of the text “is not lying” despite the

22
Ibid.

23
For Dirk Eitzen’s writings, see his “When is a Documentary: Documentary as a Mode of Reception.” Cinema
Journal, 35:1.
For Eitzen’s dialogues with Plantinga, see “Carl Plantinga Responds to Dirk Eitzen's "When Is a Documentary?:
Documentary as a Mode of Reception" (1996).

9

document being fictional and its sentiment drawn from multiple sources, Eitzen classifies The
Civil War as a documentary. For Eitzen, meaning is what matters.
I also reference the methodology of David Bordwell. When it comes to discerning
meaning, a tradition exists in cinema studies that draws upon rhetorical and cognitive theory to
analyze the process and implications of interpreting content. Bordwell, in his comprehensive
1989 book, appropriately titled Making Meaning, explores the expansive range of scholarship,
popular at the time and in the decades prior.
24
Though Bordwell makes brief mention of
phenomenology, he and others posit that viewers interpret media content based upon multiple
modes of the engagement with evidence. One such mode is meaning alluded to and inferred
from evidence. Bordwell also addresses the concept of symptomatic perception, suggesting, like
Eitzen, that evidence may be interpreted differently, dependent upon the spectator.

My Analysis and a Brief Introduction to Phenomenology
In my discussion of the politics of disruption, reappropriation, and imagination in
dialogic, experimental, and experiential documentary cinema, I incorporate the methodology that
Plantinga and Eitzen employ in the assessment of content and Bordwell’s making of meaning
derived from inference and his breath of modes of interpretation. What is different in our
analyses is the pipeline and process of reception and perception. While Plantinga and Eitzen
both base their determinations on credibility, my focus is on interpretation, a subjective process,
prior to the objective methodology of assessment. Regarding interpretation, I expand upon
Bordwell’s discussion by not privileging the meanings that are made, but rather the dynamic

24
David Bordwell. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991).

10

process of making meaning. This is a process of continuous re-interpretation of Plantinga’s
credible evidence and the inferred meanings which Eitzen evaluates.
As a phenomenologist, I theorize that credible evidence has no significance until it is
experienced. Through the lens of phenomenology, I assess the veracity of documentary content,
arguing for this broader range of experimental and experiential media. This methodology
encompasses rethinking the reception, perception, and interpretation of evidence. Considered
together, these discrete but integral processes are the basis upon which meaning is formed and
narratives are created. I apply my line of reasoning to the scenes I analyze, as I reference these
scholars and their writings. But first an introduction to …

Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl, in the early 1900s, established the school of transcendental
phenomenology.
25
Husserl believes that prior to the experience (gnosis), upon approaching
evidence (noema), the viewer (soma) possesses a-priori knowledge. Husserl illustrates this
theory through the analogy of his position or orientation relative to a writing desk. He has
knowledge of the existence of desks prior to his encounter with any desk. He also states that all
viewers share the same preconceptions relative to the existence of the desk and by extension its
veracity. Husserl assumes that his position relative to the desk is universal, as is his perspective.

25
Edmund Husserl and Dermot Moran. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce
Gibson. (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Maurice. Merleau-Ponty,Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. (New York: Routledge, 2012).

Though Husserl began writing about pure phenomenology in the 1800s, his primary contributions to the field are
generally associated with his revisited thinking from the 1900s, which often is considered as the work that helped to
solidify the principles of what we now think of as the school of phenomenology (Stanford’s Encyclopedia of
Philosophy offers a useful overview of how Husserl’s career commonly is understood in relation to the field).

11

Husserl’s theories contrast with his student Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
26
Husserl and Merleau-
Ponty’s differ in their discussions of the nature of subject matter with respect to the viewer.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that knowing an object, and by extension the world, exists only after
experiencing the object. Knowledge of the subject matter is acquired a-posteriori.
Merleau-Ponty’s work on existential phenomenology offers an approach to meaning
making central to my analysis. While Husserl’s transcendental model suggests that meaning,
and specifically the experience of encountering an object, predates the existence of that object in
the world, existential phenomenology posits that meaning only is made relative to our encounter
with the world. Though I use some terms, specifically gnosis (the term for the encounter
between person and object from which that person derives meaning) from Husserl, my focus is
on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, no being exists
without the world. In other words, if Merleau-Ponty were to comment upon Husserl’s analogy,
he would say that the orientation of the soma relative to the desk is a function of the soma’s past
knowledge of other desks and prior experiences of orientation.
27

26
Edmund Husserl and Dermot Moran. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce
Gibson. (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Maurice. Merleau-Ponty,Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. (New York: Routledge, 2012).

27
Roughly, the distinction between these two frameworks is that Husserl believes existence precedes experience and
Merleau-Ponty believes that experience precedes existence. For example, the idea of recognizing a photograph for
Husserl would relate to our preexisting knowledge of a photograph as deriving from a technology that can provide a
discourse of truth, regardless of whether we have seen a photograph or not at a prior point in our lives. There is an
intrinsic quality of verifiability inherent in the photograph itself. For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, the
photograph has no essential veracity based on preexisting traits; the only perception of the photograph’s veracity on
the part of the viewer derives from our encounters with other photographs or our use of photographic technology in
which we have observed that photographs can directly capture real events that have happened in the world. For
Merleau-Ponty, without a prior encounter with lived experience and a lived encounter with a tangible example of, in
this case, recording technology, there is no essence or essential quality of the meaning deriving from a given object
or encounter.

12

Sara Ahmed engages with Merleau-Ponty and draws on Husserl throughout her
discussion in Queer Phenomenology (2006).
28
In the book, Ahmed discusses the notion of an
oblique view, specifically in relationship to Husserl’s analogy of the desk. Ahmed suggests that
a spectator who does not share Husserl’s universal subject position (i.e. white, cis-, straight,
male) might observe and experience the evidence from a different perspective, from the side or
diagonally. She argues that queer subjects who situate themselves differently, observe evidence
from a perspective influenced by a history of having to disorient themselves from dominant
perspectives, creating a distinct view that is formed by their encounter not only with the
evidence, but also a reorientation away from these dominant perspectives. In the case of
documentary media, evidence replaces the desk.
Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s writings are foundational to Sobchack’s scholarship in
Address of the Eye (1991) on film as a phenomenological experience. She refers to the “eye” of
the soma (viewer) in relationship to the “I” of the noema (the evidence or the narrator or
narration of the evidence).
29
Together soma and noema create the experience of viewing
(gnosis).
30
Relating cognitive analysis to Merleau-Ponty’s theory, the veracity of “I” or evidence
is determined relative to a viewer’s a-posteriori knowledge.

28
Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

29
This is the first reference of “eye”/ “I” attributed to by Vivian Sobchack in Address of the Eye (1991) where the
distinction between the “eye” and the “I” is made.

30
Existential phenomenology and gnosis will be discussed in later chapters in the context of close readings of
scenes.

13

Applying Phenomenology to a Reimagined Documentary Form
Content, as represented by evidence, is received and perceived through a variety of our
senses, including, but not necessarily privileging, the visual. Interpretation and the attribution of
meaning follow from these modes of experience. In other words, the experience of and
engagement with content reimagines content or evidence in context. I characterize this
phenomenon of engagement and the transformation and interpretation of content into context as
“reappropriation.”
Analogous to a chemical reaction, metaphorically, reappropriation occurs during the
process of a spectator’s sensory engagement with the content of documentary media. Through
the lens of phenomenology, an audience represents the soma and media content, the noema.
Content, once engaged, objectively cannot be experienced again for the first time. It is forever
transformed and only can be received and perceived in the context of the media’s narrative and
from the unique perspective of an observer of this media. Context in this sense, is gnosis, the
thing that results from the experience of engaging with documentary media. Without spectator
engagement, gnosis does not exist. Engagement is the catalyst that permanently disrupts and
reappropriates content and produces context. During this process, engagement, as the essential
agent of change, itself remains unchanged.
Having its roots in Greek and coming to modern English by way of Latin, the word
“catalyst” is made up of cata- from the Greek prefix κατά- (transliterated as “kata-”,
“downwards” when used directionally, sometimes also translated as “down”) and Lysis, from the
verb λύειν (transliterated as luein, “to loosen”).
31
As a verb, to catalyze, then, is the process of

31
Greek translations are my own, verified transliterations and etymologies with the Oxford English Dictionary and
Liddel Scott Greek English Lexicon.

14

loosening or breaking down. In chemistry, a catalyst is an agent that accelerates a chemical
reaction, creating something new, and is not itself altered during the reaction.
32
My invoking of
the term is distinct from the way filmmakers like Jean Rouch have used “catalyst.” Rouch
references the camera, which he believed was an agent that could make interviewees more open
to discussing their experiences with a filmmaker. The presence of the camera made the
difference, as to in the nature of the interview. The catalyst in this case brought about change in
the way an interview was conducted.
33

Consequently, I pose that what Plantinga and Eitzen are assessing is the experience of
context or the contextualization of content. Along the same line of reasoning, I argue that
Bordwell’s meanings are not derived from content, but from the context of that content. This is a
process of continuous cognitive and visceral engagement that results from a viewer’s desire to
know more and to feel more as the narrative reveals additional content and its context is received
and perceived through the lens of each observer’s unique lived experiences. It is an experience
that differs from observer to observer, and spectators with unique perspectives must be
accounted for because they might contextualize content differently from one another, and from
what is assumed to be mainstream interpretations.
This process of meaning formation is fluid, as new and existing evidence is interpretated
and assimilated. This constant reinterpretation may result in a fluctuating sense of content’s
significance. The validity of these meanings may – at one moment of evaluation – be assessed as

32
“DOE Explains…Catalysts.” https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainscatalysts.

33
Catalytic documentary was a form that emerged in the 1960s, pioneered by filmmakers including Jean Rouch, and
referenced by Beverly Seckinger and Janet Jakobsen in their article “Love, Death, and Videotape: Silverlake Life”
and Bill Nichols in Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1992). My use of the word suggests
a different film dynamic than employed by Jean Rouch. Rouch’s catalytic film and use of the camera as an
activating agent, drives an audience to respond to the media’s content.

15

true or not lying, and the next – when judged in relationship to other experience(s) – return a
perception of being false or lying. Though these assessments may vary, they coexist because
each is a measure of a moment, and it is plausible that results will vary from moment to moment.
They might even vary within a moment, as simultaneous interpretations might produce possibly
ambiguous meanings, each with varying veracity.
Acknowledging the critical role engagement plays in the derivation of meaning, I
highlight the process of resonance, when the present contextualization of evidence relates to past
evidence and a viewer’s a-posteriori knowledge. Resonance is the “energy” that makes
disruption and reappropriation possible. This contextualization repurposes the meanings of this
prior evidence and prior experience, a process of continuous and reciprocal reformulations,
where the recombination of meaning informs and infuses new meaning and significance into the
context of past and present evidence, as new evidence is introduced. From this evolution of
interpretations, memories or archives of meanings are generated or reformulated, which in turn
resonates with other memories to form interactive networks of meaning and knowledge. This
knowledge is reflexive and recombinant, always simultaneously looking back on past
experiences and assimilating the context of present evidence, as the viewer screens new
documentary subject matter.
These interpretations are the basis upon which documentary narratives are constructed.
As context continually evolves, these narratives evolve. In a dialogic, open-ended, and
experimental narrative structure, the meanings that are derived from this context might produce
multiple and ambiguous narratives; and when these narratives are assessed independently of each
other, they may have varying veracity. Though these assessments may vary, they coexist
because each is an evaluation of a moment, and that result will vary from moment to moment.

16

They might even vary within a moment, as simultaneous contextualizations might produce
possibly ambiguous meanings, each with varying veracity. Therefore, I pose a work objectively
can be determined to be both a documentary and not, without disrupting conventional theories
regarding the nature of the form and the assessment of meanings based upon the interpretation of
evidence.
These evolving narratives can disrupt normative assumptions, raise awareness, and are a
call to action. Allowing for all modes, styles, and structures of media to be considered
documentary is significant because it highlights the form’s political potential to reappropriate
conventional dichotomous notions of normative behavior, sexuality, and what it is to be able-
bodied. Through recreations and symbolical representations, this media can communicate and
qualify affective moments and traumatic events that defy straightforward fact or fiction, truth or
fabrication. It can restore lost, underrepresented, or forgotten histories that dominant records
have overlooked.

A Hypothetical
I would like to revisit Burns’ The Civil War and pose a hypothetical rewriting of the
opening narrative. Suppose the introductory letter were to remain an amalgam of
correspondence, but its contents painted an idealized representation of the landscape of the war.
After the initial reading via voiceover, Eitzen assumes the contents are not lies because of the
trust he places in Ken Burns and based upon other Ken Burns productions he has screened.
Plantinga’s first experience challenges the truthfulness of the evidence because of his prior
knowledge of the Civil War and because he feels Burns’ editing style distorts actual history to

17

reflect an overly dramatic narrative. In addition, upon discovering the letter is fictious, Plantinga
questions what else in the narrative is a fabrication.
Sobchack relates the performance of this spoken text to prior incidents when she
experienced reading impassioned communications that soldiers wrote home to loved ones. Upon
identifying with the honesty in the letter’s tone, she assigns credibility to Burns’ opening scene.
Sobchack’s phenomenological approach suggests an alternate mode to assess the documentary
value of this evidence. Rather than objectively evaluate this sequence’s treatment of the letter
itself or the truth of its contents, Sobchack is interested in the empathetic connections she forms,
as she engages with both the letter and its contents, drawing upon her cognitive and visceral
memories. It is these memories that are the basis of her assessment.
Even before I am aware of the letter or its contents, I, like Eitzen, believe Burns to be a
credible archivist regarding the curation of documentation. Given this predisposition, I am
inclined to accept the opening scene as a factual. During the sequence, I, like Sobchack, recall
having read other correspondence similar in affect to this artifact, and thus my impression of the
message the words convey further supports my initial assessment of its context.
34
However,
since I also have studied conditions during the Civil War, like Plantinga, I wonder about the
accuracy of its content, and can no longer determine with certainty that The Civil War is a
documentary. Despite my doubt, I still respect Ken Burns as an editor and am curious as to his
reason for including evidence that appears both to be sincere, while also being counterintuitive
given my knowledge of the period.

34
Extrapolated from Sobchack’s writings in a text like “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfiction Film and Video,”
Sobchack might conclude that, based on the way the letter is written and photographed, it resembles other nonfiction
images she has seen before, for example, and draw a series of conclusions based on that understanding (1991).

18

As the film progresses, I witness in graphic detail the horrors of the battlefield. These are
new points of reference in the context of the narrative, but consistent with what I had expected to
be portrayed. Fallen young men in grey and blue cover the earth. Those who huddle in trenches,
their fears and pain are palpable. Because these are scenes not reflected in the soldier’s
descriptions depicted in the opening correspondence, Eitzen asks which evidence was lying.
Given that Burns offers these two opposing narratives, Plantinga refrains from assessing the
film’s content and classifies The Civil War as a work of fiction.
Sobchack and I attempt to reconcile the apparent discrepancy. For Sobchack who might
have hypothetically spoken with soldiers upon their return from the European Theatre after
WWII, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, she understands the “The Fog of War” that is a consequence
of these conflicts.
35
These respective artifacts are symbolic representations of the intentional
manipulation of information that occurs during a time when ambiguous truth serves the “rational
self–interest” of politicians.
36

As for my reaction, I now suspect the letter is from a soldier who glorifies the sacrifices
that must be made in service of his higher calling. Burns’ inclusion of the battlefield pictures
offers a realistic representation of that sacrifice. Juxtaposing these meanings, I conclude The
Civil War is a political commentary, reflecting two discordant narratives that must coexist to
justify the tragedies that occur during those turbulent times, a familiar theme to students of both
documentary and history. The opposing evidence disrupts the meaning that each infers. In order

35
Carl von Clausewitz first used the phrase in the 19
th
Century in his book Vom Kriege (1832) published in
Germany and translated into English and published with the title On War (1873). It is the title of the documentary
The Fog of War (Morris 2003).

36
Benjamin I. Page. “The Theory of Political Ambiguity.” The American Political Science Review. Vol. 70. 3
(1976): 742-752.

19

to make reason out of the apparently irreconcilable, I reappropriate the meaning of each and
imagine a new narrative, one with political nuance.
In the closing scenes, suppose Burns reveals that soldiers often write romanticized
descriptions in their letters back home, so as not to worry their loved ones. The fictional content
is intentional to protect and insolate their families from the truth. Its context is fully explained.
Plantinga, Eitzen, Sobchack and I all agree that The Civil War is a documentary. Eitzen’s
assessment of the letter’s content recognizes that though, on the surface, the text is false, it tells a
greater story that is not lying. Plantinga acknowledges the letter’s truth relative to the larger
story The Civil War tells. Recontextualizing the meanings of these two scenes in relationship to
one another does not change Sobchack’s assessment of the work’s documentary value. I revisit
my interpretations of this evidence, and these reformulations are consistent with my initial
assessment, which in turn reenforces my presumption of Ken Burns as a credible curator of
artifacts, a predisposition I undoubtably will recall when I view his next project.

Looking Ahead
In the following chapter, I introduce my reimagination of the documentary form,
supported by brief descriptions of the media that I will analyze in the chapters that follow. Much
of this media is experimental and experiential. Referencing Bordwell’s varying modes of the
presentation of evidence from which meaning is derived, I have selected works that exemplify
the multiple techniques filmmakers employ to disrupt and reimagine their narratives. These
techniques include reappropriating cinematic tropes from multiple genres to engage audiences
and other methods of expression that sensorily covey what didactic documentary fails to capture.

20

Chapter Two

The Presumption of Authority and the Assumption of Veracity
Essential to a discussion of the disruption of meaning is a consideration of the authority
that governs control of how evidence is interpreted. I would suggest that even before the curtain
goes up, documentary benefits from a presumption of authority and veracity attributed to the
evidence. Whether it be before the opening credits of a movie, or the doors open to an exhibit of
artifacts, this attribution of preemptive control and predetermination of credibility can be traced
to the preconception of “what you are about to see.” Giuliana Bruno writes about the
environment outside of a gallery space as a funneling experience where viewers might position
themselves prior to entering an exhibition hall and anticipate the veracity of what they are about
see, based upon the authority they attribute to the curator. In film, I suggest this is the moment
when the theatre darkens, before the first frame of the feature. This controlled environment is
when a viewer prepares for the upcoming psychological and phenomenological experience of
viewing. If a G rating predisposes one to expect content to appeal to a general audience and an
X rating suggests that what you are about to be exposed to is for adults only, then the words,
“based on a true story” advertises that what follows is rooted in truth.
Another factor that fuels this sense of presumption is a-posteriori knowledge, which
extends more broadly to the creator of the media and the nature of the subject matter. As I
recognized Ken Burns to be a reliable source, I was willing prejudge the letter and its contents as
credible evidence. As I was aware of conditions of during the Civil War, I found the overall
subject matter believable. This sense of credibility by association occurs within the narrative, as
the a-posteriori knowledge of the first instances of the veracity of viable content becomes points

21

of credible reference, and this credibility influences the assessment of subsequent elements of
evidence, contributing to a presumption of truthfulness.
A third more subtle influence is implied in the structure of the work. A viewer who
chooses to watch a documentary might expect the content to be truthful. Peter Brooks poses that
a “contract” exists between the creator of content and the audience who views this media.
37
This
contract relies upon a viewer’s familiarity with narrative conventions and a reader’s expectations
based upon that familiarity. This relates to the idea Tim Whitmarsh elaborates in his discussion
of the “second reader.”
38
What Brooks and Whitmarsh suggest is that a first reader has no
knowledge of the form and no expectation of the work’s content. Second readers are individuals
who experience the media’s content with prior knowledge of the form and, as this is their second
exposure to its structure, they have an expectation regarding its respect for convention well,
before the content is viewed. Deviation from this formula and, in the case of documentary,
production of content that is either not credible or outright untruthful would be seen as a breach
of this contract.
Once the show begins, I pose three scenarios that exemplify the relationship between
authority and vantagepoint. In the first, the presence of the narrator controls the point of view
through which evidence is observed, and the audience is a passive witness to the subject matter.
A second possibility occurs when spectator engagement draws an audience into the narrative
such that they actively become part of the experience of the work. The third is a negotiated
relationship between viewed and viewer.

37
Peter Brooks. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

38
Peter Brooks. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
Tim Whitmarsh. Narrative Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. (New York: Cambridge, 2011).

22

In the first relationship, I apply the scholarship of Louis Althusser to documentary media,
and discuss the implications when spectators hear a voice that appears to be stemming from the
State, like the LAPD in Dragnet and the British government in Housing Problems (Anstey and
Elton 1935). Althusser posits that audiences assume the voice speaks with authority due to this
association. He uses the term “hailed” to make the argument that a viewer is compelled to listen.
Housing Problems is a dialectic representation featuring first person interviews and a voiceover
that offers an overview of a neighborhood revitalization project sponsored by the British
government.
Directed by Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton and produced by Grierson and the Realist
Film Unit in Britain, the camera follows several families who live in tenement houses.
39
Over
the course of the documentary, images capture the failing state of these residences, as official
narration walks the viewer through the British government’s plans to intervene. For Grierson,
the reframing of factual details and actual footage in support of the documentary’s objective are
critical tools of the filmmaker and essential characteristics of the form. Depending upon the
orchestration and editing of information, a unidirectional argument is created that, because of the
authority attributed to the government, propels audiences toward an intentional, inevitable, and
unilateral conclusion. By way of note, Housing Problems might appear to be an unlikely
addition to my list of documentaries, but in my analysis, I will raise questions that a modern
spectator might entertain upon reappropriating the meanings explicitly conveyed in the project.
Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about documentary that has served as an authoritative function
to elevate and legitimize certain works of media above others because of their respective

39
By way of context, in Britain in 1935, many were living in abject poverty because, like in the United States,
England was in the throes of an economic depression, and, unlike America, still was recovering from the aftermath
of WWI.

23

representation of evidence as relatable and normative.
40
Trinh suggests this representation of
relatability and normativity feels at best disingenuous and more than likely foreign to viewers
who see the world and themselves in the world differently. To paraphrase an old adage, “With
great documentary comes great power,” which Trinh points out, has the potential to alienate
those who feel disenfranchised by the standards it sets for the normative mode of being in the
world. More about this later…
To find examples of viewers with the authority to author their own meanings, I turn to
interactive documentary video projects like The National Film Board of Canada’s Highrise
(2012-) and the other projects I reference, where the discovery and interpretation of evidence are
embedded in the design of the work. In Highrise, players watch evidentiary vignettes of people
go about their daily lives and professionals as they describe their work, captured primarily using
handheld cameras. This evidence can be stitched together in any order, for any duration, as
spectators explore and experience content on a path of their own choosing. The “eye” of the
player is the “I” of the media. Highrise positions viewers in the center of their own experiences.
The significance of the meanings they derive influence the narrative path they choose. By way
of note, though Highrise is not an example of a disruptive documentary, its sequel Universe
Within (2015-) is and is introduced and discussed later.
To describe an experience of documentary content that balances this sense of de facto
presumption of authority, Sobchack focuses on the viewer’s experience and de-centers the
documentarian as the arbiter of meaning. The phenomenologist also de-centers the visual text
and underscores the role of spectator’s engagement with context. This shares the authority of

40
Trinh T. Minh-ha. When The Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. (New York:
Routledge, 1992).

24

authorship with the viewer and no longer solely within the purview of the media’s creator and
curator. For those who approach the experience of viewing from non-normative perspectives,
this reclaiming of authorship is an opportunity to view media and a viewer’s life differently.
In autoethnographia (autoethnography) (2021), Iván Reina Ortiz uses evidence to tell a
personal story of the author’s coming out as nonbinary and their perception of their identity.
41

Conventional representations of content connect a viewer to this filmmaker’s unconventional life
through the use of conventional filmic tropes. At the same time, these tropes suggest gaps and
fissures in the reliability of this evidence. Through the manipulation of these elements, Ortiz
creates an experiential bridge between the subject’s lived encounters and a viewer’s sensory
world. Somatically, Ortiz focuses on the intersection of three modes of representing content: the
body, photographs from the past, and an experience in the present moment of viewing. Even
visual evidence has avisual and experiential elements. Akira Mizuta Lippit writes about what is
not shown that can be implicitly or avisually represented.
42
These juxtapositions establish a
unique relationship between viewer, viewed and photographer.

The Viewer
To better appreciate the perspective of those who see the world and themselves in the
world differently, mindful of Trinh’s awareness, I begin with the writings of Iris Marion Young,
regarding a woman’s perspectives of seeing the world, and the work of Amelia Jones who
examines the political implications of the act of viewing. Also relevant to this conversation is

41
LGBTQIA+ autoethnographic film has a specific history relating to the self and the other, and I feel this film fits
directly into this tradition. More about this can be found in The Right to Play Oneself edited by Tom Waugh.

42
Akira Mituza Lippit. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). (Minneapolis: University of Michigan, 2005).

25

Ahmed whose writing on alternative vantagepoints guides my research. Young along with
Jones, challenges the Husserl’s conception of a universal subject position regarding the
relationship of the “I” or the noema to the soma or the a-posteriori knowledge that the “eye” of a
spectator brings to the experience of viewing. To both Young and Jones, multiple spectators
approach media, the “I,” from a variety of and potentially widely different vantage points.
Young recognizes that the female experience reflects a unique relationship between a
woman’s body and the world.
43
For evidence to appear normative, this requires that the image
be viewed from a singular perspective. Jones writes that this singular vantage point is a form of
distortion that only allows, in Jones’ analysis art, in my analysis documentary media, to be
viewed “correctly” from one perspective, or from a phenomenological standpoint a particular
subject position. In Housing Problems, a viewer must look from the angle dictated by the
filmmaker, in this case, the British authority, to look right. This is analogous to “there is only
one truth, only if you look at things the way the filmmaker wants.”
44

Supported by the discussions posed by these authors, I explore the influence of multiple
observer perspectives and subject positions, as these pre-existing frameworks inform a viewer’s
experience of evidence. Ahmed suggests queerness necessitates a disorientation away from the
objects, which means that when children do not identify with normal or socially normative
representations of experience, i.e. heteronormativity, they reposition their perspective or

43
Iris Marion Young. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays on Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory.
(Minneapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).

44
Jones refers to “subject position” in the context of 1970s identity politics. For Jones, subject position is “fixed”
identity of a spectator, usually due to their various markers of identity (think all the popular discourse that starts with
someone saying, “As an x, y, z, person [where x, y, z, are identity categories of race, class, gender, sexuality/sexual
orientation, ability], I see this as xxx...” The use of the term foregrounds experience, which Jones refers to as “the
subject” or “the viewer” positioned relative to a work – the person who occupies certain subject positions/identity
categories (which obviously vary person to person) Jones in invoking the word, is not talking about one particular
group of people.

26

orientation due to this lack of identification.
45
According to Jones, for an object to appear
“normal” or normative, its representation would need to be socially acceptable and appropriate.
Jones, like Ahmed, writes that a person's sense of self and self-perception is influenced by the
socially determined normal image captured in a work of visual art.
46

I draw on Jones’ conceptualization of “anamorphism,” where the creative treatment of
evidence leaves open the possibility that its representation might be distorted, thereby upsetting
the contract between the filmmaker and the viewer.
47
Such a construction speaks to the idea that,
for those whose experiences have been excluded from dominant records, for sensory experiences
for which the visual is not only incomplete, but also perhaps misleading, a different formulation
of the perception of evidence is needed. Trinh argues that predetermined conceptions of
normativity need to be dismantled, questioned and a new contract written for the media to relate
to a more inclusive audience. Jones incorporates the phenomenological process of the
experience of viewing as it pertains to identity refiguration for those who do not “see”
themselves in the media they watch. That is why experiential and phenomenological
accountings, such as those made by Iván Reina Ortiz in autoethnographia, are significant, in that
they exemplify Tavia Nyong’o concept of the world “already false.” In such a world, due to
systems of oppression, discrimination, and exclusion, individuals or groups do not assume the

45
Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

46
For Jones: Identification is seeing oneself in a work of art; contrasted with Disidentification in the way I'm using
it, which is a simultaneous resistance and attraction to an onscreen image or the fetishistic representation of an
image. Jones uses the idea of the fetishized object to point out why some viewers might be resistant to
identification.

47
Specifically, pages 80-81. Anamorphism in visual art (not to be confused with anamorphism in computer
programming) is a technique through which an image is represented using perspectival techniques that result in the
visual appearing distorted from all views except one perspective. A classic example is Hans Holbein’s 1533
painting The Ambassadors, which features a skull that appears artificially widened, or narrowed, from all but a
head-on view. Jones also connects this concept to Lacanian subject formations and racial feminism, relationships
and definitions expounded more fully in her writings.

27

representation of evidence in documentary media reflects their lives or the lives of members of
their communities. The documentaries they construct reflect a sense a normality that is familiar
to them and those of like subject positions. Their disruption of normative perspectives of
viewing reappropriates the meaning derives from their worldviews.
I also am influenced by Kara Keeling’s connection between normativity and affect in
“Looking for M—”. Keeling writes: “This formulation of affect and affectivity … underscores
the extent to which our efforts to assimilate that which moves us are bound to the ethico-political
context of our times and available to capital and its normative structures of command, as well as
to the related yet distinct operations we know as racism, homophobia, misogyny and transphobia,
among others.”
48
By embracing these formulations, I theorize normativized narrative not only as
a written structure, but as one which has deeper connections to social and political systems of
organization. Blue exemplifies a work that embraces a non-traditional format by not privileging
the visual in favor of visceral appeal to treat a non-normative subject. From the perspective of
queer theory, normativity takes on an additional dichotomous connotation, especially when
considering alternate representations of hetero-, cis-, white, “able-bodied,” and economic and
social class defaults. Declaring boundaries of what is acceptable allows for the inclusion in
documentary media of certain individuals and the exclusion of others, which often is invoked to
justify otherization and oppression.
Prior to this, the focus has been on the body’s response to truth and truth claims. Next,
by analyzing narratives that are non-normative, that do not rely upon a singular message or an
assumption of closure, I reimagine truth as its own form of narrative by exploring the ways in

48
Kara Keeling. “Looking for M— Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future.” In
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Vol. 15, 4(2009): 566.

28

which the viewer’s experience of truth can be received, perceived, interpreted, internalized, and
inform a-posteriori truths. Along the way, I incorporate scholars who have written about the
relationship between interactive media and phenomenologically informed spectatorship. I begin
with the scholarship of Kate Nash who in Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate takes a
phenomenological approach to analyzing interconnected reference points or referential networks
in interactive documentaries. These reference points collectively validate meanings that vary
depending upon the choices a viewer makes, which create the possibility that a project could
yield multiple storylines, as well as a multiplicity of truths.
Regarding the point of view of the “eye” through which “what you are about to see” is
experienced, these vantagepoints can vary depending on the structure of the documentary. The
opening voiceover in Dragnet preempts any need for spectators to assess the validity of what
they are about to witness. The LAPD already has verified its content. This also is apparent in
Housing Problems, where the Housing Authority orchestrates the presentation of evidence and
maintains control of the viewer’s perspective throughout the narrative.
Alternatively, in If Every Girl Had a Diary (Benning 1990), a negotiation exists between
the narrator’s and viewer’s experience of the media. During the film, the viewer is both invited
in and turned away from seeing what the narrator sees. This sense of disorientation provides a
spectator with a constant awareness of the optical nature of (self)-surveillance. Audiences are
literally invited to join Benning onscreen, and there is an expectation of unmediated access to the
filmmaker and subject. At other times, audiences are made to feel unwelcome, as if they are
invading Benning’s room where they are recording their autoethnography. As I watch, I feel I
am intruding, and my sense of unease is reflected in Benning’s discomforting looking back at

29

me. This reappropriation of the experience of viewing introduces me to an ethical dimension as
it relates to the representation and the revelations of a personal story.
Paul Ricoeur who in Time and Narrative, Volume Three, discusses the distinction
between “seeing as” as metaphor and “being as” as the literal alignment of a viewer’s vantage
point with the text.
49
Ricoeur uses this framework to distinguish fiction from history. I argue the
same model is applicable to a phenomenological understanding of the interpretation of content
by theorizing the relationship between spectator engagement and viewed content in dialogic
documentary media. In analyzing this relationship, I suggest that the distinction between “I” and
“eye” collapses in a discussion of reader engagement Ricoeur describes as “being as.” During
the ongoing process of the interpretation and reconciliation of meanings, the viewer and the
subject of the narrative or the narrator of the text are aligned, as in If Every Girl Had a Diary and
Lauren Hadaway’s film The Novice (2021).
The Novice is a fictional story that represents the emotional moments of an author’s life.
Incorporating recognizable filmic tropes to convey a known storyline, Hadaway’s work
exemplifies the use of familiar cerebral and visceral evidence to convey to audiences what might
appear to be an unfamiliar narrative. Eventually, the protagonist and audiences face evidence
that destabilizes that storyline and disrupts their affective experience. This juxtaposition of
normative and non-normative identification can be analyzed in terms of Stuart Hall’s outline that
differentiates forms of identification.
50
In one aligned reading of The Novice, audiences
emotionally connect with the protagonist, Alex (Isabelle Fuhrman). In another, this one
oppositional, a viewer might be resistant to the representation of Alex as a protagonist who

49
In Time and Narrative, Volume Three, Ricoeur expands on his analysis of mimesis to discuss the distinction
between “seeing as” as metaphor and “being as” as the literal alignment of a viewer with text. (Ricoeur 159).

50
Stuart Hall. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. (SAGE Publications, 1997).

30

nearly self-destructs rather than achieving the victory a viewer expects in a typical sports movie.
Simultaneous feelings of identification and dis-identification exemplify Hall’s negotiated
spectatorship, a unique way of viewing that is both aligned and resistant at the same time.
Rather that reach a normative resolution, The Novice’s leaves the resolution open to a viewer’s
interpretation. In presenting a familiar story through a distorted lens, the work operates in the
realm of experiential media, challenging audiences to imagine that alternative narratives exist
representing lives that do not follow normative paths.
In Zanele Muholi’s performance piece, “what don’t you see when you look at me?”
(2008), the subject matter is “seen” only through the eyes of a viewer’s experience and a
reimagining of the dancer’s movements in relationship to the evidence. The artist uses evidence
to symbolically address a traumatic history through imagery and imagination. This visualization
engages with the politics of personal agency with respect to violence inflicted upon Black South
Africans, specifically LGBTQIA+ Black South Africans.
51
This violence occurred before,
during and after the end of Apartheid in 1997 and continues to this day throughout the country.
Muholi, a queer Black South African born in the township outside Durban, reduces this history
to evidence over which the performer reclaims control, and by association, reclaims this history.
In “what don’t you see when you look at me?”, the body of the “you” in the title of the
performance is not the body of the “me,” the dancer. Instead, the query is an invitation to
viewers to connect with what they imagine is implied by the dancer’s performance. This
performance piece exemplifies a reappropriation of symbolic evidence by the performer, along

51
I use LGBTQIA+ to reference the communities about whom Zanele Muholi writes. For purposes of the larger
project of my dissertation, I use LGBTQIA+ interchangeably with the term queer. However, when specific
populations are being referenced throughout this chapter and have been referred to by specific acronyms historically,
I draw on these acronyms when possible and for increased precision.

31

with the viewer, to seize the power of authority and the dialogic potential to rewrite these
forgotten events.

Reception and Perception
Evidence is received and perceived through a variety of modes. This engagement is
apparent in all the works I cite. To explore the dynamic of reception and perception, I return to
phenomenology and the writings of Merleau-Ponty, as they relate to film studies and discussions
of the reception of sensorial stimuli, specifically the skin and the cornea, as somatic pathways.
Merleau-Ponty writes about the experience of the body, as a porous medium and the reception of
sensory input that traverses this portal or gateway. The body, specifically the flesh, is the
boundary through which this experience is mediated, a site both of perception and reception.
52

This somatic reaction is what inspired Michael A. Unger, in his essay on “Experiential
Documentary,” to call Leviathan an “experiential documentary.”
53

Evidence in Leviathan (2012) produced by Harvard’s Multisensory Ethnography Lab,
viscerally engages the body of the viewer to create a sense of identification with the action
onscreen. The project reflects an attempt to prioritize multisensory evidence and to consider
how a multisensory open-ended message might be conveyed onscreen.
54
The film follows a

52
Merleau-Ponty, from The Visible and the Invisible, “Working Notes,” 248-249.
[…] My body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived [thing]), and moreover that this flesh
of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it, and it encroaches upon the world
(the felt [senti, emphasis in original] at the same time the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation
of transgression or of overlapping— — This also means: my body is not only one perceived among others,
it is the measurement (mesurant, emph. in original) of all [or, in this analysis, not all but all that is perceivable
by an individual, my note], Nullpunkt of all the dimensions of the world.

53
Unger, ibid.

54
The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor. describes its project in a way that
highlights a connection with and prioritization of the experiential. In their information section on their website, they
underscore: “Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and renonatural sciences, and the humanities,
SEL encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with

32

team of commercial fishermen in the North Atlantic. Evidence captures in graphic detail the
daily activities of the boat’s crew through observational cinematography and underwater
sequences. The camera also records the sensory experience of their daily activities, as they, for
example, gut and fillet their catch. Leviathan exemplifies the visceral use of evidence to
document life, not simply from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, but, as Unger has written, from the
vantagepoint of a viewer who is actively engaging in the experience.
55
This film is interesting to
me and why I highlight it in my analysis is because of its reappropriation of camera techniques to
create a documentary experience than transcend the filmic.
“Haptic visuality” is a mode of representing evidence explored by Laura U. Marks.
Marks describes visual evidence that is represented haptically as “visuality that functions like the
sense of touch.”
56
The author emphasizes the link between the materiality of video, which is the
texture of the film, from its grain to the tactility of the screen, and the kinds of synesthetic
associations this materiality produces in a viewer in Benning’s use of the grainy Pixelvision
video footage in If Every Girl Had a Diary. The objects featured in the autobiography are
reproduced with scratches, interruptions, and limits to their resolution. The portrayal of evidence
appeals to a spectator’s somatic sensibilities which in turn contributes to the appearance of the

difficulty, if it all, be rendered with words” (https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/). This idea of capturing experiences that
cannot be rendered with words emphasizes the desire to capture and record sensory and experiential dynamics that
move beyond the visually or linguistically indexical, speaking to other forms of memory and using other methods of
archiving to access these experiences.

55
Defining experiential documentary, Unger writes, “Formalism in documentary filmmaking also dismantles the
notion of objective experience and memory. […] Experimental documentaries engage with the nonfiction world
through a different form of cognition, which I refer to as experiential knowledge- knowledge based on experience”
(Unger, n.p.). Unger also quotes Trinh T Minh-ha in addressing the relationship between formalist and experiential
approaches to documentary and the dismantling of conventional assumptions of the relationship between truth and
nonfiction, a correlation I will take up at greater length in my discussion of Trinh’s work When the Moon Waxes
Red.

56
Laura U. Marks. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses and Touch. (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000). 22.

33

film’s authenticity. This technique is also apparent in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman
(1996) and Zoe Leonard’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1994-1996) where choreographed
candid evidence is manufactured to resemble Dunye’s home video footage and Leonard’s
chromogenic high gloss photographs emulate 1950’s Hollywood production stills.
Borrowing from Robert Stam, the means of expressing each element of evidence when
these means are considered together influences the process of engagement. In Dennis Tupicoff’s
His Mother’s Voice (1997), I discuss evidence that juxtaposes compelling audio with visual
backdrops that both complement and complicate the work’s narrative. The film’s soundtrack is a
recording of a radio interview with a mother who recalls the events that took place when she
learned her son had been shot. The evidence of her voice is heard twice. The first is paired with
a series of animated images that continuously sequence. These visuals, albeit abstract, closely
correspond to the description in the woman’s audio. The visual evidence, in this first case,
directly supports his mother’s voice. Visual evidence during the second audio playthrough
captures the emotion of the moment. Tupicoff chooses disruption to represent her visceral
response by employing stop-motion images that feel disjointed. This blending of voice with
visuals, together express the distortion, disorientation, and distress of the experience of tragedy.
In LA 92 (Lindsay and Martin 2017), the meaning of evidence is reappropriated by
remixing past and present newsreel footage along with interviews from witnesses. This structure
establishes cyclic parallels between the events in Watts in 1965, the riots after the Rodney King
trial in 1992, and the community’s response to police violence in 2017, when the project was
released. These recognizable elements of evidence visually intersect across multiple time frames
with broad cultural significance, while also being somatically engaging. Given the film’s
dialogic structure, as this content resonates with viewers, it may elicit many possible meanings.

34

This format relies heavily upon the viewer’s prior knowledge of this past and the present
evidence, which transcends the traditional cinematic framework and chronology of a beginning,
middle and end. This prior knowledge is the basis upon which meaning in the film is
determined.
In work like The Hunting Ground (Dick 2015), the representations of elements that
convey Dick’s story interact as heterogenous components within a documentary. Visceral
evidence that introduces the narrative is explicitly disruptive, visually apparent, as well as
implied by what is not shown or by what the music suggests. This transitions into a
reappropriation of meanings using tropes from classic horror, melodrama, and pornography to
document the likelihood and actual occurrence of rape that occurs on college campuses. Robert
Stam broadens the application of the term polyglossia to describe the co-existence of multiple
languages or voices in society to the co-existence of multiple filmic techniques in The Hunting
Ground that combine to create a greater effect than each element implemented alone.
57
These
different modes of representation and the contrasting and complementary perspectives from
which they may be received and perceived, inform a spectrum of possible cognitive and visceral
engagements. Dick’s creative treatment of content taps into a viewer’s simultaneous desire to
look and look away, as discussed by Carol Clover and Julia Kristeva, in their respective
analyses.
58
In this context, I incorporate Linda Williams’ discussions that reflect emotional
elements elicited by evidence that perhaps ethically should not be represented. As Allan Sekula
might suggest, the act of photographing survivors of a violent crime itself can carry with it

57
Cf. Stam’s discussion of polyglossia in Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (1992).

58
Carol J. Clover. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982).

35

connotations, as the bodies of those photographed become associated with the crimes committed
against them, further complicating the ways in which bodies and the archive operate in this film.

Engagement
To better understand this process of engaging with the contextualization of evidence from
a phenomenological framework, I once again turn to Bill Nichols and to Michael Renov and their
logocentric definitions of epistephilia, first used by Nichols to refer to a rationally based love of
knowledge and later built upon by Renov to incorporate curiosity and desire.
59
Expanding upon
their scholarship, I further nuance an analysis of the implications of re-contextualized evidence
when considering experimental, experiential, and interactive forms of documentary media. This
process of re-contextualization is exemplified in She, Puppet (Ahwesh 2001), whose hybrid
format factually uses fictional evidence to destabilize notions of identity. The evidence that a
viewer observes is screen-captured sequences of an offscreen player controlling the onscreen
play. This onscreen play features reprocessed prerecorded footage from the video game series,
Tomb Raider (Eidos Entertainment 1996). This footage showcases, in multiple genres, images
primarily of Lara Croft’s repeated deaths and rebirths. As this demise-respawn cycle plays out, a
voiceover questions Croft’s capacity for self-determination. She, Puppet is an example of
experimental media that reappropriates the use of factual and fabricated content to reimagine
identity. However, the reimagination lies in the observation of this evidence, not in the evidence
itself.

59
Bill Nichols. Introduction to Documentary. 3rd Edition. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 27-28.
Michael Renov. “Documentary and Psychoanalysis: Putting the Love Back in Epistephilia” in Embodied
Encounters, edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska, New York: Routledge, 2014.

36

Another example of reappropriated meaning through a process of re-contextualization is
exemplified in Beats Per Minute (BPM) (Campillo 2017) that captures the passions of an
historical narrative symbolically in dance. In Beats Per Minute (BPM), visual and audio
evidence is evocatively edited to create a visceral documentary experience that unites both
archival and reenacted footage with fictional romantic scenes. Evidence captures the curiosity
related to the movement of ACT UP Paris during the 1990s and the undeniable attraction of one
of the movement’s charismatic leaders, Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). The film’s lead is swept
up by the passion he expresses for the cause he protests and the anticipation of the possibility of
falling in love. Visceral and cognitive representations of these themes overlap, both somatically
and thematically. In the streets of Paris, bodies are in motion marching. Their forms are
drenched in fake blood as evidence of the inadequate or lack of available health care for
themselves and those they love and have lost. In a nearby neighborhood building, against the
backdrop of this scene and storyline, figures, awash in emotion and light, press against one
another on a dancefloor. Equal amounts of screentime are dedicated to outside where there is
evidence of the historical realities of the demonstrations and, inside where the evidence
showcases a room illuminated by neon and a sense of hope, where the promise of romance is
celebrated. The contrast of the two sequences catalyzes new meanings attributed to this
historical moment. Cognitively and viscerally, I can never again reimagine the event in the same
way.
This sense of engagement is apparent when a non-normative or an unfamiliar world
becomes incorporated into a viewer’s context, as viewers reimagine the cognitive and visceral
significance of evidence within the documentary. By collapsing the distinction between the “I”
and the “eye,” the filmmaker blurs the lines between where viewer begins and viewed ends.

37

Together, the negotiated “I” and “eye” assess the validity of a work’s treatment of evidence,
argument, and ultimately validity, as in How to Survive a Plague (France 2012). David France’s
project is predominately filmic, where evidence is comprised primarily of found and archival
footage cataloging the work of ACT UP in New York in the late 1980s and 1990s. The
experience of this evidence raises awareness by challenging perceptions that homosexuality is a
disease to be cured, and that cured individuals restore a sense of normativity to the social order.
The onscreen marching and the movement of the assembled crowds somatically connects
protestors to viewers. The images of black and white figures that fade between off and on
accentuate this sense of action, compelling viewers to join the event, as a demonstration of the
relationship they feel for the cause. The narrative inspires mimetic engagement, as defined by
Jane Gaines.
60
This film further highlights the physical relationship between content and its
reception that evidence inspires.
This invitation to engage is reappropriated in a work such as Chronicle of a Lying Spirit
(Smith 1992), where the alignment of “eye” and “I” becomes the disruptive force that
precipitates a reimagining of the way history is recorded. In Chronicle of a Lying Spirit, Smith
presents two simultaneous and oppositional narratives. The first one is colonial and the second is
anticolonial. Made in 1992, Smith’s documentary is a fictional film about archiving and archival
practices. Through an evocative voiceover and a series of photographs, the filmmaker introduces
the viewer to evidence that represents the narrative’s protagonists. An implicitly white male
narrator tells a story that theoretically describes the subject matter of the film. As he speaks, the

60
Jane Gaines. “Political Mimesis.” In Collecting Visible Evidence. Eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999: 84-103.

38

fissures between his words and the portrayals on screen become more apparent, and the idea of
not only exclusion, but the archive itself enforcing racist and exclusionary beliefs, becomes more
prominent. For Smith, evidence of these diametric narratives prompts further investigation and
interrogation, as they challenge audiences to question the veracity of their normative
assumptions of how history is represented.

Interactive Engagement
As a sequel to Highrise, Universe Within adds an additional interactive component to the
interpretation of data which was in integral element in the design of its predecessor Highrise.
Unlike in Highrise, in Universe Within at various points, it queries viewers as to the significance
they place upon the evidence they are about to view. Whereas Highrise uses credible evidence
in an interactive environment to construct a unique narrative, Universe Within goes a step further
by challenging viewers to utilize evidence as means to look within themselves and reimagine
their relationship to interactive content, and by extension documentary media.
Bruno also studies the influence of a spectator’s physical orientation with respect to the
experience of the presentation of evidence and the organization of these artifacts in a gallery or
exhibition hall space. Bruno references the concept of proprioception, which is a physiological
term to describe a body’s position in space. More specifically, proprioception is an awareness of
where the body’s physical boundaries are and how that body interacts with other bodies and
objects in the vicinity.
61
When applied to interactive media such as Highrise and Universe

61
Paraphrased from Derek Burrill “Queer Theory, The Body and Video Games” in Queer Games Studies, pages 25-
34, ed by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

39

Within, I argue proprioception refers to the degree to which viewers sense the participation of
their own bodies, as they move through the experience of play.
62
The more individuals feel they
are participating, the greater the weight they attribute to the evidence.
The concept of spatialization within a narrative is connected to Ahmed’s
phenomenological reorientation of subject position, extending Ricoeur’s concept of “being as” to
consider the merging of “I” with “eye,” and Bruno’s references to proprioception with regard to
exhibition spaces. Documentary evidence exhibited in exhibition halls, curated together,
produces a documentary narrative that reimagines events and recalls people who were key
participants in the story these assembled artifacts reimagine and recreate. As viewers move
through this space, their decisions of where to go, in what order to receive and perceive
evidence, the length of time to observe, and the validity and significance of each element is
within the authority of the spectator.
When I apply proprioception to narrative theory, it refers to the degree to which viewers
are aware of their own bodies, as they move through the narrative. Bruno writes about the
corridor outside of a gallery space, and I refer to the analogous moments as the theatre darkens or
the commercial that precede the start of a television show. She characterizes this environment
as a funneling experience. It is a space where viewers might position themselves prior to
entering an exhibition hall or before the first frame of the feature. It is a time when individuals
prepare themselves psychologically for the experience to follow.

62
Proprioception, or someone’s ability to orient themselves in space physically usually based on environmental
cues, is defined in neuroscience and often used in fields such as game design. For a definition, see Susan Hillier,
Maarten Immink and Dominic Thewlis’s “Assessing Proprioception: A Systematic Review of Possibilities” by in
Neurorehabilitation and neural repair, 2015-11, Vol.29 (10), p.933-949.

40

Considering Ahmed’s theories in conjunction with Bruno aids in a more precise
phenomenological reading of the documentary experience and of the body in documentary space.
By becoming aware of the body during the experience of viewing, the theories that relate to a
player’s affinity with a corresponding avatar or viewer’s alignment with the protagonist of the
narrative, can be explored in relationship to each other.
63
By challenging this relationship,
awareness of movement becomes more relevant to the possible outcomes and the determinations
of meaning. Citing Burrill, the viewer/protagonist and player/avatar are the authorities who
control how meaning literally and metaphorically are formulated and received.
64
In conventional
conceptions of nonfiction media, an assumption preexists of a viewer’s orientation as pertains to
content. In an exhibition setting, the artifacts will be oriented in gallery space by the artist,
curator, or docent, possibly based on a sense of linearity or dialectic order in support of the
themes which govern their presentation. In a more dialogic configuration, the spectator has the
power to control the path along which evidence is to be received and perceived. In the latter
case, the authority of meaning creation and validation lies with the spectator. A viewer’s
physical and emotional movements gesture toward an understanding which catalyzes the
possibility of new learning that potentially results from the process of engaging with this content.
Gone Home (Fullbright Company 2013) is a “walking simulator” that centers a player’s
physical orientation, in relation to evidence, as a key component in determining the significance
of this experience.
65
The plot centers around Katie (Sarah Elmaleh), a female college student,

63
Dictated by a media’s structure, this relationship is discussed in terms of first and third person juxtapositions
regarding the ability or inability to “feel alongside” another character.

64
Derek Burrill, “Queer Theory, The Body and Video Games” in Queer Games Studies, pages 25-34, ed by Bonnie
Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw. )Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
65
Gone Home, directed by Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen and Karla Zimonja (2013), video game.

41

who returns to her childhood home, only to find that her parents and sister Sam (Sarah Grayson)
have disappeared. Prompted to investigate throughout the two-story house, the viewer/player
examines artifacts that were left behind and listens to audio diaries of those who are missing in
an effort to recreate an historical record of what might have happened to them. The self-
authoring does not have a literal ending, but the adventure concludes when the games is exited or
when the mystery is resolved. I have selected to discuss Gone Home because it is a good
example of how history is imagined, based upon available evidence, interpretation and
significance of that evidence and its relationship to prior knowledge.
Similarly, in an exhibition setting, the organization of the work might be based upon a
sense of linearity or dialectic to convey a curator’s or docent’s point of view reflecting the theme
of the presentation. This is relevant to my discussion of Zoe Leonard’s The Fae Richards Photo
Archive. The more engaged viewers are with a given artifact, the more invested in its veracity
they become. I saw the photographs at MOCA, and my experience of their viewing and my
walkthrough of the initial curation changed considerably. By virtue of being in a museum space,
rather than flipping through the pages of a book, the orientation of my body in relation to the
images was fundamentally changed. I could move to any of the sides of the photo exhibit, and
once I did, I was able to encounter the exhibit in one of multiple orders. Taking control of my
experience facilitated my creative engagement, which led to many possible outcomes.
In particular, the distinction between the origin of this exhibition and the development of
the film is instructive in looking at the political implications of reinforcing a fabricated history
by providing a physical experience that by association affords its evidence legitimacy.
Movement through an archive privileges sensory engagement, specifically with the body of the
viewer, and directly ties the politics of how centering proprioception can inform documentary

42

experience. The visceral presence and cognitive attention afford the experience an awareness the
perception of the relevancy of the artifacts on display. By actively engaging with these artifacts,
the viewer implicitly assumes the importance of this evidence in the making and meaning of this
history.
66

66
The Fae Richards Photo Archive is owned and exhibited separately from the film The Watermelon Woman, with
anniversary and retrospective screenings of The Watermelon Woman not always including photographs from the
physical archive and the physical archive being exhibited in whole or in part without the inclusion of the film. This
dynamic was discussed by Alexandra Juhasz, in conversation with the author.

43

Chapter Three

Resonance
The phenomenological process of engagement I analyze to catalyze the contextual
reformulation of content and the disruption and reappropriation of meaning is resonance. This is
a process of forming and reformulating cognitive and visceral reciprocal relationships between
content and prior experiences and existing knowledge. I pose an observer actively navigates and
negotiates in “conversation” with what is being viewed and paratextual significance of this
content, including what the viewer might know about the film and filmmaker, as well as other
connotative evidence, such as familiarity with the subject matter. This dynamic suggests that
resonance can occur as a result of various modes of engagement that produces multiple contexts.
An extreme example of this is the horror game Until Dawn (Supermassive 2015) where
the focus is on a player’s somatic responses to evidence. I draw on this example to highlight the
relationships between content and visceral memories. Focusing on the body as a creator of
meaning and, turning to an example that reflects its compulsion to almost reflectively respond as
a motivation to engage, I sought a more critical analysis of the body as repository of multi-
dimensional visceral responses to media that draw upon a familiar history of like-minded
experiences. Until Dawn resonates with familiar themes to ground its narrative and entice
viewers to look or look away as they imagine or attempt to avoid a history they are about to
write. Fictional in nature, this adventure draws upon filmic tropes referential to the slasher sub-
genre. Triggered by player input, sequences closely mimic this style of horror. Analyzed
through the lens of documentaries that appeal to affective and somatic registers, this video game
exemplifies the intersection of choice-based narratives and interactivity which makes possible

44

the open-ended potential for physical responses to resonant content. Its overt dynamic centers on
the relationship between body and text. The design relies on both visual and visceral
engagement, utilizing the haptic interface of the PlayStation 4’s controller, similar in format to
other projects that incorporate feedback, like breath and pulse, to drive engagement.
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Exploring the implications of resonance, I turn to Pooja Rangan’s insights regarding an
empathetic response an observer might experience. This connection often is predicated upon the
assumption that a viewer can relate to circumstances of an event, the life story of an individual,
or a location portrayed within the documentary. Rangan argues that this assumption is based in a
universal subject position with problematic roots in a Western humanist tradition. Given a
viewer’s possible lack of lived experience that aligns with the individual, subject matter or
events portrayed in the media, if this connection is unfamiliar or discordant, then, absent a
cognitive and/or visceral relationship, it might be argued that resonance or a sense of empathy
might not be straightforward.
Empathy, as Rangan defines it, has its origins in Western modernist philosophy from the
20th Century. This idea is rooted in the concept of “humanism.” In a humanist tradition, an
individual who is imagined as a “universal subject” and not identified as such but is implicitly
cis-, straight, white, male and, most importantly, connected to colonial powers, seeks to
understand the “other.” This otherized subject is viewed as “foreign” or someone who does not
match the identity of the universal subject on the basis of one or more “normal” categories. An
empathetic response occurs when the universal subject maps the other’s experiences, presumed
to be equivalent, onto his own. In such a scenario, authority and power resides with the universal

67
Mainstream examples of this phenomenon include PS4-PS5 games (games made at the end of the PlayStation 4
generation or right when the PlayStation 5, which has a more haptic interface, era) like Last of Us Part II (Naughty
Dog 2020), and the more experimental work of Tender Claws in works like Pry, among others.

45

subject. However, if the other’s experiences do not align with that of the universal subjects, the
other is rendered “not legible.”
The process of making the other’s emotions and experiences legible to the universal
subject therefore suggests that the other’s experiences are “legible.” Through this empathetic
relationship the other becomes “understandable.” Rangan poses that this relationship is a best
disingenuous and more likely unethical, challenging those who believe that experiences
unfamiliar to the universal subject are invalid unless they can be made legible. By suggesting
that the empathetic “human” experience has its roots in the assumption that the universal subject
is the one empowered to decide what is understandable and what is not is antithetical to
humanism. Furthermore, to pose the universal subject's experiences are “human,” whereas the
other’s are not, dehumanize the other. Rangan argues that the historical portrayal of empathy in
documentary media reflects this power dichotomy and invoking empathy as a barometer to
assess the truthfulness of this media, in this context, may not be the best measure of its veracity.
However, I would pose that unfamiliar content may still elicit emotional connections in
spectators. This resonance is linked to the concept of “speaking nearby” proposed by Trinh.
68
In
adapting Trinh’s formulation, I pose that though the emotions of the “eye” of the spectator might
not align with the “I” of the filmmaker or subject matter, viewers might sense that their
responses exist in parallel with or supplemental to the sentiment conveyed by the documentary’s
content. Ahmed and Jones offer a mode of engagement that does not isolate the queered
spectator. This parallel positioning affords observers an alternative perspective. Evidence

68
Trinh, T. Minh-Ha and Nancy N. Chen. “Speaking Nearby,” in Feminism and Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 317-336.

46

reflecting societal norms, which otherwise might be seen as inadequate and not representative of
a viewer’s lived experiences, may become relatable if reimagined.
A film that exemplifies this process is Forbidden Love (Fernie and Weissman 1992), in
which discrete contextual references inform one another. In the context of archiving evidence, as
viewers engage with new subject matter and perceive it in the context of prior experience, both
the interpretation of the present and the archive of the past, influence and transform one another.
The reimagining of this past in Forbidden Love represents an emotionally-based archive which
provides evidence of queer communities that otherwise would not be visible to many of the
women featured in the documentary. This collection of pulp fiction literature “introduced”
members of their community to what gay and lesbian life was like in New York City. I chose to
analyze Forbidden Love because thematic evidence explores this intersection between the factual
lives of these women and the fictional stories which provided an affective connection to their
lived experiences.
Being able to engage and resonate with contextual evidence is a phenomenon that is
referenced in the scholarship of Andre Lepecki and Ann Cvetkovich. Viewers retain the
experience of this engagement in their memories. We tend to think memory as being a cognitive
function, but we also recall sensory experiences and viscerally retain these throughout our
bodies. Lepecki proposes that the body is a repository or archive of cognitive and sensorial
memories.
69
These archives retain, recall, and inter-relate experiences that both contextualize
each other and validate the evidence represented in the media. Resonance that occurs at a
visceral level is exemplified in Derek Jarman’s Blue (1990). In Blue, content is presented

69
Andre Lepecki. “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” New York, USA:
Cambridge University Press. Dance Research Journal, 2010, Vol.42 (2), p.28-48.

47

without any visual reference, as audiences imagine meanings based upon the sound of the
filmmaker’s voice. Blue avisually positions the theme of blindness at the core of its narrative
and provides no visual reference beyond a blue screen. In doing so, Jarman privileges nonvisual
evidence, arguing not for the primacy of other senses, but for an experiential vantagepoint to
engage the viewer in which vision is neither critical nor even necessary. Blue exemplifies
evidence that determines and distinguishes able and disabled individuals. Jarman creates an
archive not only of these familiar feelings, but descriptions which produces new feelings. These
in turn, for a given viewer, validate the context of archives now populated with experiences of
what once was unfamiliar or of a forgotten past. These inter-related experiences resonate with
one another, and the once unfamiliar now is knowable.
Cvetkovich writes about the cognitive and visceral repository of memories viewers
record as they register communal and intangible artifacts of events and affective experiences
which cannot be visually represented. Richard Fung in Sea in the Blood (2000) uses evidence of
his experience to addresses themes of life and death nonlinearly and avisually. Contextualizing
and reappropriating the meanings of metonymic visuals such as water, blood, and the human
form, I expand on Katherine Lawless’ writings to explore how Fung’s poetic, personal
documentary references the artist’s autobiographical reflections to excavate the multiple layers
of the unspeakable impact of loss. These visuals symbolize vitality and disease, what
conventional filmic techniques fail to adequately convey. The filmmaker recalls the death of his
sister Nan, who was born with thalassemia, and the diagnosis of his partner Tim with HIV/AIDS.
Employing metaphor and by experimenting with evidence that is identified with both the
concrete and the abstract, Fung evokes an ambiguous reflection of his non-visual interiority. Sea

48

in the Blood’s use of evidence engages the viewer in an open dialogue, asserting the complexity
of what Fong can and cannot intellectually portray, what he can and cannot emotionally access.

Interpolation
If resonance occurs when multiple contexts relate to one another to give rise to new
meanings, then interpolation is the operation that makes resonance possible. Interpolation as a
process is essential to reconcile and reappropriate the meanings of past and present experiences.
During this process of engagement, experience informs present viewing. Nyong’o introduces the
term “polytemporality” when discussing the relationship of past and present experience.
Nyong’o describes this interpolation of past or a-posteriori knowledge with the present
experience, where past and present simultaneously coexist. In my discussion of the experience
of context, I argue that past and present are constantly reformulating each other, as the
contextualization of evidence is ongoing. Heather Love, a professor of English, writes about the
relationship of past, present, and future with respect to queer identity.
70
Love describes the “look
backward” as a governing “myth” that pervades much of queer literature, and much of the way
that queerness was defined in the Twentieth Century. By queerness, she primarily references gay
and lesbian sexuality, and by looking backward, she draws attention to the all-too-common
occurrence of negatively stereotyping queer experience and queer life.
When documentary media addresses this history which Love and Nyong’o look back on,
the present context of evidence is informed by knowledge of this past. Nyong’o, in
characterizing the reality of what it is like to be Black and queer in the United States, describes

70
Heather Love. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1999).

49

being aware of histories that impact the context of a moment and the experience of that moment
itself.
71
Nyong’o’s moment, according to Jones, could be indeterminate in duration,
conceptionally, referring to the time it takes for present evidence to be contextualized in light of
past experience. Merleau-Ponty might conceptualize this duration as the time it takes for the
soma to engage with the noema to create gnosis. I argue that a viewer’s preexisting contexts,
along with the filmmaker’s content, together form a new narrative, an artifact of gnosis, that
exists apart from the original two sources. From a phenomenological perspective, this artifact is
fluid, as its interaction with media content and a viewer’s existing networks of archives is
ongoing. In this context, Gaines’ call to action is the constant interpolation of new artifacts,
artifacts that continue to inform one another during the process of reception and perception, a
process that is a never static regardless of the media type.
Interpolation also is a means of reclaiming lost histories. This phenomenon is
exemplified in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Zoe Leonard’s The Fae Richards
Photo Archive. Dunye’s and Leonard’s respective fabrication of past and present evidence,
when viewed through the lens of potentiality, recaptures a history that dominant archival records
fail to preserve. Their media portrays a reimagination of the life of Fae Richards. I look to the
writings of Jaimie Baron appreciate that engagement is an influence when attributing veracity to
evidence. In the case of evidence in Dunye’s and Leonard’s projects, this sense of authenticity is
substantiated by the relationship that evolves between the viewer and Fae Richards’ history. As
Cheryl seeks out and discovers evidence of this one famous Black film star, a narrative is woven

71
Drawing on the writings and work of Kara Keeling and Adrian Piper, Nyong’o describes Black polytemporality as
a superimposition and simultaneity of past and present for which an indexical notion of the present cannot account.
Nyong’o writes: “We cannot directly represent this emergence of a black polytemporality within the indexical
present, but we can sense it…” (Nyong’o 93).

50

that captures a history lost or forgotten. I highlight these works as they both exemplify a
reappropriation of meaning to bring to life a story that only mockumentary can legitimately
validate. It is sense of restoration that emerges from the relating present and prior contextual
evidence within a work, as this context engages with a viewer’s archive of experience. Grainy
footage and an authoritative voiceover gesture toward a sense of familiar visuals and aesthetics.
Though the noema might be fictional, the narrative interfaces with the soma of a viewer invoking
a gnostic experience analogous to what a spectator expects in conventional historical
documentary media.
I pose accessing meanings that are interpolated based on a spectator’s reception and
perception of cerebral and somatic stimuli, can be analyzed alongside a discussion of the process
of archival excavation. Drawing from the methodology of Allyson Nadia Field and the
theorizations of Ann Cvetkovich, both of whom, though working in traditionally disparate
domains, enact similar approaches to the storage, retrieval, and application of evidence as points
of reference, based on the veracity of their validity within and among networks of resonance.
This resonance validates the resultant context which now fills what was once an “ellipsis” in
historical records.
72

Facing the challenge of reconstructing Black American history from filmmaking during
the silent era, a time when these records were not preserved or referenced in dominant
Hollywood accounting, Field poses audiences interpolate the missing content by inference. They
draw connections between artifacts that are known, to fill in the gaps, or what Field terms

72
“Ellipsis” in this context is analogous to the ellipsis in writing, which suggests a trailing off or gap between two
thoughts. For Field an ellipsis is a gap in the historical record, where a space between two moments in time or
significant historical documents is not able to be filled in by extant films, records or other textual accounts.

51

ellipses, with what has been lost, to revitalize and reclaim this past.
73
Reorienting a viewer’s
perspective in relation to the discovery and appropriation of meanings that are interpolated
through the process of excavation attributes to that evidence an import of significance. I apply
this notion of narrative excavation to the process of knowledge production, specifically, the
formulation of meanings that are absent from profilmic content.
Archival excavation provides the internal evidentiary support that connects external
content to physical and emotional memories. This process reimagines the cognitive and visceral
context of meanings that populate Field’s ellipses. Viewing excavated thought and affect as
testimonials allows the repositioning of elliptical content, not as a reminder of deficiency, but as
an assertion that these people and events will not be forgotten. In She, Puppet, this preservation
derives much of its source from excerpted scenes of implied violent emotion, similar to the
material Cvetkovich focuses on in her analysis in Archive of Feelings. Without explicitly being
stated, the conveyance of what a character feels is a process of excavation based on a viewer’s
projection, a resonant reaction that implicitly identifies a spectator with the evidence onscreen.
This extrapolation is fueled by a sense of engagement with a narrative’s cerebral and emotional
representations. Because profilmic representations do not exist, evidence of this forgotten or lost
history is conveyed avisually, as are visceral experiences that require more than a sober
treatment. Despite this absence or deficiency, this subject matter either resonates with a viewer’s
lived experiences or fills in the gaps that will form the basis upon which future content might
reappropriated, in a continuous process. Ellipses hold the potential to reimagine history, as
viewers interpolate what is not or cannot otherwise be represented in media.

73
Field, Allyson Nadia. Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black
Modernity. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

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I believe dialogic narratives can disrupt preconceived notions of normal sexuality,
behavior, what it means to be “able-bodied,” as well as recreate lost or forgotten histories. This
also applies to the representation of traumatic and tragic memory. I expand Field’s notion of
interpolation to an affective repository, bringing her work in conversation with that of
Cvetkovich’s. For that reason, I have included discussions of conceptions of normativity and
disability studies that address documentary media, as they relate to media such as Jarman’s Blue
and Fung’s Sea in the Blood. These works catalyze the disruption of normative dichotomies and
through the reappropriation of the meanings of contextual evidence, what were once two
opposing states of being, now may be reimagined in the context of a new appreciation of the
meaning of life without assessing lifestyle or ability in comparison to socially defined standards.

A Note About The Way I Am Using Politics
A shift in the normative conception of the power of media begins with problematizing
Grierson’s definition of documentary and Kuehl’s perspective on truth claims. Grierson’s writes
that film can operate as a “hammer,” driving certain systems of thought and belief into public
awareness. Awareness, in this context, is objectified, over which the filmmaker’s creative use
of evidence wields a powerful and compelling force, the hammer. Authority, according to
Grierson, lies in the source material. Turning to Kuehl, attributing validity to a work’s evidence
and claims also presupposes the authority of its content, drawn from preexisting knowledge
systems. Referencing Nichols, if a work’s truth is made apparent from a sober discourse based
upon Grierson’s sources, then I pose the creative manipulation of information could cloud the
reasoning and judgement that sustains the validity of Kuehl’s evidence and claims. I believe
these authors also regard the documentary form as a cultural repository of actuality, an erudite,
extant archive, to be treasured and treated differently than works of fiction. Their conventional

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wisdom casts documentary as a distinct media form, staking a unique claim to authority and
authenticity. To dismantle this notion challenges their conventional wisdom.
Earlier I referenced Trinh who writes that to mainstream communities, documentary has
served an authoritative function to elevate and legitimize certain media and the narratives above
others. Trinh also argues that for a work to resonate with a broader range of audiences,
representations of “truth” and “falsity” need to be dismantled or questioned in order to challenge
these power dynamics. Trinh states that every spectator interprets a text to their own truth:
“[…] Every time an interpretation of a work implicitly presents itself as a mere (obvious
or objective) decoding of the producer’s message, there is an explicit reiteration of the
fetishistic language of the spectacle; in other words, a blind denial of the mediating
subjectivity of the spectator as reading subject and meaning-making contributor. The
same applies to producers who consider their works to be transparent descriptions or
immediate experiences of Reality ‘as it is’ […] Literal translations are particularly fond
of ‘evident truths,’ and the more they take themselves for granted, the more readily they
mouth truisms and view themselves as the ones and the only right ones.”

I quote Trinh at length because I feel that this argument is foundational to thinking about
politics and authority. The conception that linear, unmediated truth is presented as fact, but is, in
reality, a form of authority exercised by a filmmaker over a viewer, is essential to understanding
the alternatives I present. By reading the power dynamics of teleological or, as Trinh might call
it, linear, documentary as fundamentally normative, I add a queer phenomenological spin to
Trinh’s analysis, suggesting how viewing evidence through a lens that transfers agency from
filmmaker to viewer can help to dismantle notions of authority often bound up with forms of
state, colonial, racist, and queerphobic violence. The power of the reappropriation of the
treatment of actuality is not in the actuality is creates, but in its the power to disrupt.
As a contextualization of actuality is central to reappropriation, I recognize this context is drawn
from networks of knowledge accessed from the archives of a viewer’s experience. To further
clarify the knowledge I am referencing, I relate what is termed “top-down” to a-priori

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knowledge and “bottom-up” to a-posteriori thinking. Fundamentally ontological in nature and
with its roots in Ancient Greek philosophy, top-down knowledge is exemplified in the type of
documentary where a filmmaker organizes and edits evidence that points viewers toward a single
meaning or truth. This conclusion is the genesis of a-priori meaning-making, which suggests
that an absolute form of knowledge exists, and audiences must seek to understand it, as best as
they can. This is based on the Platonic ideal. Out there, in the world, is a single form of
understanding, and the viewer’s job is to get as close to grasping it as possible, similar to how
Plato describes objects existing in pure forms, which worldly experience and geometry seek to
approximate. Meaning is not internally determined. It emerges from pursuing an understanding
of external information.
In contrast, bottom-up knowledge occurs when viewers discover meaning from their own
points of reference and understanding. This is an a-posteriori method of meaning-making,
which suggests that knowledge resides in many forms, each unique to a spectator, and no one,
absolute means of understanding exists. Knowledge is formulated, born from our experience in
the world. This figures knowledge as the ideal that from the world derives multiple forms of
understanding, starting with the viewer and residing in the viewer’s own contexts, similar to how
Aristotle describes objects existing only as they appear in the world, and our understanding of
the form of an object constructed out of our encounter with the world.
The phenomenological location of resonance and meaning in media that does not
inherently or explicitly reveal itself, occurs at the point of engagement when the viewer’s context
processes the filmmaker’s content. The power of this experience lies in the dynamic exchange
which emerges at the intersection of the two forces. One could not exist without the presence of
the other. The validity of content and context it suggests, depends upon the preexisting

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knowledge of the spectator, more so than the information provided by the filmmaker, and this
negotiated reading of the media’s text is where my analysis of the political of disruption and the
reappropriation of meaning begins.

The Narrative
In a dialectic narrative, the articulation of the filmmaker’s message is narrowly and
skillfully crafted to be comprehensible, as it logically progresses towards its one-and-only,
singular, inevitable, and undeniable resolution. This resolution results from the presentation of a
question or mystery or topic about which little is known. The language through which this
material is conveyed is primarily visual, and the expectation is that the understanding reached at
the end of a film takes a normative perspective with regard to content. By normative, I am
referring to those which are verifiable by traditional profilmic and audio means such as the
photographic evidence in Housing Problems. This implies normative meanings associated with
representations of evidence mimic life’s milestones and life’s lessons which reflect normative
events such as birth, marriage, reproduction, and death. Lee Edelman suggests that in dialogic
narratives, a connection exists between the interpolation of context and teleology, especially as
this reformulation relates to narrative structure.
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In the mid-twentieth century, normative behavior would be associated with life
milestones, such as “appropriate” come-of-age experimentation or traditional courtship that leads
to heterosexual marriage.
75
By normative, I draw on Judith Jarvis Thompson’s discussions, who

74
Lee. Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
75
Judith Jarvis Thompson. Normativity (The Paul Carus Lectures). (Chicago: Open Court, 2008).

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bases her application on the generally accepted philosophical definition of the concept.
76
She
analyzes “normativity” as it relates to morality, determined by what behavior or identity society
or the culture deems individuals “should” do or be to achieve moral goodness versus what
individuals believe they “ought” to do or who they are. This is a juxtaposition between what
society defines as a normative standard of behavior as compared to people who take actions
based on their own moral imperative or moral authority to pursue their own moral compass. She
discusses the normative standard of behavior or being versus what individuals believe they
“ought” to do or who they are, live their life, or take actions based on their own moral imperative
or moral authority to pursue their own moral goodness.
This reflects the imperative to be who they are that follow from their own individual
moral authority.
77
In other words, from a societal perspective, a socially defined community or
culture determines what is normative action or identity by associating certain behaviors or
identities with “acceptable norms” and, by extension, with what is morally good. It then follows
that non-normative or morally unacceptable behavior is that which society regards and labels as
“bad” or deviant from standard norms.
Documentaries, such as The Thin Blue Line and true crime shows like The Jinx reflect
normative practices that follow conventional means of evidence curation.
78
In The Hunting
Ground, the horrific allusions to rape resonates with viewers due to the filmmaker’s integration
of familiar filmic tropes. Veracity of the filmmaker’s claims depended upon an audience’s
recognition of normative emotional or socially acceptable responses to these scenes.

76
Judith Jarvis Thompson. Normativity (The Paul Carus Lectures). (Chicago: Open Court, 2008).

77
Thompson, ibid.

78
The Thin Blue Line, directed by Errol Morris (1988), digital video. and The Jinx, directed by Andrew Jarecki
(2015), digital video.

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Declaring boundaries of what is acceptable allows for the inclusion of certain individuals
and the exclusion of others, which often is invoked to justify otherization and oppression. This
use of normative when applied to narrative studies echoes Warhol’s application. By referencing
scenes from various media such as Ahwesh’s She, Puppet (2001) where images viscerally invite
a viewer to become part of a story that challenges conventions, I explore variations on Edelman’s
relationship between narrative and time. According to Robyn Warhol, these milestones may be
captured through non-linear, non-normative narratives. This structural differentiation is the
focus of Warhol’s analysis.
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Though Warhol’s perspective is drawn from predominately fictional text and memoirs, I
extrapolate her writings to discuss the nature of narratives derived from non-normative
documentaries. Warhol is concerned with socially or culturally defined “good” norms of
linearity and closure, to borrow from Jean Luc Godard, where the story begins at the beginning,
develops in middle, and ends at the end. Overall, the formula follows a problem/solution format
that leads to a teleological conclusion.
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Warhol introduces the idea of time that, absent a single resolution, defies a reader’s
expectation of linearity, which is the method of traditional storytelling or the recording of
history. I pose this conventional beginning-middle-and-end mapping of a normative narrative
can be extended to a normative mode of receiving, perceiving and verifying content. In my
analysis, I challenge this convention and, by building upon Warhol’s concept of non-normativity,
I pose that good/bad and normative/non-normative dichotomies be reinterpreted as not

79
Robyn R. Warhol. Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. (Ohio: Ohio State University,
2004).

80
“A story should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order” is a quote colloquially
attributed to Jean-Luc Godard, which I am invoking somewhat causally here.

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oppositional positions, but rather encompassing such that one is not defined in opposition to the
other. This ambiguous reappropriation stems from evidence that defied absolute validation, but
rather contextually determined.
Juxtaposing conventional arguments, as described by Kuehl, with non-normative
documentaries, helps me to further theorize the open-ended potential of the types of experiential
media. As suggested by Warhol, my studies focus less upon the content in each of the media
examples I explore and more about how their respective arguments unfold. These examples do
not fit into neat categories or convey unilateral meanings. Instead, these meanings become
multiple narratives that together create networks of context.
I connect this breakdown of a story’s linear components to the structuring of meanings,
ultimately resulting in an ideological narrative. In broad strokes, a normative narrative begins
with a premise, which for documentary narratives often manifests as a problem to be solved or a
topic to be investigated. Then, the middle expounds on this problem, offering witnesses,
evidence, or examples to offer a solution or explanation. The end then presents that explanation
or conclusion in final form, what theorists refer to as the telos. This resolution manifests as the
singular argument the filmmaker seeks to convey. By understanding these narratives as
normative in the same way that a teleological narrative is normative, what is queer about a queer
narrative and queered approaches to narration can simultaneously analyzed.
Queer narratives that lack closure and queered approaches to narration do not drive to a
singular conclusion, but gesture towards a broad range of meanings, in multiple directions. They
are fundamentally nonlinear. Being open-ended and subject to interpolation, their veracity will
fluctuate depending on, at any given moment, the context of the phenomenological experience of
the evidence upon which a viewer derives meaning or meanings. By treating meaning as open-

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ended, my approach is distinct from Bordwell, with significantly different implications for an
understanding of knowledge production. These reimagined meanings in turn produce new
narratives and knowledge that were not there before.
I argue, dialogic media, where the meaning and narratives are interpolated, reimagines
representations of able-bodied and normative modes of being. Wellness and correctness have no
oppositional states when evidence, in context, complicates these conventional categories. This
challenge can broaden a viewer’s understanding of disability and what is means to be able-
bodied, as discussed in Jarman’s Blue and Fung’s Sea in the Blood. This opposition to normative
assumptions also applies when considering communities and individuals who, based on
nonnormative sexual and gender identification, have been violently oppressed or erased from
dominant records, as in Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Muholi’s “what don’t you see
when you look at me?”

In Conclusion
When characterizing what determines documentary content, the bridge that connects
cognitive theorists and Bordwell to Sobchack is the process of reappropriation that produces
context from the representation of content. While one discipline treats the “thing” as a discrete
object to be assessed and the other prioritizes the experience of engagement as a measure of
evaluation, what I believe needs to be acknowledged is that the “thing” no longer exists once it is
experienced. The “thing” is transformed into context which can be assessed. However, the
result might vary from moment to moment and spectator to spectator, and, in any given moment,
the media might be judged both documentary and not, depending on the contextualization of its
evidence.

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I argue for a more fluid definition of documentary experience and assessing documentary
value. Within a singular work, fictional and factual evidence can give rise to documentary
context. Engaging with this context, the creation of meaning and the evolution of narrative, are
all phenomenological processes that continuously occur during the experience of media. Driven
by epistephilia, the desire for the evaluation of documentary truth can lead to an ambiguous
outcome. Knowledge gained from evidence, need not negate the meaning and assessment of
subsequent recontextualizations. Not because documentary and truthfulness as constructions
defy definitive determinations. But that in any given moment, in any given context, because as
past and present experiences infuse one another with new meanings, any given truth claim may
fluctuate in its determination.
I hypothesize that a tension exists between the desire among viewers to know what they
are about to see it “true” or “not lying” and an open-ended experiential invitation to engage in a
learning process. In the latter case, the determination of documentary is not relevant to the
work’s documentary value. Documentary that challenges normative assumptions may appear to
be “false” and “lying.” However, as a result of engaging in this phenomenological process, the
ambiguous truths that emerge disrupt normative assumptions of behavior and disability. What
may viscerally resonate with what one feels might also disrupt what one knows. While the
former engagement reinforces a viewer’s archive of feelings, the latter experience might raise
awareness and precipitate knowledge production. Resonance is the fuel that drives engagement,
and engagement is the agent that reappropriates content into context. This process is, by itself, a
call to action. I pose that this fostering of cognitive and visceral awareness is, in and of itself, a
gesture towards political activism.
81

81
Jane Gaines. “Political Mimesis.” In Collecting Visible Evidence. Eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 84-103.

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Through the lens of queered narrative theory, this call to action is informed by
experiences that have been archived in the physical body. Nonlinear, non-telological, and non-
narrative, the films I discuss do not assume that a truth is “out there” to be found, but rather that
truth is open to interpretation. This subjective characteristic which also reflects the empathetic
nature implicit in resonance and a viewer’s archive of experience, all create the opportunity for
new modes of conversations that follow from the disruption, reappropriation and reimagining of
content. Ceasing to think about nonfiction and fiction as genres and more as classes of narratives
expands the pedagogical and political potential of these sober discourses to raise awareness. A
new understanding of what constitutes documentary media broadens the range of subjects and
their stories that fall within its domain.

Before I Start
I am beginning with Housing Problems, a film most people would agree is a conventional
documentary and suggesting how the theories of reappropriation and recontextualization of
meaning I am posing might complicate our experiences of viewing this work.

Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton 1935)
Beginning with John Grierson’s conception of documentary as a “creative treatment of
actuality,” this statement acknowledges the license curators of information may take in their
attempt to communicate truth. I feel Grierson’s characterization of the form opens the door to a
critical examination of where the line exists, in general, between nonfiction and the
manipulation, distortion and outright fabrication of facts. In discussing Grierson, I am focusing

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on a small subset of a larger body of his work. Grierson’s projects for the British Realist Film
Unit and his later founding of the National Film Board of Canada both stand out as significant
moments in film history. One of the earliest films I studied was Housing Problems. The project
is part of a nonfiction series, along with works like It Comes From Coal (1940), Green Food for
Health (1940) and Choose Cheese (1940), Housing Problems seeks to introduce the public to
critical social issues and how these matters are being addressed. In addition, these films attempt
to educate the public about appropriate health practices.
82
My intention in including Housing
Problems in this analysis is to draw attention to trends in how documentaries were produced and
conceived for discursive goals by documentarians such as Grierson. These goals were tied to
raising awareness, in Grierson’s case, of predominantly governmental programs. With that in
mind, before the lights in the classroom dimmed, I had the expectation that what I was about to
watch was a fair representation of reality.
A woman, voice worn-down, expression weary, gazes into the camera lens. Her hands
fidget and her posture slumps. With each grainy frame, her message screens with equal intensity
and measured initiation, clear and concise. She describes the dirty, warm water in which her
family must bathe for wont of other options, of the rat she mistook for a small dog who perched
on her child’s head as the baby tried to sleep. These words paint a vivid picture of her living
conditions, which most assuredly could be described as squalor. Her words appear carefully
chosen; her recollection precise. Later, sequences feature a voiceover in which a man calmly
explains how the government has a rescue plan, to build rows of crisp, white housing to replace

82
It is important to note that these films, while connected by the fact that many of them were produced by the
Realist Film Unit and that they all introduced government programs in different ways, had a specific voice. Some
other, often-cited were highly poetic, like the introduction of the Royal Mail Service in Night Mail (Watt and Wright
1935), and others direct and discursive. Though these films each reflect the formal touches of their specific
directors and writers, they are connected by many falling under Grierson’s producing purview and the film unit’s
objectives toward realism and edification.

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the tenements currently occupied by those featured in the prior segments. The narrator provides
a window into this future, models of the proposed structures, and reassures me these new
projects will be a welcome improvement, because people in authority care about, care for and
attend to the needs of their citizens.
As the room lights come back on, I look at the page where I had been taking notes and I
reflect upon the truth of the narrative being posed in Housing Problems. Viewed more than 85
years later, from the perspective of the communities the British government was committed to
helping, I come away with an alternate reading of the film. I do not doubt the veracity of what
had been said and shown, but I sense the presentation has been so strategically structured that I
cannot help wondering what had been left out. What details beg further investigation. If critical
elements of the story have been omitted, was Housing Problems something other than simply a
creative treatment of actuality?
Though most documentary studies of Grierson begin with his review of Moana, in which
the term “documentary” first emerges, I argue that going back to his scholarship on the editing of
periodical and film content sheds light on how he will come to delineate the form and define the
discipline. In his analysis, Grierson emphasizes recorded, both textual and auditory media as a
means of communicating information with an institutional focus or imbedded institutional
authority.
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Grierson wrote this at a time when the definitions of fiction and nonfiction were much
more porous than they are now and when techniques like reenactment were frequently used

83
For more about Grierson’s institutional affiliations and beliefs regarding specifically governmental programs and
the role of documentary in furthering them, see John Grierson.“Broadcasting and the Cinema as Instruments of
Education.” An Address Delivered to the Higher Education Meeting at the Southport Conference of the N.U.T. In
World Film News. 1936, 3-11.

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without comment or problem, even in his review of Moana.
84
For Grierson and his
contemporaries, defining content has more to do with a filmmaker’s objective, to capture
actuality, and not whether truth might only apply and exist in nonfiction films.
85
In his piece for
the British Postal Service, “Broadcasting and the Cinema as Instruments of Education,”
prepared for primarily educational audiences and published by the Teacher’s Union, Grierson
challenges those who took a revolutionary view of film and radio, people who believed that these
relatively recent technologies would alter people’s worldviews. Rather Grierson countered that,
in and of themselves, these media forms are not permanently going to change the perception of
the viewing or listening public. He wrote that film and radio play active roles as part of larger
cultural, educational or political projects, arguing these media sources supplement existing
pedagogical methods, specifically bolstering the powers of description available to an
instructor.
86

Much of Grierson’s writing, especially his famous 1960s essays that cover the uses and
intentions of documentary, identify the form as a “pulpit” and holds that evidence has a stable
connection to a profilmic object, the reality before the camera. He also draws straightforward
links between propagandistic modes and nonfiction media to make an argument. This is what

84
In his review of Moana, Grierson especially praises the use of reenactment, maintaining that it is an important part
of the experience rather than the characterization that some later documentary scholars might apply to such a tactic,
which would claim that it is in tension with the goals of documentary as a genre or form/format. This argument finds
further expansion in Grierson’s review of Moana, where he expands not only upon the educational benefits of
nonfiction film, but their persuasive power as well. (Grierson, Grierson on Documentary 1966).

85
Evident in statements such as Grierson’s reference to documentary as a “pulpit” in his famous quote, “I look on
cinema [specifically, he is referring to documentary here] as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist” (Grierson 1933,
quoted in Grierson on Documentary 1966). Grierson referenced at multiple points the continued messiness of the
characterization of the term “documentary,” though, in his work with the Realist Film Unit in Britain and later
during the founding of the National Film Board of Canada he would continue to emphasize the persuasive potential
of the medium and its flexibility as a pedagogical and persuasive tool.

86
John Grierson. “Broadcasting and the Cinema as Instruments of Education.” An Address Delivered to the Higher
Education Meeting at the Southport Conference of the N.U.T. In World Film News. 1936, 3.

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Jerry Kuehl later will call “evidence and arguments.” Albeit manipulated, evidence begins in a
state of absolute actuality that is understood by all viewers the same way. In fact, for Grierson,
documentary’s authoritative function might be understood as a fundamentally dialectical and
discursive one: to teach or persuade all viewers of one way of thinking or reasoning through
treating actuality in a persuasive way.
This is an explicitly non-phenomenological reading. Viewing is not an experience, but a
receiving act mediated and mandated by the filmmaker’s orchestration. The narrative that is
created drives to a singular and stable conclusion, solution, or resolution. All viewers are
expected to emerge with the same understanding, the same perception of actuality. Documentary
has never held claim to an unvarnished representation of truth and persuasive curation always
has been an accepted technique associated with the medium. In trusting documentarians with
noble intentions and the tools with which to teach the public, audiences have been more than
willing to assign authority to the filmmaker and allow these curators of content to guide their
understanding and production of knowledge. Effectively, we put our trust in their representation
of real people, places, and events.
According to early theorists like Grierson, to capture actuality in documentary as in
Housing Problems requires the narrative early on establish a foundational premise which serves
as a viewer’s point of reference and a stable signifier of meaning. An observer attributes
veracity based on what is initially presented as visually and acoustically apparent. Central to
Grierson’s formulation is this viewer’s identification with these signifiers, relying upon a
viewer’s assumption of trust in the veracity of these foundational premises. Descriptions of rats
crawling on the faces of babies are undoubtably evidence of poor living conditions. By
establishing this information, the veracity of these details carries through to subsequent

66

sequences that support the filmmaker’s message. To make a successful argument, throughout
the documentary, the evidence attributed to the filmmaker must never be called into question.
Watching the woman deliver her harrowing story left me unsettled. For me, Grierson’s
representation of evidence prompts my questioning the validity of the film’s argument before I
am willing to trust where the narrative leads me next. If Grierson’s storyline were to play out
exactly as he poses, the persuasive function of these clips would have been for me to embrace the
government’s commitment to better housing. In 1935, audiences might have been willing to
passively accept the point of view of the voice of authority embodied in the narrator. Instead, I
focus on assessing to what degree I am being manipulated by the filmmaker’s creative
presentation of details. As a more active observer, I invite myself to engage with this treatment
of actuality. The result is a reappropriation of meaning.
What I perceive was that the resident’s appearance feels staged, perfectly centered
onscreen. Her descriptions seem a little too coached, memories too scripted to come across as
unrehearsed recollections. In the film, she speaks just long enough to hold my interest, not long
enough to have exceeded my attention span. The proposed buildings may address one problem,
but, sterile and uniform, their construction as a solution to the housing problem raises other
concerns. The design lacks the individuality that makes a space a home. Moreover, the
government’s vision is hypothetical, yet to be constructed and actualized. I am uncertain that
those in power will follow through on their promises. In 1990, Nichols wrote in his introduction
to Introduction to Documentary that Grierson’s focus was never on actuality as unvarnished.
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But for me, the varnish in Housing Problems clouds the filmmaker’s argument.

87
Nichols’ foundational study in Introduction to Documentary identifies Grierson’s early influence and detail how
he defined and shaped the discipline. This theme also is covered by authors such as Rosaleen Smyth, John Izod, and
Jo Fox whose biographies and critiques of Grierson explore his contributions to the field, as well as his relationship
to British colonial cinema.

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As I try to relate to Housing Problems’ narrative and the format of presentation that
Nichols and Grierson posited as critical determinations of documentary, I recognize my
perspective is based upon the camera’s focus which reflected the filmmaker’s point of view. My
sense of physical proprioception, my ability to position my body in space, was being marshalled
in service of a somatic and singular argument. From where I stood on the streets during the
opening sequences and final presentation, the vantage points were designed to validate the
conclusion I was visually, didactically and dramatically directed to endorse.
Bruno writes about the space for viewing, regarding gallery exhibitions and the influence
of a spectator’s position and orientation, as an observer either negotiates these curated and
creatively edited environments or is shepherded through the corridors of artifacts. Also
referenced is the area outside the exhibition, where, prior to entering, spectators anticipate the
validity of what they are about to witness. I extrapolate this formulation from a queer
phenomenological perspective. As envisioned by Bruno, before the doors open or the room
darkens or the curtain parts; even in the moments between frames of a movie or in the time it
takes a spectator to move from one display to the next; the inevitability of experience exists.
What remains variable is the nature of this engagement.
Grierson might characterize this engagement as the passive reception of knowledge,
relinquishing authority to the camera. I would argue this phenomenon undermines perception.
Alternatively, if choice to engage is a viewer’s decision, prompted by the content or structure of
the media or self-directed, as in the case of a gallery space or interactive work, then meaning is
an active process of audience authorship. By challenging Housing Problems’ narrative from a
non-normative or anti-normative viewing position, I become cognizant of the external power

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relations inherent in the work’s structure and reclaim my subject position and the authority to
validate the claims that the film professes to solve. In this context, this film is a documentary,
whether its evidence is sufficient or insincere is in support of its claim.

Post Script
Rather than persuade or convince, the work creates the desire for me to investigate
further, to seek out more information. For this reason, I believe, the film is a documentary, but
not in terms Grierson describes. Whether the presentation of the conditions in which these
individuals exist is true or not lying, following the reasoning Vivian Sobchack, the content
resonated with my belief that no one should live in under these housing conditions, and
something should be done to help this community. My ambivalent reaction to Housing
Problems’ claims suggests that if alternate meanings might be derived and appropriated from its
scenes, I am ready to examine other works from the perspective of their creative use of actuality
to reappropriate meaning and disrupt normative assumptions. I am ready to reimagine
documentary.
Now the fun begins. In the following pages, I draw on scenes from predominantly avant
garde, experimental, and experiential works to exemplify the ideas I have discussed in this
chapter. These examples are drawn form a range of media styles and formulas. This is
intentional, so you may better understand my reasoning.

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Part Two: In Practice

Chapter Four
The Viewer

The following four pieces draw on the viewer’s reference points to build meaning, both
connotatively and literally. In If Every Girl Had a Diary, the viewer negotiates with the
filmmaker, being both allowed and denied access to Sadie Benning’s interiority. In Gone Home,
connotative objects are given documentary meaning by the player’s interactions and associations.
Hunting Ground draws upon the viewer’s somatic associations with horror to produce a somatic
response to document the reality of rape on college campuses. Finally, Until Dawn uses visceral
engagement of in a fictional context to exemplify our reappropriation of evidence dictates how
we reimagine history.

If Every Girl Had a Diary (Benning 1990)
Often considered “diaries,” Benning’s early work combines references to the access a
camera provides a spectator with a constant awareness of the optical nature of (self)-surveillance

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lent by auto-ethnography. Benning’s invitation to see as I am seeing implies the
phenomenological “I” and “eye” are aligned, analogous to narrative theorist Paul Ricoeur’s
concept in storytelling of “being as,” which refers to the collapsing of a viewer’s vantage point
with the text.
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If Every Girl Had a Diary explores the relationship between content and the
spectator’s expectation of unmediated access to the filmmaker and subject, who are often, in
autoethnography, the same person.
The blur and whir of an unsteady Pixelvision camera as a teenager faces me – the viewer
– directly. They, camera and teenager, accompany me through the bedroom, a small space with
a ceiling that cuts a diagonal through my field of view. Taking a compact container from under
the bed, the teenager – a young Sadie Benning – uses one hand to remove items from the box
while holding the other hand off-camera. I realize the camera is in Benning’s other hand,
filming the scene from our mutual vantage point and perspective. Camera and teenager start to
take me through the room, describing a ring and a few other items. The camara dips closer to
Benning’s face, highlighting Benning’s eye in a macro view, watching Benning watch me. Then,
the teenager’s attitude appears to change and turns toward me with sudden hostility. “Don’t
look at me,” Benning demands, confronting the camera. And still the camera continues to roll
and to remain what seems to be aggressively close to Benning’s face. Now, the focus fixates on
Benning’s eye, looking back at me, daring me to look away. The eye holds my attention as a
spectator, as it fills almost the entire frame and has a disconcertingly heightened presence.

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Time and Narrative, Volume Three (1990), where Ricoeur expands on his earlier writings on mimesis to discuss
the distinction between “seeing as” as metaphor and “being as” as a literal alignment of viewer and text is the
concept I am drawing from here (Ricoeur 159). Ricoeur uses this framework to distinguish fictional narrative from
history, however I argue the same model is applicable to a phenomenological understanding of indexicality. By
connecting this phenomenological concept to the ideas from Merleau-Ponty (later expanded by Vivian Sobchack in
Address of the Eye) of the distinction between the “eye” and the “I,” it is possible to think of the collapse of “seeing”
and “being” as a way in which the division between spectator and viewed index can be productively theorized or
modeled.

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Then, the shaky camera moves away from the eye and back toward the box of items, also
photographed in close-up, with the same attention and proximity as the eye.
These items are personal, but also conventionally diaristic. A ring gives me insight into a
significant relationship from Benning’s youth, but I am denied information about what this
relationship might be. I am curious – the focus on the object, and Benning’s clearly visceral
reaction to it, indicates some strong emotional connection that I, as a viewer, also feel. However,
the lack of elaboration creates a clear boundary between Benning’s “I” and my “eye.” The film,
on a larger scale, repeats these patterns of access granted and then denied in several central
places. Significantly, these often occur around objects that themselves carry larger connotations,
inviting me to form my own associations and then complicating those associations, or
underscoring that I will never know the broader, connected or perhaps distinct meaning these
objects have for Benning.
The closeness with which Benning’s eye is photographed affords my eye unfettered
access and encourages me to think about a connection between my role as a spectator and the eye
of the filmmaker, the subject being viewed. I bear witness to the rings and other objects Benning
takes out of the box, attributing to them clear referential status. They are indexical, in that the
items, as described in voiceover, refer to moments in Benning’s life, and, as the camera’s gaze
intensifies, it moves me closer to the evidence of Benning’s presence.
I am left with my own interpretation and a slight sense of discomfort. A knowledge that
my inference is due to the fact that I reappropriate with what I have seen, but also that these
connections operate separately from the filmmakers’. As for Benning’s associations, I never
may fully know them. This, of course, is the case with any visual or auditory medium where the
viewer/listener is distinct from the author. However, the emphasis on access and refusal within

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the narrative itself invites reimagination. I am engaged, wanting to know more, only to have my
curiosity textually, explicitly and purposefully revoked at key times.
Reflecting upon the creative choices that compose If Every Girl Had a Diary’s making,
the image and movement of my eye, the eye of the spectator, and Benning’s eye, the eye of the
filmmaker, are both captured in a straight-on style with a handheld lens and recorded in medium
shot to medium close-ups. Each tracks along parallel paths. At the same time as Benning’s
voice compels me to both look and look away, I can both see and cannot avoid Benning’s gaze.
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My oscillating vantagepoint is both an element of the film’s indexical language and a critique of
the unmediated access to Benning’s internal life. This phenomenon occurs at the moment of
reception, an eye looking at an eye that does and does not want to be seen. Because the
profilmic referent requires a spectator as part of this process of reception, I felt it was vital not

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Two notes should be made on this chronology in reference to If Every Girl Had a Diary:

1) The chronology I am tracing here is the first of what will be many departures throughout this dissertation
from the work of traditional documentary studies, which do include scholars such as Kuehl but less
emphasis on phenomenology. By reading Kuehl alongside a phenomenological text specifically concerned
with the relationship between the “eye” and the “I” of spectatorship (a tension I will be discussing further
in the sections on phenomenological film spectatorship and gnosis and on the membranes of the body and
the film, where I engage with Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, Sara Ahmed and Linda Williams, et al,
who all build on existential phenomenology in distinct ways), I seek to emphasize that, in my analysis, the
spectator and the experience always are present and in the forefront. Spectatorship itself takes on a
physical presence and an objectified (but not objective) reality within the logic of the film-object, as
referenced in the indexical representation of the eye/I in Benning’s work. This reverberates in how I think
about truth and truth claims on a foundational level in order to complicate the notion of the truth as
received and not interpreted and to again underscore that the truth as I am discussing is generated in the
moment of reception. It is important, therefore, to trace the connection between phenomenology and
indexicality through the “eye” as an early part of this study.

2) Regarding the inclusion of this analysis when talking about Benning’s work, most studies of Sadie
Benning’s early corpus focus on their role as a queer filmmaker and as a critic of surveillance culture or as
an auto-ethnographer engaged with 1980s and 1990s confessional and self-interrogatory modes of
filmmaking, i.e. Lex Morgan Lancaster, Sarah M. Panuska, and others. While these foundations, especially
the role of being surveilled and self-surveying (in a Foucautian sense of panoptic self-monitoring) do
influence my thinking, they are less central to this portion of the analysis. While acknowledging the history
of these contexts is important when talking about the eye in Benning’s work, I am focusing more on
contextualized and situated subjectivity as a way in to truth claims in this section and will return to the
larger concerns of truth and surveillance.

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only to acknowledge the relative position of spectator during this process and to theorize the
relationship between visuality and the perspective from which the visual is viewed.
The profilmic presentation of this evidence represents its undeniable existence. “This
person was here; these objects were here and are being photographed.” The epistemological
argument also is clear, these objects are understood as forms of access to a personal and
verifiable reality. This access is not one that occurs without someone looking on. Benning and
the camera address the spectator, emphasizing that the relationship between representation and
actuality is one that also requires a viewer. This photographic evidence and my presence, as a
witness, is sufficient in support of Kuehl’s definition of the form.
From a phenomenological perspective, my interest is in the relationship between the
soma or somatic engagement witnessed through my and Benning’s eyes and interpreted and
subsequently verified as referent based upon the subjectivity of the spectator. Whereas Merleau-
Ponty refers to the porous membrane from the viewpoint of a singular soma, in Benning’s work,
there are effectively two bodies that vie for the viewing authority to interpret meaning.
Benning’s photographed “I” and the implied presence of my “eye” both mediate access to
Benning’s physical form. When my access to see is restricted or turned away, its porosity is
disrupted. Benning blurs the lines between where the viewed (“I”) ends and viewer (“eye”)
begins. Reappropriating the meaning of my denied access, I am no longer an objective witness,
and therefore my assessment of the form is no longer sufficient. As this denial destabilizes
conventional wisdom regarding my ability to objectively assess of validity of its content, If Every
Girl Had a Diary is a documentary by virtue of my experience, rather than my experience of
viewing.

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To further explore this dynamic between viewer and the subject being viewed, I return to
the writings of Merleau-Ponty, and discussions of organs (eyes and skin) as somatic structures
that are pathways through which sensorial stimuli are received. Merleau-Ponty is notable in this
context because he writes about the experience of body (the membrane of the skin or the
membrane of the cornea) as a porous medium and the reception of sensory input that traverses
this portal or gateway to ascertain the indexical referentiality of the object being perceived. His
description of porosity implies access, providing a sensate path to the experience, interpretation
and attribution of significance given to an object, based on the meaning it assumes as referent
within the narrative. The body, specifically the flesh, is the boundary through which this
experience is mediated, a site both of perception and reception for Merleau-Ponty, just as the eye
in Benning’s work is both seeing and being seen.
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Jones in Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts
(2012) conceives of the concept of reconceptualizing the relationship between viewer and
viewed subject, refiguring how identity, a person's sense of self and self-perception, and
identification both are normatively located in a work of visual art. Jones’ focus is on the history
of visual art in the Twentieth Century, specifically the attendant concepts of authority and the
gaze concerning artists at the time. I feel her work has a pertinence in regard to an analysis of
documentary and to queer and feminist power relations through an engagement with the gaze in
Benning’s work.

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Merleau-Ponty, from The Visible and the Invisible, “Working Notes,” 248-249.
[…] My body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived [thing]), and moreover that this flesh
of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it, and it encroaches upon the world
(the felt [senti, emphasis in original] at the same time the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation
of transgression or of overlapping— — This also means: my body is not only one perceived among others,
it is the measurement (mesurant, emph. in original) of all [or, in this analysis, not all but all that is perceivable
by an individual, my note], Nullpunkt of all the dimensions of the world.

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Drawing on Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” Jones references the
gaze as an exchange between viewer and viewed.
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Mulvey’s formulation suggests that the
viewer is the active participant, the bearer of meaning and of the look. The viewed subject exists
to, to quote Mulvey’s oft-cited formulation “to be looked at.” Instead of this dichotomy, Jones
considers subjects who look back. The author theorizes that subjectivizing the viewed
individuals in a work of art can distribute agency back through the piece, located in a more
distributed way. I would add, negotiated between filmmaker, viewed and viewer. I take this
theory a step further. By reorienting practices of viewing beyond the active/passive dichotomy, I
theorize a concept of the gaze that lacks directionality. In If Every Girl Had a Diary where the
“I” does not just look back at the viewer from within a work, but the viewer’s “eye” and the
filmmaker’s “I” are merged or “being as” if they are one. Together they create an exchange of
power that is no longer figured in terms of an active/passive dichotomy, but rather a negotiated
gaze.
This negotiation is not without consequences. Benning’s direction, “Don’t look at me,”
without turning the handheld camera off or away, indirectly draws attention to my presence and
that I am engaged. My spectatorship is both expected in the context of viewing Benning’s
documentary evidence and fraught in the context of observing Benning’s personal narrative. My
viewing is enabled by the same filmmaker who is the subject of my gaze. I imbue referentiality
to Benning’s gaze and the objects we watch together.
However, my witnessing, as Benning looks back at me, makes Benning visibly
uncomfortable. Then when the camera shifts perspective, first to an image of the ceiling and
then to Benning’s eye, these moments of seemingly casual self-presentation take on an affective

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Laura. Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

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relationship to the content being viewed. The frame darts back and forth, nervous, restless,
indicating I no longer may be a welcome part of this intimate filming. The affective discomfort
to which the camera testifies, takes on an experiential cast, as I, as viewer, am placed in the
position of both looking at the subject who does not want to be watched, as Benning’s camera
continues to roll, and identifying with Benning’s increasing discomfort at being filmed, as the
camera continues to film. I cannot look away, but I also know that my looking is intrusive, and
this tension, made evident by Benning’s formal choices, raises a question in relation to my study
of the representation of content. Benning’s denial is a barrier to my observation of evidence, and
in the moment of sensing this tension and discomfort, I am made aware of the ethical dimension
of this intrusion.
If Every Girl Had a Diary exemplifies a documentary defined by the experience of
viewing. The meanings each of us derives from this experience stem from negotiated
vantagepoints, as the “I” of the work and the “eye” of the viewer privilege one another for the
authority to contextualize the content being recorded. The possibility of the reappropriation of
meanings as a function of the tension that exists between viewer and viewed highlights the
subjective process of contextualizing, as the dynamic between the “eye” and the “I” evolves.
Benning’s autoethnography disrupts the concept of absolute knowledge in favor of the
representation of personal truths that are ambiguous.

Gone Home (Fullbright Company 2013)
In Gone Home (Fullbright Company 2013) Katie, who is of college age, upon going
home, discovers that her mother, father, and younger sister are not there. The challenge is to
locate their whereabouts, which takes a viewer through the house in search of clues that might

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reveal the fate of her family. These clues are both visual and audio, as Katie comes across items
and listens to audio diaries that represented evidence of their existence. As an interactive
experience, I am positioned within the media and aligned with Katie, as the author of the
narrative. This structure, despite being dialectic, that is to state, programmed with a “solution”
to the mystery, allows the protagonists to determine their own paths and write their own history
of what occurred. This history is the manifestation of the meanings and significance attributed to
the artifacts Katie and I retrieve. Gone Home is an example of a “walking simulator” that
privileges the relative position and orientation of players in relationship to the items they collect
when assessing the relevant meanings of these items within the narrative.
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Rain cleanses the pain outside a digital window as I use the first-person camera to orient
Katie, my avatar, in the frame. At first, I am unsure both who I am and where I am going. I
press “tab” to remind myself of how to progress forward and then select the “w” key to drive
forward. My physical representation is not visible. So, I have to assume my location as I enter
the virtual house and start to explore. I pick up a videocassette and insert it into the VCR. I
smile; my parents still own one. The tape plays. An allusion to a 1990s punk band that I
recognize.
I wander around the rooms of the game. Drifting. Slowly situating myself in space. My
decisions feel more arbitrary than binary. I continue to collect objects. Hair dye that might
indicates my rebellious adolescence. Voiced diaries highlight moments of my movements. The
dye narrative provides me with the item’s backstory – reflecting her sister Sam’s past when the
identities of Sam’s contemporaries used similar products and enjoyed similar music (though

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A “walking simulator” is a style of video game where the primary form of interaction is with objects in the
environment via navigating the environment as a plays “walks.”

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updated for a 2000’s audience). Katie recalls conversations growing up with Sam, similar to
dialogues I have with family and friends. Their talks reflect the experience of their mutual
histories, as I remember my own.
Gone Home enforces the collapse of character and player experience, which in turn
illuminates the political implications of merging the “I” and the “eye.” As theorized by Paul
Ricoeur, the viewer is placed as an avatar inside the narrative. My body becomes an active
participant, and my decisions and movements shape my experience. As I acquire knowledge,
beyond determining the meanings of evidence such as the VHS tapes and the bottles of dye, I
explore the personal history behind letters between Sam and the woman who I later discover to
be Sam’s high school girlfriend, as well as correspondence between Sam and our parents.
Overall, the themes of family rejection and queer tragedy have political implications in the
context of the storyline.
NPR’s review of Gone Home, “A Game With Heart, Gone Home Is A Bold Step In
Storytelling” by Steve Mullis, draws attention to the voyeuristic feel of the game.
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After
playing for about 20 minutes, I began to feel like an intruder, reminiscent of Sadie Benning’s
work, in which the artist unwelcomingly looks directly at the viewer and confronts the
spectator’s gaze. Gone Home amplifies this dynamic, as a means of destabilizing the notion of
access to evidence, based upon choices of where to navigate or where to position Katie to
investigate next. Through my (as the “eye”) assumption of the body (or “I”) of the player-
protagonist, I insert myself into the history of another character’s narrative. Along with my

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Steve Mullis. “A Game With Heart, Gone Home Is A Bold Step In Storytelling.” NPR. Dec 26 2013.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/12/22/256345375/a-game-with-heart-gone-home-is-a-bold-
step-in-storytelling.

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presence is the context that my memories and associations infuse into the interpretation of the
evidence procured.
This intrusion is where, I believe, the political implications of my engagement and the
resultant reappropriation of Gone Home’s narrative lies. In the acquisition of evidence, albeit
animated artifacts to tell a fictional story, Gone Home mirrors and models a documentary format.
Each interactable object is a point of reference that engages with a multiplicity of meanings,
modes and representations. Projecting my context onto them is presumptive. Just as “I” equates
to “eye,” the narrative I created of Katie’s sister Sam’s life is more a mirror of my own past than
what might have been representative of Katie’s sister’s experience.
In this context, the recreation of her history is not an objective process, but an
interpolation of the past through the lens of my experience. Just as my experience is unique to
my history, the documentation of actuality is by nature subjective, which further undermines the
traditional mandate of employing the form as Grierson suggests, an educational tool, in this case
to inform us about the past.
94,

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This destabilizes the perception that the result of an assessment
of the veracity of evidence positions a spectator closer to determining the veracity of a
documentary, and, by extension, emphasizes the subjectivity at the heart of a viewer’s search for
absolute and objective truth in the representation of evidence.
When I teach a class in interactive media, I often use these types of games to introduce
students to an analysis of indexicality and to speak about documentary as experience. I reference
this genre to exemplify the influence of the game’s design on the body’s movement and sensorial

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This argument finds further expansion in Grierson’s review of Moana, where he expands not only upon the
educational benefits of nonfiction film, but their persuasive power as well.

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John Grierson. “Broadcasting and the Cinema as Instruments of Education.” An Address Delivered to the Higher
Education Meeting at the Southport Conference of the N.U.T. In World Film News. 1936, 3.

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responses to evidence and events. I have them read Sobchack’s article, “Toward a
Phenomenology of Non-Fiction Film and Video,” to provide them with a theoretical framework
to understand the interplay of documentary context in non-documentary films.
In response, students relate Gone Home to their own experience, discussing whether or
not they recognize the videocassette recorder and the musical style of Riot Grrrl bands, two
elements that resonate with my past. More striking are the observations they offer in regard to
their ability to orient themselves within the environment of the scenes. They comment upon
setting and staging where artifacts are received and perceived. They reference the intensity of
the lighting in a scene and the quality of an audio track that provide evidence of the existence of
a person or the actuality of an event.
Digital spaces are, for the most part, designed to lead viewers through a predetermined
path and process, orienting their bodies from the position of confusion, via haptic and auditory
cues, and progressively drifting toward closure. In a work like Gone Home, where the
engagement is largely metaphorical and indirect, where traversing space is occurring virtually,
our gnostic processes similarly are virtually engaged. Any perception beyond the literal is
acquired by virtue of the movement of the controller, which, as a handheld device, is an
extension of our bodies. While navigating the environment, the acquisition of knowledge is
grounded explicitly in a-posteriori experience, such as familiarity with a VCR. From this
familiarity and the context that precipitates from it, meaning is inferred, reflected upon,
extrapolated, and serves as a guide as a viewer negotiates a path through the spaces of a
documentary’s narrative. This path may lead to a reformulation of presumptions and rewriting
of histories, as a consequence of the reappropriation of existing knowledge.

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The Hunting Ground (Kirby Dick 2015)
The year was 2015, and I admit I was feeling a bit anxious when Dr. Seiter screened The
Hunting Ground, which addresses the topic of rape on college campuses. Some films that treat
the survival of trauma from an experiential standpoint take the perspective of utilizing genre
conventions in order to invoke an audience’s response. The Hunting Ground explores the
connection between the body and what might be viewed as unrepresentable by approaching the
subject of campus assault from an experiential perspective. By incorporating the genre of horror,
Dick’s documentary attempts to evoke awareness and provoke a call to action. Receiving
numerous accolades upon its release, the film, which builds upon the language of the thriller,
received both negative criticism as well as praise. I am less concerned with whether this stylistic
infusion of cliched conventions is justified or appropriate, and more interested in looking into
how leveraging the impact of fictional film tropes emotionally reinforces and torturously induces
disruptive points of reference that color the experience of graduation and leaving home possibly
for the first time. This is a disrupted future that viewers would rather not imagine.
The first time I screened Dick’s documentary, it made me feel so uncomfortable, I left
midway.
A wide-eyed teenager staring at her laptop. The illumination of the screen highlights her
surprise! Elation! Seeing the expression on her face, I recalled how I felt when I received my
college acceptance “letter.” About the same way. The intimacy of the room now is rendered via
video, joined by other videos of teenagers at their computers, reading their emails.
Exclamations of – “I got in!” “I can’t believe it!” against “Pomp and Circumstance” playing in
the background. As the cacophony of celebration continues, the sky grows dark, cut with hard

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shadows. I feel a knot in my stomach because I anticipate what is to come next – The Hunting
Ground is about rape. The sequence cuts to a single female student who walks under an
archway that marks the entrance to a campus. The camera places me over her shoulder. What
she sees, I cannot avoid witnessing. It is night, and we are alone. The tell of a pulsing
synthesized soundtrack foregrounds she is being followed. Not by other students who wander
through the frame. Backpacks and messenger bags over their shoulders. Talking in low voices
and laughing. Just another evening…for them. They are not the subjects of this documentary.
For the woman from the opening sequence, the school of her dreams is about to become the
scene of her nightmares.
The screen dissolves into points of lights. Then…nothing. Then, the movie’s title. Then
voiceover… “I was at my first college party. I didn’t know too many people yet – but a few
friends I had met at orientation invited me to meet up with a few of their friends on campus.” A
sea of bodies. New faces, none too threatening, though undistinguishable in the dimly lit dorm
room. A driving rhythm of synth pop conveys a generic sense of a good time. Gazes exchange
with the intention of meting someone new. Making a connection…undermined by the music that
drowns out any expectation of meaningful conversations. The uncertain reality of the moment
taunts the sense of prevailing anticipation that permeates the air. The tracking lens shifts from
the perspective I share with the protagonist and drifts through the space. Fragmentary, faded,
and blurred images unspool, one over the other, one following another, as memories often do
when disparate thoughts come together to sort out what reason has difficulty rationalizing.
A man approaches her, and the moment turns dangerous. He moves with too much
confidence, with a for-granted assurance, with a given license to execute violence. Her red Solo
cup spills a bit of liquid as her body sways in an attempt at not-awkward dancing. “I met him

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that night. He got me a drink. I went back to his room.” A doorknob. The hard bathroom floor,
a suddenly too-bright light. “I remember waking up, as he held my face against the tile.
Then…” Then, she described the feeling of the racing the pulse in her throat. Nausea…
And that is when I walked out. As I left, I noticed two or three students, also moving
toward the exit. Later, bolstered by the fact that I am a film student, I watch the balance of the
documentary, to discern where Dick, as critics wrote, crossed the line. Moreover, I want to
determine where, in documentary media, a line should be drawn or if one should exist at all. For
insight, I examine Williams’ scholarship who writes about body genre and the body as a source
of knowledge production, specifically rooted in spectatorial reaction, particularly visceral, in the
form of spectatorial response. I also draw on Stam’s discussion polyglossia, as Dick compounds
multiple genre tropes from classic horror, melodrama, and pornography in this opening sequence
to reappropriate the meanings of familiar images and audio, such that their recontextualization
disrupts any sense of celebration and triumph.
As the narrative continues, one of the women featured in the film’s opening reaction
videos speaks with a matter-of-fact tone that occasionally wavers with barely subsurface
emotion. She recounts the college party she attended, the first weekend she spent on campus.
She describes meeting another student, the events of the evening, and, ultimately, being sexually
assaulted in a setting very similar to the sequence I have just witnessed. The tone of her
testimonial unevenly fluctuates between compassionate concentration and full-on dichotomy of
predator and prey straight out of Wes Craven, foreshadowing the central tension in The Hunting
Ground, between slasher movie sensibilities and sensitive interviews.
To discuss the representation of traumatic experience, specifically sexual assault, that is
either underrepresented or unrepresented, I return to Akira Mizuta Lippit’s concept of

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avisuality.
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While The Hunting Ground fosters identification with survivors, it does so by
embracing a genre that traditionally does not foster empathy and historically has sensationalized
female victim/survivors. This treatment of its theme creates distance between viewer and
viewed. While the genre of horror has broad appeal that elicits a strong and impassioned
resonance felt in the body of the spectator, decentering attention away from the stories of these
protagonists undermines the film’s message which in turn, complicates and compromises a
spectator’s emotional connection to Dick’s message and The Hunting Ground’s documentary
value.
When I left early, it was because I found the subject matter unsettling and the stitching
together of the trauma of these women with horror movie aesthetics inappropriate. While genre
conventions are quintessential tools to illicit predictable viewer resonance, horror aesthetics are
more than just neutral narrative structural devices. These tropes stimulate associations that work
on the body in particular ways. Aestheticization of information in The Hunting Ground enables
details that are beyond the realm of a spectator’s experience to find meanings via the physical
reactions these tropes elicit. These responses, as in horror, are instinctively felt in the body.
What audiences remember and possibly act upon experiencing these documentaries, often
depends upon the intangible impressions that occur while the media is being viewed, at the last
frame, and long after. The Hunting Ground’s content is grounded in this emotional resonance.
This engagement reappropriates existing visceral knowledge, and the disruptive imagery of
Dick’s documentary becomes an integral point of reference that contextualizes the future

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It should be noted, here I am talking about traumatic experiences as they are represented in specific works of
nonfiction media. I am not seeking to (nor am I qualified to!) make general statements about how trauma or
traumatic memories are stored in the body, or to speak to the experience of a traumatic event or memory, which is
highly individual for each survivor. I therefore also restrict my analysis to media scholars as opposed to
psychological professionals and discuss the body as soma from a phenomenological perspective as opposed to a
psychoanalytic or sociological or physiological one.

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experiences of young female students who will be moving onto college campuses. Though its
structure if the film is discursive, Dick’s argument is disrupted by his treatment of actuality.
Understanding the challenge of basing a film’s content upon a dynamic that feels so
sensational, I looked to the discussion of body genres posited by Williams, Sekula and revised by
Gaines.
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For Williams, horror fundamentally involves the displacement of sexuality onto a
horror that arrives “too early.” She cites the examples of females in horror who are on the way
to meet boyfriends or partners and who are murdered before the moment of sexual encounter.
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As a reactive space where reactions to pain and fear are recorded and remembered, the body,
according to Williams, is a repository of understanding and empathy. This relationship between
the body of the protagonist and the body of the viewer, in many ways, according to Gaines, is
mimetic. Gaines posits that documentary media is political, the purpose of which is to motivate
a viewer to get out of their set and move into the street, as a call to action that mirrors events
onscreen. In this context, The Hunting Ground succeeds to raise awareness by drawing attention
to the bodies of the protagonists, but the movie fails to align these women with the bodies of
those viewers of the film who witness their trauma, situating its classification beyond Marks’ and
Gaines’ conception of political mimesis. Instead, Dick’s creative decision to dress his message
with the trappings of horror suggests a visceral sense of engagement associated with danger,

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In, respectively, Linda Williams. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess.” Film Quarterly. 44.4(1991): pp. 2-
13.and

Jane Gaines. “Political Mimesis.” In Collecting Visible Evidence. Eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 84-103.

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Williams’ essay, in its discussion of S&M pornography and in her citations of Morgan’s anti-pornography
writings, does directly engage with the idea of sexual assault and sexual violence. However, this analysis, in
focusing primarily upon bodily response, takes up a different portion of the analysis, and therefore is distinct from
this analysis. It is, however, significant (and troubling) that Williams’ analysis is linked with violence and sexuality,
and The Hunting Ground collapses the aesthetics of horror and events tied to sexual assault.

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pain, fight, or flight. The spectatorial reaction the body internalizes is shrouded in threat or what
likely lurks beyond the frame. This all too familiar desire to warn the protagonist is born out of
fictional narratives, reminiscent of Carol Clover’s and Julia Kristeva’s writing on the horror
genre, which draws attention to the voyeuristic tension viewers feel when they must face the
ethical dilemma to watch or avert their eyes.
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According to Sekula, the body often is treated as a site of evidence (and literally takes on
this status legally in many representations of assault and rape investigations) and as such could
easily be understood as indexical.
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However, such a framework suggests that the violence of
such an event is visible and that an appropriate cataloging of physical symptoms can speak to an
experience not only in a way that is complete, but that is sufficient or appropriate for the
survivor. Since this is rarely the case with an event with lasting effects beyond the single event,
looking at films that treat survivor testimony and the aftermath of assault in a more elliptical and
connotative way can help further nuance an analysis of evidence, so that trauma becomes not
unrepresentable, but represented in a way that is experiential, phenomenological, and dialogic.

Until Dawn (Supermassive Games 2015)
Embedded in Until Dawn’s filmic design and as a commentary on the role of
spectatorship, the body of the viewer/player is the determinator of the narrative, becoming an
active author in the meaning making process. The game admittedly is not a documentary.

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Carol J. Clover. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). and

Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982).

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Allan Sekula. “The Body and the Archive.” October. 39 (1986), 3-64.

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However, the creation of history as a process of interpretation and the reappropriation of
evidence are processes that I feel relate to the validity of documentary content. Until Dawn,
developed by Supermassive Games, is a choice-based horror game in the slasher subgenre.
Based upon a classic horror-movie premise, five teenage friends meet at a remote cabin,
presumably to reminisce about the loss of a sixth member of their core group, who has died a
year before. Over the course of the night, a mysterious force threatens them. As I play the
game, a series of dialogue options prompt me to take actions that will determine if these
characters live or die. Via a handheld controller, I switch between maneuvering members of the
group. At moments during these segments, a mysterious figure appears and functions as a
commentator/therapist, asking about my decisions to save or sacrifice certain people, and about
my fears. Based on my answers, the story further evolves and shifts to elicit experiences tailored
to the personal feedback I provided. One of this game’s at-the-time-novel innovations was the
use of this somatic controller to detect small movements. A twitch or a jump back might trigger
a significant change in the game’s outcome.
Until Dawn begins with a sequence that puts me in the mindset of many films I have
watched. Specifically, many slasher films. It is not subtle about this objective: the howling wind,
the secluded cabin, the group of morally-compromised teenagers all herald the conventions of
the kind of film destined for a bargain Blockbuster bin and hailing from an era where that
reference would resonate. The game wears its B-movie-ness like a badge of honor. Because the
narrative is only minimally interactive for the first few minutes, I mostly watch the action happen
from the safety, comfort, and stillness of my couch. Impatiently, I urge my character forward
using the joystick. In case this choice-based aspect and its alignment with horror was not clear
to me as a spectator, a splashy opening title sequence in which rivers of light illuminate a

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butterfly’s wings, introduces me to the “butterfly effect” chain reactions that will influence
everything I do. I am about to discover, I am a viewer of a horror movie and the one who
orchestrates many of the options that lead to its conclusion. A single turn of my thumb could
cause a major catastrophe. Oddly, the intertitle does not emphasize the potential for any
positive outcomes. Small decisions can result in major disasters, it seems.
This also puts and keeps me in the mind of horror. The trembling score, the flickering
light, and the howling wind that greets me in these opening sequences once the intertitle
concludes, scream horror – as do the actual screams that join the soundtrack in short order.
Once this opening sequence has concluded, I click through to start the game and am
greeted by a gathering storm, the sounds of wind whipping through a clearing of trees, and a
close-up view of a figure running ahead of me. All conventions of a thriller landscape. The PS 4
controller shakes in my hands, as I am prompted to drive my player-character forward.
Dutifully, I engage with the device and begin to move. Then pause a moment to take in my
surroundings. The unit grows impatient, as apparently, it does not tolerate inactivity. To gain
my attention, it vibrates once again. Suddenly, the screen darkens. Then a series of prompts
appear. A quick-time event that requires me to react to avoid an undesirable outcome, possibly
death and the termination of my experience.
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I follow the instructions, complete the task, and
hit “Enter.” Darkness, once again. Recalling games I have played in the past, I wait for Until
Dawn to refresh itself. The traditional transition to resurrection. But not this time. My
character indeed has died, and that death has been part of the story.

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A series of prompts in a video game in which a player must press a series of buttons in a predetermined sequence
within a set time limit, usually to avoid player death or another undesirable outcome.

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I “respawn.” This time I crouch down, tuck myself in a corner of the entry of an antique
lodge. The star location of countless horror movies. Why did I wander inside? I should have
known better. All around me, noises. Crunching bone and rapid breathing. A prompt flashes –
“Don’t Move.” Instinctively, I rest the controller loosely in my hand. I am aware of my body,
that every flinch might lead to a violent act, and yet to do nothing would most certainly be
unwise, as, from my past experience, I know the controller has no patience for indecision.
Imagining my violent destruction sufficiently fills me with dread that I stay very, very still. My
body is an archive of my fear, and my every gesture, an index of what I am experiencing – or
what I am afraid to experience. This fear – not the desire to run away – compels me to avoid
movement. My muscles tense, which the controller registers.
Poor choice. The screen goes blank. Will I ever learn?
The game is not only playing with my awareness of horror, but it is manipulating my
emotional connection to the genre as one that explicitly impacts my body. This knowledge of
these tropes is itself an archive not focused on the cutouts of characters I encounter, but on my
own experiences and memories. The characters themselves are types so generic as to feel
intentional – recognizable not only from slasher films, but from contemporaneous teen shows
and other similar forms of media. The emphasis therefore is on my physiological response –
hold still, move now, ignore the pounding score and generic heralds of danger at your own peril.
Throughout Until Dawn, I am able to manipulate the trajectory of my experience by
responding to prompts that, for example, ask, “what I am afraid of ?” This input adapts the
adventure to my responses, subsequently modifying the look, feel and overall intensity of the
action. If I state I am scared of bugs or scarecrows, the storyline varies as to increase numbers of
these objects propagated throughout the balance of the game. Along the way, as I jump between

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characters dependent upon their fate, I feel invested in keeping as many as I can alive. After a
range of playthroughs, I notice, as the narrative progress, some characters become more overtly
violent, and others try their best to save everyone and everything.
As a media studies student familiar with slasher movies from the 1980s, I recognize the
cinematic tropes by which I engage with Until Dawn, such as a quickened heart rate consistent
with horror. The jockish couple right out of central casting, a bookish nerd and earnest “final
girl,” their stereotypes cue me to their respective destinies based on other media I have seen.
Because the narrative is designed to be open-ended, I determine its conclusion and can alter the
fate of these characters, based in part upon my engagement or resistance to traditional cinematic
tropes.
This engagement or resistance also opens itself up to two possible outcomes with respect
to these tropes. Throughout the game, stagey dialogue and archetypical figures hold me at arm’s
length. The focus is much more on my body, which raises the question – do I want to save these
figures, do I want them to make it to the next frame? And what are the ethical implications if
part of the genre, part of the consistency with horror, is the recognition that, if any of these
characters meet their deaths, they will not be missed? That watching their gory demise is in fact
part of the genre as well?
This realization is unsettling for what it suggests about the truth of cinematic horror.
Rather than critiquing violent video games (and there are plenty of video games that do this), the
game is a discourse on the actuality of violent cinema. If I remain passive, as the passive viewer
of a film might be, I let violence occur, whether consciously or due to my own slow reflexes. If I
were unfamiliar with the genre of horror, these reference points would not have the same

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meaning. The dialogue that unfolds is one about the genre; it is one about the fluid roles of the
spectator in the genre. The index remains my own experience, mapped onto my own body.
Precise responses to the prompts, “Move” or “Don’t Move” or “Hold Still,” are critical in
order to keep the present player protagonist, and others alive. The wrong gesture or no gesture at
all, might result in an avatar’s death at the business end of a virtual spike. The protagonist’s
activities onscreen and my intentional maneuvering of the controller align. Effectively, I
simultaneously assume the role of killer, savior, and last woman standing. At these respective
moments, my movements craft the story.
This relationship between my motions and my emotions, decisions to act or not act, are
made with an awareness that I am being influenced by the tropes, particularly those standards
that characterize classic horror films, built into the design of the narrative. The effective
influence of these tropes, as well as my physical reactions to this stimulus, affect my choices.
The resonance I experience stems from the recognizable images portrayed and reenforced by the
somatic responses they elicit. These sensations are based upon my memories of movies from the
genre, images that conjure up strong visceral reactions. Consequently, this contextual
reappropriation of content harnesses the visceral intensity of prior experience to influence the
course of the narrative.
Until Dawn is not just a game about the mechanics of horror media and referential horror.
It is a commentary on engagement, my body’s relationship with its interactive narrative
structure. Relating the theory of a viewer’s relationship to slasher genre tropes posed by
Williams to Lepecki’s work on body as archive, my body is a repository of memories that retain
experiences of the media I have watched and the somatic reactions I have had to them. Extending
Cvetkovich’s writings on queer archives, this repository of memories can be theorized as archive

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of sensations. I refer to it as archival because it pertains to the process of retaining cognitive and
visceral memories as referents that I will draw upon to contextualize and validate future content.
This resonance associated with the process of retrieving and perceiving memories from the
body’s archives is subjective, and the consequential links that flow from these relationships form
a dynamic network of associations unique for each and every player who navigates their own
path through Until Dawn. Personal meanings emerge from this unique narrative as a result of the
relationship of the media’s fictional content and a player’s archive of context or a-posteriori
knowledge.

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Chapter Five
The Presumption of Authority and the Assumption of Veracity

The presumption of an authoritative voice lends an air of credibility and perceived
veracity to the documentary content. These works shift the focus from the individual and the
personal and more directly situate the viewer in relation to an archive and in some cases in
relation to an institutional authority. In Highrise, the journey is more self-directed – the
filmmaker still presents an authoritative view of the cities, but the viewer can navigate this city
in any order and stitch together their own way of relating to the geography as a result. Universe
Within further expands this open-ended format – the content has been designed by the
filmmakers/designers but the viewer is encouraged to relate this work to their own personal
views and reactions. In autoethnographia, the authority of the image is subverted: images that
would provide a determined and close-ended narrative are rejected by the filmmaker and directly
opposed by their expression of self. The Novice looks at a personal archive and contrasts the
autobiographical and lived experience of the protagonist with the imperatives of the generic
conventions the spectator has come to anticipate from her journey.

Highrise (National Film Board of Canada 2012-)
Universe Within (National Film Board of Canada 2015-)
Highrise (2012-), funded by the National Film Board of Canada and released online (at
the website http://highrise.nfb.ca), is a self-directed documentary, where viewers control the
presentation of evidence, and the film’s meaning emerges from their interpretation of what they

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select and observe. The project is a compilation of documentary clips that catalog the lives of
several people who work in highrise buildings located across multiple countries. Most segments
are interviews with these individuals, interspersed with b-roll footage, captured by primarily
handheld cameras, of them performing the tasks they describe. As an observer to their world, I
can choose when to arrive and when to leave, and to stay for as long as I like. These elements
can be navigated in any order. Stitched together, they are a montage portraying the city’s
vitality. This formula casts viewers as sole curators of their own unique experiences, which
occur through their engagement with the media’s content. As a case study in the relationship
between narrative structure and interactive documentary, Highrise exemplifies Ricoeur’s and
Sobchack’s merging of the “I” with “eye,” given the role of the viewer in its design.
The screen glows with opening titles, then fades into a matrix of well-photographed
buildings. It takes me a moment to realize that these shots were taken in different parts of the
world. I make my first selection. A medium-close up records a line cook in Milan, Italy
preparing chopped meat and vegetables. He does not appear to be aware of the camera. Either
that he does not care. The slam of a knife against a cutting board. The sizzle of meat being
seared. I can smell the fat burning off. The rhythms of this environment set the pace, as they
guide me through the action. Confident. Assertive. Felt but not uttered, “Do not bother me, I
have a job to do.”
I exit this scene and “travel” to a different location, a voyeur who drops in expected.
Witnessing what each sequence chooses to reveal. I wonder who has greater control of the
narrative. I get the sense that the structure of the documentary is intended to make me believe I
do. But I know better. And, for now, curiosity motivates me to investigate further.

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The self-directed nature of this site is striking to me.
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I drop in and watch people in
what appears to be their normal settings, conducting activities they perform on a daily basis. The
introduction screen pictures highrise buildings next to each other and in some cases
superimposed upon one another, which gives me the impression that this is a landscape made up
of multiple spaces. This panorama is a composite of a city’s population, and individual windows
are entry points into each building, allowing me to witness evidence of its inhabitant’s lives from
the comfort of my desk chair. Though the emphasis is on visibility, Highrise very much depends
on a viewer’s imagination to interpolate meaning based upon the experience contextualized
during these visits.
When writing about the rise of interactive documentary in the late 2000s, Nash describes
the inherently phenomenological exercise of a viewer’s authority to navigate this kind of media.
Exploring Highrise requires active participation to engage as a passive spectator. From the
perspective of being at a distance looking on, a range of possible narratives can be produced,
which can be further enriched and embellished, based on a viewer’s resonance with the subject
matter. This process is the means through which larger, overreaching meanings are construed
and constructed. For Nash, the narratives, that are dynamically written as a function of this
engagement, are dialogic, due to the open-ended possibilities suggested by the media’s structure.
The gnosis attributable to this style of interactive medium is in sharp contrast to single-threaded
experience that emerge from dialectic documentary formats. Nash perceives Highrise’s mode of
self-direction as full of potential, informed by discourses around the “utopian” possibilities of the
Internet at the turn of the 21
st
century, sometimes referenced as “networked thinking” or

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The topic of interactive engagement will be further explored in later chapters.

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“networked storytelling.” These are terms with a rich history in studies of interactive media that
fall outside the scope of this analysis.
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Highrise’s appeal draws momentum from a viewer’s desire to “get inside” a resident’s
environment. Implicit in this formula, is the assumption that witnessing the day-to-day activities
of individuals will expose the meanings of their lives and livelihoods. This film emphasizes the
quotidian, focusing on small moments as opposed to large-scale movements. This process
bridges considerations of avisuality and narrativity, which poses limitations in terms of the
utopian future for this type of technology. Because the film presents no definitive storyline, all
meanings derived from the film’s content and context are left to a spectator’s subjectivity. Given
Highrise’s design, the domesticity of the film feels more voyeuristic than informative. The
descriptions are not personal and in some cases not relatable. Access is indicated solely through
visibility of their domestic spaces with little explanation and much left to my imagination.
Returning to the methodology of what determines media to be documentary, the
subjective, interpreted and interpolated validity of the evidence that a viewer perceives from
Highrise’s clips is undermined only if the content lacks credibility. Given that the work’s
absolute visceral and cerebral authority rests with the viewer, I pose the status of the media is
indeterminant. It is neither factual nor fictional, as the negation of one does not imply the
determination of the other. I do not consider these respective forms oppositional.
I now turn to an example of media, Universe Within, in which viewers actively engage in
the determination of the documentary value of the content they are contextualizing while they are
watching. Released in 2012 as a sequel to Highrise, Universe Within, poses questions they must
answer in order to continue traveling the world outside and the universe within themselves.

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Kate Nash. “Modes of Interactivity: Analysing the Webdoc.” Media, Culture & Society. Vol. 34.2 (2012): 195–
210.

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Whereas Highrise was about how a spectator navigates the narrative, Universe Within is about
how spectators navigate their own sense of self in the context of the meaning they reappropriate
as their bodies interface with the media onscreen. Technically an online installation with
multiple avenues of engagement, evidence supports two narrative networks. The first is visibly
navigable, as in Highrise, and the other is one of self-reflective.
I enter Universe Within via a browser window. The screen asks me to choose an avatar.
I click on an image of a wide-eyed young girl. She tells me that, “I am nine years old, at least
that’s what the makers of this documentary have decided.” And, as if there were any doubt in my
mind, “I’m not real.” She has been selected to be my guide through this virtual journey. But first
she wants to know how I envision using the internet.
“Save your building.” Seems like a reasonable objective.
“Prevent war.” A bit ambitious.
“Start a labor movement.” Also, reasonable.
“Save your friend’s lives.” A heroic goal, no doubt. It makes me wonder what might
have happened to endanger them, what role I am being placed in as spectator.
I select, “Save your friend’s lives” out of curiosity, and also out of the desire to see how
that particular story ends up.
My guide continues. As she speaks, her words are visualized as nodes, which appear
across the screen connected by a spiderweb of vectors. The image transitions to a series of still
images, while an intertitle informs me that I am in “Mexico City.” The journalist tells the story
of a site she created to draw attention to the stories of five journalists who were taken hostage.
She was able to arrange for their safe release by drawing attention to their story and continues
to do similar work for other individuals in similar situations. As I look at these scenes, I am able

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to move my mouse slightly, to focus on different parts of the photographs. If I turn to the left or
right, the image appears slightly fragmented, giving me a sense that I am witnessing pieces of a
larger universe, while still feeling connected to the whole picture.
Returning to the home screen, intrigued. Two new avatars appear, each in the same
pixelated style as the young girl. I select the male teenager on the far left and we become
acquainted in the same fashion as my first guide. Though by comparison, his gestures are more
expansive, his voice more open, and his words more adolescent. I wonder if I was meant to
encounter his image first. My conversations with this young man will set the tone and shape my
expectations of the meanings I might derive from my interaction with the media’s subject matter.
He asks me about my beliefs in the internet’s ability to transcend different boundaries – of
gender, of class, and of identity, by design to introduce me more directly to the documentary’s
content. “Can the internet transcend…”
“Hate?” But the Internet also is a platform to espouse hate…
“Spiritually?” Not sure what this vague prompt means…
“With laughs?” Laughs – as transcendence?
“With beats?” Music – as bridge to what?
I click on this one.
Universe Within launches with the prompt, “How would I like to use the Internet today?”,
meta-text that speaks to my overall expectations with regard to the investigation I am about to
undertake. This question and the interactive exchanges posed by the avatar guides that follow,
tease me to participate and heighten my commitment to stay actively involved in this experience.
I find myself compelled to respond. As I peruse this universe within myself, I am asked not only
about what I am seeing and what I feel about what I am seeing, but how my answers align with

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the goals I determined when I responded to the initial query. These responses reflect the
significance of the meanings I appropriate from the content I am about to watch. They also
potentially disrupt any assumptions regarding how I might have interpreted online content prior
to answering questions that challenged me to look within and consider the broader significance
of the narrative’s message.
Each open-ended question engages with a universe of meanings that are possible based
on how I perceive the experience of interacting with virtual content. Like in Highrise, the
avenues to explore emerge from the choices I make. If I were to select alternate discissions, it
would result in a different set of places to visit. Whereas Highrise begins with a collage of
buildings constructed to represent a city, Universe Within literally is entered via a constellation
of portals, reappropriated as stars. Both utilize the point-and-click interface as the means to
maneuver. In Universe Within, observers investigate a spatialized digital skyscape. Both
projects are structured so that evidence is observed only after viewers decide where and how
much to navigate and when to move on. Both narratives imbue their hyperlinks with multiple
references. The prompts in Universe Within pose an additional membrane through which to
engage with and contextualize its content. Finally, in both documentaries, discrete references
that resonate and emerge as each portal is traversed, collectively form an interdependent network
of meanings. In Universe Within, right from the start, the significance of how this network will
be reappropriated is foreshowed.
In Highrise, as I peer into each building through virtual windows, I am positioned as a
voyeur, passively observing the lives of others. I am a witness who manages my own interface
and seeks meanings by exploring a world outside of my own. In Universe Within, my journey is
much more determined by the responses I proffer that influence the choices I will be making

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along the way. By engaging with these prompts, I become part of the documentary’s visual
network, tethered to its framework by a touchpad and a mouse click. This apparatus and
construction of the interactive interface contribute to my haptic reception and perception of its
content. More than simply cerebrally involved, as I might have been watching a movie, I am
physically engaged. This visceral connection further validates the evidence I view.
As a consequence of my movements and the answers I submit, I define my own narrative.
Simultaneously, because Universe Within initially challenges me to think about my use of virtual
content, I am asked to reflect upon the dynamic evolution of meanings that stem from this
engagement and my relationship to the process of self-authoring. The narrative I define, in turn,
defines me. In other words, the documentary subject of Universe Within includes, in large part,
me. In contrast to Highrise, which provides a self-directed experience within a normative
context, Universe Within questions my motivation at the launch. This awareness is subjective,
and the variability and open-ended direction of possible responses become the basis of acquired
knowledge that I will reference as I contextualize new experiences.

Autoetnografía (autoethnography) (Iván Reina Ortiz 2021)
Drawing from Renov’s concept of epistephilia, which he characterizes as a desire to
understand documentary truth in a way that extends beyond the cerebral and accounts for
emotional connections, I want to see if a personalized account of sensory and cerebral evidence,
where the author assumes total authority, could further my notion of experiential documentary. I
turned to Autoetnografía as a film that is both autoethnographic and sensorially engaging.
Autoetnografía tells a personal story of the filmmaker/subject’s coming out as nonbinary and the
way they perceive their own identity. This film embraces indexical references and complicates

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them further with the inclusion of avisual and experiential elements. Fitting into the larger
tradition of autobiographical works that represent the self, Autoetnografía invokes conventional
tropes to disrupt a viewer’s reliance on evidence to tell their personal unconventional lived
experiences.
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In this film, interpretation of evidence is subjective in its meanings and much
information can be gleaned from sensory resonance with the somatic representation and the
interpolation of the contextual significance of the body, photographs from the past, and a
spectator’s experience in the present moment of viewing. These juxtapositions establish a
unique relationship between viewer, viewed, and photographer.
Iván Reina Ortiz introduces themself direct-to-camera, through an image of themself as a
child, along with a series of photographs of their youth. Additional images of their family invite
me into their home, as a narrative explains how they were raised in a context which produced
clear definitions of “male” and “female” gender presentation and identification. Stating that
they were not a “masculine” child, their gaze – and by extension mine – lingers on the image of
the attire of their younger self. I recognize they are pictured dressed very much like the adult
men behind them. After a moment, the photograph gives way to a dark screen, before
reappearing and disappearing again in a flickering pattern. The image flits in and out of
visibility and view, and does so quickly enough that, for me, it became difficult to see what
exactly was pictured. Several other family photographs – of significant family gatherings,
birthdays, and other milestones – flash in front of the camera in a similar pattern. They describe
this atmosphere, as well as their own coming into an awareness of themself as nonbinary, in a
series of monologues that often contrasts with the images they have chosen to present. Their

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LGBTQIA+ autoethnographic film has a specific history relating to the self and the other, and I feel this film fits
directly into this tradition. See also Thomas Waugh. The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary
Film. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

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sense of isolation registered with me as their truth, as I strongly identified with how this must
have made them feel.
The ethnography begins with the author setting up recording equipment in a studio space.
In what appears will be a traditional narrative, they announce, direct-to-camera, that this will be
an exploration of their life. What follows is a succession of photographs, accompanied by
Ortiz’s voiceover, that takes me through various moments in their childhood and young
adulthood. Through this retrospective series of pictured self, family, and friends, I should
become acquainted with how the filmmaker was raised and the different figures who have and
continue to be part of their personal story. At first read, these are the images upon which I might
base the narrator’s childhood conceptions of their identity and self-identification. In fact, these
photographs do not tell the entire story. Moreover, they tell a misleading story, that of a
masculine persona with whom the filmmaker does not identify. The presumption of these
snapshots as evidence is continuously disrupted by their unconventional and ephemeral editing,
challenging their veracity, and speaking to Autoetnografía as a documentary of false experience.
Experientially, their creative curation destabilized the images as a source of predictable
knowledge, points of reference, and as signifiers, truthful representations of Ortiz’s reality.
Individual shots do not follow one another in consistent intervals. Briefly visible, as they flash,
flicker, then fade, in and out of focus, these sequences tease at predictability, but telegraph
disruption. I could not anticipate how long one would stay onscreen before the next would
appear. As opposed to a straight cut or fade to black, this irregular pattern or lack of a rhythm, at
times, is sensorially unnerving.
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I also wonder, as in Housing Problems, what events might

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These images strobe and the film is accompanied by a warning. The uneven accessibility of these images to
viewers with epilepsy or other sensitivities (I, who have been recovering from damage to my optic nerve for the past
two years, had to watch the film in several sittings due to the rate at which the images cycled) to such images builds
a sense of the visual record as limited, and a source of pain as well as evidentiary support of lived experience.

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have been excluded from the visual record. This question introduces a dimension of uncertainty
into my viewing. The manipulation of evidentiary artifacts that appear then disappear, leaves
open the possibility of multiple and possibly discordant interpretations based upon multiple
opportunities for sensory, cerebral, and visceral engagement.
While I might extrapolate and attribute significance to these artifacts, the inferences I
interpolate are a result of my experience, not the filmmaker’s. This distinction and the need for
me to relate to content that is not directly or sufficiently contextualized within the documentary,
produce meanings that resonate from both access to the life of the ethnographer and my own
reappropriation of the evidence of that life.
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The validity of this interpolation relies upon the
subjective relationship between myself and the work’s content, between my perspective that of
Ortiz.
Yet I would propose a film like Autoetnografía can be conceived as a documentary when
the validity of evidence is inferred. My focus is on the experience of viewing and the
reimagining of Ortiz’s life. The meanings of the images in the film do not come from their
visual authority. I am looking at family photos, but primarily by way of negation and disruption.
The filmmaker provides information about what they do not feel, or do not identify with, or what
the photograph does not show. For example, at one point, Ortiz says, “I was not a masculine

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I am using the word subject here, for lack of a better one. However, the word contains problematic associations
and power relations (relations that are somewhat collapsed when filmmaker and “subject” are the same person.
Muholi and others have written and spoken about how the word subject, in its colonial connotations and association
with a documentary participant whose agency is subordinated to the whims of the filmmaker, carries with it a deeply
troubling connotation. I use the word subject here, where filmmaker and film focus are the same person, for clarity
(and because it is awkward to refer to filmmaker and “subject” as two separate “participants” when they are in fact
the same person, so this makes it clearer when I am referring to the focus of the film on their life versus their
practices in producing, directing and writing the film). Elsewhere I have opted to favor the word “participant” to
describe the person or people who are the focus of a documentary, especially when filmmaker and participant are
not the same person, and a power relationship therefore might be inferred from the use of the word “subject.” This
is distinct from the “subject” of a documentary, as in the topic about which the film has been made.

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child,” rather than telling me who they are, the emphasis is on a rejection of the masculinity
implied by the photograph. The visual, which does not directly speak to the filmmaker’s lived
experiences or is unable to do so without the supplement of the filmmaker’s, in some cases,
counterfactual voiceover, is not assumed to be a source of objective evidence. The photo taken
at face value, rather than being a stable signifier, is inadequate, unreliable, and incomplete. The
image’s veracity, therefore, comes from the capacity of the filmmaker to intervene in the sober
discourse it represents and lend a sense of personal subjectivity through the flashing screens and
narrated details.
The logic of the film’s argument is to suggest experience is not single-strand, and neither
is a spectator’s affective experience of the film. Such a construction speaks to the idea that, for
those whose experiences have been excluded from dominant records, for sensory experiences for
which the visual is not only incomplete, but also perhaps misleading, a reappropriated
formulation of the contextual meaning of evidence is needed. This is where experiential and
phenomenological accounts become important, and where the idea conceived by Nyong’o of the
world “already false” is a central element of this reappropriation. In a world already false, the
stability of a signifier, or the capacity of a single concept or image to speak to a unliteral
conception of truth is not assumed. The world already false describes an experience wherein,
due to systems of oppression, discrimination, and exclusion, an individual or group has not been
able to assume that images or image production from a dominant cultural space will reflect their
experience.
For individuals whose assigned identity differs from their definition of self, they grow up
in a world already false. In the context of content, drawing from Ahmed’s queer
phenomenology, these individuals have had to assume that a space exists between what is

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represented that has never seemed adequate and their true lived experiences.
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Instead,
Nyong’o engages with the concept of fabulation, drawing on Marc Siegel’s characterization of a
reality figured outside the dichotomy of truth and falsity, or, by extension, outside the realm of
the visual and hidden, to be, “neither true nor false but fabulous.”
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This formulation is
influenced by queer of color critique, Black queer and trans studies, and what Nyong’o
references as “performance and media studies.”
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In referencing fabulation, Nyong’o moves
away from the context of what can be objectively verified and enforces the importance of
alternate modes of remembering, experiencing and archiving realities. Autoetnografía provides
me with an alternate reading of a visual narrative. The filmmaker recounters their childhood by
providing evidence of pictures of themself growing up, which they then consciously oppose
through voiceover and other formal elements.
Possibly the most notable formal element in Autoetnografía is the use, periodically, of an
editing pattern that rapidly cuts between image and darkness at irregular intervals. This,
accompanied by the mild strobing discussed above, creates the dynamic of pulling the viewer in,
only to push them out again after a brief moment’s engagement. This first and foremost
complicates our relationship to visuality – we can only look so closely at the images, for
example, and also confounds our relationship to the idea that an image, due to its indexical tie to
reality, gives us increased access to information or understanding. Instead, the image itself is,
explicitly and directly, a barrier to entry. Autoetnografía was not the first time that the concepts
of image, visuality, and knowledge were connected in my mind, but it was the first time that

107
See references to Sara Ahmed related to queer orientation in Part One.

108
Siegel, quoted in Nyong’o, Tavia. Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. (New York: New York
University Press, 2018). 15.

109
Ibid.

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image, visuality, and access were explicitly linked to ideas of identity. We see Ivan’s body and
the identities – masculine, child – that are mapped onto them in childhood. These images are
presented in a standard and unedited way – what we see is how Ivan is identified – how they are
dressed by their parents, how they are framed in family photos – from the outside looking in.
This identification, then, is based in and predicated on continual disruption. The idea that
we can observe is curtailed by the explicit obfuscation of the witnessing which occurs in the
film. We see, but we can only see so much. Seeing itself is not a method of an unbroken
dissemination of information or a means by which information is communicated. Rather, the
disruption of information is part of the logic of the film. This logic builds upon my
understanding of how indexicality operates in other films, as well as historically what an index
indicates in works like autobiographies. However, a challenge to the concept of evidence itself
also is part of the logic of this piece. The film is set up to present evidence in a way that is
familiar, only to complicate that evidence when the effects of this familiarity are aligned with a
normativity that is an anathema to the protagonist. Photographic evidence and the organizational
principles and ideas which drive it are seen as kinds of standardization of and also a means to
curtail expression. The interruptions which impact the body of the spectator also make what
usually is an easily absorbed process of watching filmed photographs into a markedly
uncomfortable one.

The Novice (Lauren Hadaway 2021)
Screened as part of the Outfest festival in 2021, The Novice reflects moments adapted
from Lauren Hadaway’s own life in conversation with filmic tropes from conventional genres.
The narrative centers around the experience of Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman), a novice college

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rower, who works her way from beginner to the varsity team, navigating personal relationships
with a rival, a love interest, and friends and mentors along her journey. Any sense of satisfaction
she might feel from putting herself through a grueling training regimen is complicated by the
unravelling of her friendship-turned-rivalry with teammate Jamie (Amy Forsyth), which
alternates between collaborative and competitive, before shattering when Alex chooses her own
advancement over camaraderie. In another narrative thread, Alex’s decision to relentlessly work
out is contrasted with her developing romance with Dani (Dilone). Initially this sub-plot
provides uplifting emotional contrast to the film’s dark intensity, until Dani, unable to
successfully reason with her girlfriend, walks away after witnessing the degree to which Alex
has become self-destructive.
I came to this film not expecting a documentary experience. I was interested in the
subject matter. For the past three years I had been an assistant programmer for Outfest, and I had
seen mention of the film in programming discussions. Other than that, my relationship to the
piece was somewhat vaguely defined. I was surprised, then, when the work had an immediate
somatic impact on me. Alex Dall aspires to be a competitive rower, and the closest I have ever
gotten to a rowboat is my relationship to a friend who made the crew team in high school. But I
could relate to aspects of her journey – pushing oneself, the desire to be, if not the best, then the
hardest working at a task, the drive and ambition that can come to define someone. But it was
less that I related to the story itself and more how I became connected to this narrative that linked
to my experiences and contexts and ultimately theorization.
A young female rower, Alex, sits alongside several teammates in a training room. In a
montage of workouts, the sequences of activity surprisingly appear to me to lack vitality. Voices
are muffled. The illumination flat. Details out of focus, difficult to discern. Except the spotlight

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on the Alex’s body. A shift in location places her in a boat, as she begins to row. Her deliberate
movements and determination are infections, against the strains of “Someday” by Brenda Lee.
A song I associate with romantic narratives of wish fulfillment and future love.
After the race, Alex’s body is physically depleted. She collapses. Any sense of
adrenalized elation that accompanies crossing the finish line, is lacking from the scene. I
assume her exhaustion is coded as accomplishment – the reward that validates the punishment
an athlete must weather to prepare for this moment. A part of me identifies with the mythology
of “no pain, no gain.” Then again, the woman appears to be in so much pain, the unsettling
manifestation of her unwavering pursuit of a dream.
Previously …
The cliché of a college bar is palpable. From the sticky floors – to the strings of lights – to
the just-barely-out-of-date indie rock piped in through staticky speakers. A nervous Alex in a
fringed leather jacket enters the room. Shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, she studies the whorls
in the wood of the lamented floor. Until someone approaches. Alex looks up, and that someone
looks back. Dani, who, in keeping with college cliché, has a guitar case slung over her shoulder.
Dani goes onstage – the music starts – Alex is not going anywhere. Their love story begins.
Later …
Against a backdrop of high contrast lighting and a romantic score, Alex sits at the rowing
machine. Another Brenda Lee song begins. “I’m Sorry.” It doesn’t much match the mood of the
scene. Alex starts to row – And keeps rowing – The music stops and starts and stops again.
Without warning, an “handle” snaps and hits Alex’s arms. Undeterred, Alex begins to row,
again. The cycle continues, as Alex grows increasingly more depleted.
Next …

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Alex is in the bathroom of her apartment. Looking in the mirror. Her exhaustion turns to
resentment. All she sees is her failure. The song reprises, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, for being so
untrue. I didn’t know, love could be so cruel…” It plays over and over – Alex strips off her
clothes – Frustration turns to anger as the tempo of the music crescendos. And Alex begins to
repeatedly strike herself. In the mirror, Alex surveys the scratches and bruises on her ribcage.
With a critical eye that rejects her own reflection. And for a moment I think, I hope, she is about
to clean her injuries. Then, with hands that are shaking, Alex removes a scissor from the counter
and scrapes at her side with the blade until the self-inflicted wound bleeds.
As …
Dani walks in, and sees Alex crumpled on the floor with the blade in her hand.
Concerned, Dani pleads with her to think about what the sport is doing to her body and mind.
Alex is unable to return Dani’s urgent gaze. Their love story ends.
And later …
Alex stares at a posting. The lineup reflects her hard-won team spot. With a single
gesture, she crosses her name off the list. Figuratively and literally walks away. I am relieved
by her decision and disappointed in the narrative’s failure to follow through on its promises.
Alex is a fictional character who embodies Hadaway’s lived experiences. The story is an
homage to their respective histories. What the protagonists sustain, what is physically apparent
to the viewer, is what Alex endures and Hadaway sacrificed to achieve what they initially
envision as a successful goal, making the team. Given the genre tradition of come-from-behind,
underdog athletes who triumph in the moments before the credits, the narrative that unfolds is
neither classic nor predictable. Alex’s realization of what she is sacrificing to satisfy the future

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she imagines precipitates a decision that defies Hollywood conventions but feels all the more
real.
This adjustment manifests in the toll it takes on Alex’s body. Hadaway avisually
conveys via physicality that, regardless of what normally constitutes a happy ending, all that
ends, always does not end according to expectations. The sacrifice sustained by athletes and the
psychological risk of a lover’s rejection are somatically represented in the film. The Novice
juxtaposes what it takes and takes from an athlete who pursues winning at all costs. These are
understandable consequences, and because they are received and perceived as being reasonable
in context, Alex’s story is relatable and resonates with viewers.
Throughout The Novice, familiar tropes are well-represented, and their tribute to
historical Hollywood context is apparent in the emotional import of the sequences in which they
are invoked. They track with recognizable storylines and predispose audiences to anticipate
what will happen next. By relying on referential filmic systems, viewers relate to and become
invested varying moments of the charm and pain in Alex’s life. From these moments, meaning
is extrapolated, as observers align themself with the protagonist and the challenges she faces.
Right from the start, the film reads like a typical sports movie and a teen melodrama.
Frenetic training sessions highlight Alex’s choice to favor exercise over her personal life. The
Novice is also a romance, where a naïve protagonist overcomes personal obstacles and explores a
sweet, albeit doomed, relationship with Dani, a physicist-and-guitarist who sees beyond Alex’s
obsessive behavior and tries to rescue her. Eventually, Alex’s destiny diverts from being draped
in normative genre narratives to being shrouded in horrifying sequences that depict her passion
devolving into depression, ultimately causing her to question the degree to which her self-worth
has been narrowly, and perhaps unhealthily, defined by the dream of athletic success. By the

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conclusion of The Novice, making varsity is no longer the inevitable climax of the movie.
Similarly, the romantic sequences start off absurdly on-the-nose, reminiscent of a young adult
coming-of age fantasy until all falls apart when Dani cannot save the troubled protagonist.
While the film’s resolution is inconsistent with its counterparts in the genres of sports
films and romances, it feels all too familiar in the context of my a-posteriori experience. A
disruption exists, as I mentally and physically reappropriate my associations with what I assume
should happen to cognitively and viscerally engaged with what does occur. This reappropriation
is significant because allows a me to identify with the conflicting themes that undermine the
narrative. As the plot darkens, my initial assumptions, the ones I held based upon these two
tropes, are now considered in a new context. This is a process of identification that Stuart Hall
refers to as negotiated spectatorship, where, at one moment, viewers identify with Alex’s
character, but in the next, they disassociate themselves from the character she becomes or the
choices she eventually makes.
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In a negotiated reading of The Novice, the viewer both is
aligned with parts of the narrative and is resistant to others. I might find affinity with Alex’s
journey as a college freshman athlete navigating a high-pressure environment at a young age. I
also might find it difficult to justify her motivation for pushing away her friends and loved ones,
or the patterns of self-harm that reflect her defeated sense of optimism.
This context is the basis upon which I attempt to reconcile this sense of negotiation and
juxtaposition. As I abandon my initial impressions of the narrative, I assume control over its
reinterpretation. Having destabilized the normative assumptions of traditional athletic and
romantic fiction, now as author, I reimagine meanings reappropriated from the context of The
Novice’s events and perhaps discover new narratives within its non-normative structure.

110
Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. (SAGE Publications, 1997). See
Part One of this dissertation.

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By disrupting my expectation of a narrative that follows traditional tropes, Hadaway explores the
potential for new modes of engagement based upon what a non-normative storyline might
suggest. This disruption makes possible a recontextualization of the film’s content, not as
symbolic of resignation, but as a more realistic representation of the challenges and decisions a
viewer must face. This process allows for a narrative that feels more resonant than a generic
genre treatment of events and evidence that follows a formula which does not mimic real life. It
manifests in the reappropriation of the themes that govern The Novice’s two storylines and
occurs outside the frames of the film, where the viewer has the authority to interpret meaning
from ambiguous narrative consequences. The Novice operates in the realm of experiential
documentary by destabilizing predictable audience engagement and reappropriating new
meanings whose assessment of validity verifies my determination of the form.

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Chapter Six
The Somatic

The somatic finds a different implementation and context in Leviathan, where the
material onscreen engages with a person’s memory of visceral experiences. From this visceral
relationship, the film derives its documentary value. In The Watermelon Woman, the validity of
fictional evidence is reappropriated through somatic associations and relationships that engage
with a viewer’s sense of documentary history. In His Mother’s Voice, a viewer’s somatic or
visceral association attributing validity to the sound of a mother’s voice extends to the entire
work a sense of narrative resonance. LA 92 also is a somatically experienced network of
associations built within the viewer’s memory and imagination, recontextualizing past and
present images together.

Leviathan (Harvard’s Multisensory Ethnography Lab 2012)
At the Harvard’s Multisensory Ethnography Lab, filmmakers involved in the effort have
made the study of referentiality with regard to multisensory input a priority.
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Leviathan is a
film to come out of this project. I reference the work as an example of reappropriating multi-
sensorial evidence to convey an open-ended visceral experience. The camera records the daily
routine of a crew of commercial fishermen in the North Atlantic, through observational

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The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, describes its project in a way that
highlights a connection with and prioritization of the experiential. In their information section on their website, they
underscore: “Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and natural sciences, and the humanities, SEL
encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with
difficulty, if it all, be rendered with words” (https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/). This idea of capturing experiences that
cannot be rendered with words emphasizes the desire to capture and record sensory and experiential dynamics that
move beyond the visually or linguistically indexical, speaking to other forms of memory and using other methods of
archiving to access these experiences.

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cinematography and underwater sequences. Images from the camera also reflect the sensory
experience of their daily activities, as they, for example, gut and fillet their catch. Upon its first
showing, Leviathan was commended for the visceral use of the (relatively) new-at-the-time
technology of GoPro cameras. Due to their waterproof durability, these devices could float atop,
as well as dip beneath, the surface of the ocean. They accurately document the behavior and
environment of the life of these professionals.
Waves strike a screen, or maybe a lens – something reflective and smooth against which
the water spatters. The camera – it becomes clear that is what the water has hit – shakes and
shudders, as if itself submerged. Sound – crashing, the cries of seagulls, the shouts of sailors
above the waves – seeps toward what remains a limited line of sight. There is a row of objects
up ahead – maybe buoys, though it is hard to tell in the semi-darkness. Is it dusk? Or is the
camera’s field of view and source of available light both sufficiently obscured that it is
impossible to tell what time it is, in fact, at all? Suddenly, I am moving up. Above the water
toward the light – it is now possible to see there is light, maybe always has been, though I would
not have guessed it from the previous dimness. I move across a wooden deck, toward a section
where a fisherman is working. My focus remains on his hands, as he slowly performs an action
that I soon realize is the gutting of a fish.
The camera, as if in consort with my own discomfort, sways as I try to center myself
within the image. It’s not just the visceral (both literal and figurative viscera, in this case) that
makes me immediately squeamish. It is the constant positioning and repositioning of the
viewpoint. The many GoPros used in this production are undeniably a novel addition to the
film’s technical landscape and offer an immediate look at the world of commercial fishing. But
they also alternately allow and limit, orient and disorient, my perspective in a way that makes me

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uncomfortably aware of their presence. The motion of the images flinch back and forward,
carried as if by their own waves.
I should note two things about my experience of watching Leviathan. I get motion sick
very easily and seasick more easily than that. The first time I studied the documentary, I viewed
the film on an IMAX-sized screen with immersive surround sound and had to leave halfway
through. Leviathan is without a clearly defined single human subject; no one person or idea is
followed through, except its focus on fishing. The storyline is a decentralized collection of
scenes. During much of the footage, there is no background narration. Very little factual about
North Atlantic fishing can be ascertained from watching the film. Rather than provide discursive
explanations of the actions as they transpire, the documentary’s visual and auditory stimuli place
me on the boat, alongside the fishermen as they work. Unger argues that foregrounded in this
and related projects is a dynamic visceral connection between the subject matter presented and
the sensorium of the spectator. What I remember about Leviathan is how I felt.
To appreciate the implications of this reaction, I return to Merleau-Ponty. The physical
experience can best be understood phenomenologically, as an encounter between my body and
the film. My relationship to Leviathan is rooted in my body’s resonance with the camera’s
movements, as theorized by Andre Lepecki and Ann Cvetkovich and the body as an archive of
experience. I sense what the men onboard likely experienced, and these references validate the
film’s truth. My reappropriation of this visceral context is fueled by what my body internalized,
appealing to network of memories of resonant indexes. These points of reference are the familiar
sounds, depictions and the implied movement and “smells” of the sea. The experience of the
perception and reception of these indexes may presume to be universal, but their interpretation is
individual and unique to each viewer. Left to my imagination are the meanings attributed to

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these indexes. This process allows for subjective reappropriation, consistent with the concept of
reception through multiple sensory inputs, following Marks. These somatic inputs are what
inspired Unger to call Leviathan experiential.
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This resonance operates on multiple levels,
which suggests that a documentary claim born from multiple forms of engagement can generate
more than one narrative.
In Leviathan, my curiosity about the material registers both emotionally and
intellectually. As I consider this film in conjunction with other pieces that complicate my
relationship to evidence, I can apply Unger’s concept of experiential documentary to the
interpolation of fictional context, theorizing a concept of the reappropriation of meaning based
upon an individual’s unique sensory resonance with this evidence.
This sensory evidence is by no means comfortable or unbroken in nature. It is constantly
interrupted, renegotiated, and reimagined. It also is offered using a visual language, the
spectacle of the imagined and the real, the interpolated and the provided, that is not familiar from
continuity editing. Especially at the time, when 360 video and its similar counterparts were
relatively new technologies, the vocabulary for reading a film on the part of a spectator contained
a bit of confusion about where and how to look. Because we are uncomfortably and
continuously being asked how to survey this media, there is a sense of alignment and removal.
A fundamental uncertainty around how to interpret the media’s indexicality and in turn an
unfinished and/or open-ended nature to the piece.

112
Michael A Unger. “Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's GoPro Sensorium: Leviathan (2012), Experimental
Documentary, and Subjective Sounds.” Journal of Film and Video. Vol. 69.No. 3 (2017): 3-18.

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The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye 1996)
The Fae Richards Photo Archive (Zoe Leonard 1994 -1996)
The Watermelon Woman ends with a title card, reading “sometimes you have to create
your own history.” The author of this quotation, filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, is describing her
search for Black lesbian actress Fae Richards, whose fictional existence and legacy have been
excluded from the records of Hollywood’s chronology. Dunye adopts an alternative formula, the
mockumentary, for remembering those individuals who traditional institutions and institutional
knowledge have overlooked or forgotten. In the film, historical intervention suggests an
alternate modality of experiential and phenomenological contextualization of content, by virtue
of the fact that both Dunye and Leonard manufactured this evidence to substantiate Richards’
backstory.
The film documents the journey of the protagonist, Cheryl, as a young Black female
filmmaker in the early stages of her career, who sets out in search of a black actress she sees
portrayed in a movie entitled Plantation Memories. The role of the performer is credited only as
“The Watermelon Woman.” Beyond this oblique reference, her identity is a mystery, one that
Cheryl is determined to solve. This investigation takes Cheryl into private homes and into
contact with individuals who knew the actress. In these moments, she hears first-person
accountings and views their personal mementos, including Leonard’s images, that shed light on
the woman’s forgotten past. Cheryl has to go to great lengths to locate these details because
mainstream repositories of records failed to preserve traces of the watermelon woman’s career
and life. Every piece she uncovers adds dimension to the character of Fae Richards. By
weaving together these testimonials and materials, Cheryl reimagines the watermelon woman’s
history.

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I watch Cheryl watching Plantation Memories on her TV from the warm of her of her
apartment. The boxy set rests on what looks like an AV cart below a video tape player circa
1990s. On Cheryl’s screen is a scene which appears to take place in the constructed and
confined black and white 1950’s set of a Hollywood plantation, likely pre-Civil War. A young
Black “mammy” stereotype approaches a white woman, the stereotypical owner of the estate.
They appear to be of similar age. The mammy assures the woman that “Mr. Charles,” will be
returning soon. The Black woman’s voice wavers, as she falls to her knees, practically
genuflecting. I am taken back to the Antebellum South.
Cheryl mouths the words along with the actors. Her passionate recitation clearly mocks
the moment. It also provides a visual link between herself, also a Black woman, and the
performer onscreen. Cheryl’s bandanna matches the one the watermelon woman wears. The
two fictions merge into one reality.
The film concludes. Credits scroll. All the actors are named except the “mammy,” only
described as such and recognized by the racist moniker “The Watermelon Woman.”
Cheryl’s adventure begins. She and her best friend Tamara approach the reference
station in the library. The whirr of florescent lights overhead and the Spartan furniture sterilize
the space. I imagine a sign over the desk that reads, “impersonal institution.” A man in a
sweater vest with a distant expression welcomes her indifferently. She inquires if they have any
books on Fae Richards, explaining that she was a Black actress working in Hollywood during
the 1940s and 1950s. His half-hearted typing produces little result. The two researchers are
dispassionately referred to the reference area. The librarian reminds them that the reference
section is for referencing what has been recorded for the record. As the two search, they realize,
as they leave the library, the absence of records is revealing.

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A similar scene unfolds when Cheryl goes to visit the Herstory Museum-parodying
Center for Lesbian Information and Technology in New York (cheekily abbreviated as C.L.I.T.
throughout the film). A volunteer presents her with a series of boxes of material on Black
lesbians, dumping the materials onto a table and announcing that they are not as yet cataloged
because C.L.I.T. is a volunteer-run collective. Cheryl shifts through a series of photos, many of
which are glossy prints of Richards at downtown clubs early in her career, before she broke into
the Hollywood scene, including candid snapshots with Martha Page, Richards’ sometime lover.
This window into Richard’s past is closed when Cheryl is told that these artifacts must
remain in the archive. Cheryl would like to leave with more than memories of what she has
seem. These images would be valuable leads for future reference. She is told her access is
denied to protect the privacy of the of those whose images are cataloged at C.L.I.T.
A few prints slide surreptitiously towards the lens of Cheryl’s camera; she subverts the
rules of the institution. Ellipses in history are filled through unconventional means.
In the same way that experiential documentaries draw on the sensory responses a
spectator has to media, mockumentary films are less concerned with fact and more with
resonance, suggesting that knowledge production is a consequence of the process of a viewer’s
cerebral and visceral/somatic engagement, unique to each individual. The first time I viewed this
film, I was struck by the ways in which the associations between the past and present created a
simultaneous experience of a history that was avisual and a present that was strongly connected
to that history. Unlike docufiction, where documentary content is merged with fiction, The
Watermelon Woman is pure fabrication, though the marketing and discourse associated with its
distribution suggest that people still nod and wink when discussing the film and the Leonard’s

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archival photographs.
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The temptation to reference these works as factual reveals the
compelling nature of their visceral and intellectual resonance. As in Leviathan, what is relevant
is seen and felt. The distinction between this multisensory work and The Watermelon Woman, is
that in Dunye’s film, the non-visual and other sensory forms of engagement are in service to a
specific political project centered around a history that may only be invented and imagined.
This prior experience to a large extent governs the operation of the mockumentary’s
argument. In her analysis of The Watermelon Woman, Jaimie Baron argues that, because a
spectator relates to the Cheryl’s journey and the story that unfolds, evidence of that story takes
on an attribute of veracity that has less to do with the actual truth or falsity of specific details and
more reliant upon a sense of engagement which is facilitated during the process of observing.
This resonance assigns documentary value to the work. It is this experience of the content that
defines the form.
Not only does the filmmaker appropriate meanings between the frames of this evidence,
but she is enacting a process akin to what José Esteban Muñoz describes as “disidentification.”
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Muñoz speaks to a tension that exists between alignment or identification with a desired subject
and a resistance or downright revulsion toward that same subject. An example of this is the
racist representations of the “watermelon woman” in Plantation Memories, who represents an
offensive portrayal but with whom viewers still may identify or to whom they still may feel

113
Many of the pieces reference Richards and the mock-documentary style, downplaying the work’s role as a
narrative film and emphasizing the ephemera that connect to historical Hollywood representation. For examples of
this type of discourse, see articles about Watermelon Woman in publications such as Lesbian News, promotions and
reviews of the film when it screened at Outfest in Los Angeles and others, accessible via the holdings pertaining to
the film at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries. Such discourse is different, but also
markedly focused on history and preservation, in the Anniversary screenings of the film in 2016, also archived at
ONE.

114
José Esteban Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1999).

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connected, in a conflicted and ambiguated way. Cheryl recognizes that this history, out of which
her associations with Richards’ performance in Plantation Memories arises, has an affective link
to the material which reimagines the actress’ narrative in terms of the young woman’s present
adventure.
The filmmaker’s implication is that imagining a future is not an end but a beginning.
This beginning is connected to a feeling across time, a sense of resonance that extends across
past, present and future and which is exemplified in a concrete sense in the haptics of the archive
of photographs that accompany the film. Imagining history is explicitly backward-looking,
located in memory and reflection. However, the narrative logic of The Watermelon Woman
connects the past, present and future that, when viewed through the lens of potentiality,
reappropriates the significance of lost or forgotten lives. The idea that Cheryl the filmmaker
within the film is “just starting out,” and that this “start” is definitionally bounded not only by the
past but also by the ability to carry knowledge of the past, and specifically of Fae Richards’ life,
into the future, is key to the film’s conclusion.
Cheryl’s journey is influenced by the Black women who historically, in Hollywood, have
not been included in dominant narratives of glamor or prominence, relegated instead to the kinds
of roles which the title “watermelon woman” describes. Discovery of this past shapes Cheryl’s
present. In the process of learning about Richards’ past, Cheryl underscores and challenges her
own lack of representation in society. By developing a sense of her own identity, while
searching for the historical reality of Fae Richards’ lived experience and by connecting her life to
Richards’, Cheryl is able to shape her future as a filmmaker.

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Tavia Nyong’o introduces the term “polytemporality” to describe this merging or
interpolation of past with the present, where past and present simultaneously coexist.
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Nyong’o notes that this awareness follows two discrete timelines, linear and nonlinear.
Characterizing what it is like to be Black and queer in the United States, Nyong’o describes how
it is necessary to be aware of histories or to possess a-posteriori knowledge of that past that
impacts the context of a moment and the experience of that moment itself. The Hollywood past,
reimagined for Fae Richards in the present, also depends upon the viewer’s encounter with
history.
This moment dwells in the past but also the present, comparing the two moments and
existing at the same time in the past and present. My recollection, or my research into the
historical dynamics of 1950s Hollywood film, also informs my reactions in this moment. Not a
past in the sense of a look backward as Love describes it, the reflection that this encounter
encourages nonetheless is a look back and forward at the same time. Bounded by history and
histories of erasure in particular, the work also expands forward in order to contextualize or
recontextualize the viewing experience.
These moments of insight, as Nyong’o has written in a different context, informed by
desire and intellectual curiosity at the intersection of these affective and cognitive modes, give
rise to a second temporality, an experience rooted firmly in the present, even as both Cheryl and
spectator are aware of the past. This sense of unbounded opportunity is born out of a breath of
past experiences and gestures towards a multiplicity of possible futures. As Muñoz describes in

115
Drawing on the writings and work of Kara Keeling and Adrian Piper, Nyong’o describes Black polytemporality
as a superimposition and simultaneity of past and present for which an indexical notion of the present cannot
account. Nyong’o writes: “We cannot directly represent this emergence of a black polytemporality within the
indexical present, but we can sense it…” (Nyong’o 93).

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relation to queer futurity, the expanding horizon line indicates a forward look into possibility.
This possibility also, necessarily, is impossible to actualize. Rather, the future is “yet to
come.”
116
This idea of the yet to come introduces a third temporality into this formulation which
also resonates with Dunye’s formulation. Not only is there is a look back, but there is a way of
imagining the future that enacts a different framework.
The Fae Richards Photo Archive was released in two forms: one was a book published in
1996 by ArtSpace Books, San Francisco available in conjunction with the film project, and one
was on display to the public as a separate art exhibition prior to the movie’s release. These
pictures, associated with The Watermelon Woman, feature Richards, family, and friends. The
subject matter ranges from professionally staged portraits to candid snapshots of stolen moments
and vary in style from emulating Hollywood glamor to intimate and informal.
When I viewed and paged through The Fae Richards Photo Archive in printed form, I
thought my experience would be chronological. This organization would produce a sense that
Richards’ experience unfolds following an orderly roadmap I needed to discover. While the
different materials can provide a sense that this photograph is a home image, while this image is
one taken in a studio, the sense that together they reveal a composite of a single life, with a
single trajectory, is enforced by the linearity of the page layout. The order in which I read the
images is aligned with the order Richards lived these scenes and the order in which they have
been curated for my discovery. The sense that the images have been organized in a curated order
also produces a sense that someone else is guiding me through this experience through the literal

116
Akin to the idea of a “queerness to come” in “Queerness as Horizon” in José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia:
The Then and There of Queer Futurity. (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 25.

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and figurative lens of visuality, allowing me and guiding me to see an account as if it had been
revealed, having previously been occluded.
For a long time, this was the only way I could access the material, as I had started
studying Dunye’s work several years after the initial release of the film, and after several of the
exhibits featuring the photographs had ended. When the exhibit was revived to celebrate the 25
th

anniversary of the project, I visited this archive in 2018 at MOCA in Los Angeles. The
following is based on my visit. As I walked through the room, I keep reminding myself that
these images are of an invented character, but also are an intervention to counter systemic
erasure of Black and queer lives in previous nonfiction historical records.
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The archival images are presented under museum glass. As I progress through the
history they convey, I feel like a guest that has wandering into Fae Richard’s life story.
Memories that reflect her celebrity and her passions. The grainy and faded texture of the
photographs transport me to a time before my time, to an era that is familiar and authentic
because they resemble so much of what I have seen in trusted sources from this period. They are
arranged in what I assume to be chronologic order, moving from left to right, with dates that run
from the 1920s to the 1970s. The narrative spans Richards’ career. In the first grouping, as a
nightclub singer, she seems to have headlined at neighborhood venues, joyously performing
before adoring audiences. I have a front row seat. I can taste the gin, and the cigarette smoke
burns my eyes. Next, I move further to the right where I am introduced to the actress. Featured
in a trade magazine, her persona emits the radiance of a star who is widely known in Hollywood
and plays lead roles in the “race films” made by Liberty Pictures, a minority owned and

117
A concept introduced by Julia Bryan-Wilson in “Imaginary Archives” (Wilson 2013) and other pieces about
Dunye’s film. See Julia Bryan-Wilson and Cheryl Dunye. “Imaginary Archives: A Dialogue.” Art Journal. 72. 2
(2013): 82-89.

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operated studio that caters to Black moviegoers. As I approach the end of the exhibit, I am
invited go behind the curtain into her private world through snapshots taken at home with June,
her partner.
I move back through the room to once again marvel at the glamor still, which appears to
be shot in a studio and on its way to publication in a 1950s Hollywood magazine. Her form is
radiant. Her expression mysterious. Inviting. Unapproachable. Professionally highlighted, she
carefully and casually lounges against a monochromatic backdrop. Looking up and to the left
out of the frame, her expression seems reflective, but also mediated, as she is turned away from
the camera. I am permitted to see, but only to see so much. This look and the direction of
Richards’ gaze, remind me that what I am witnessing is publicity-oriented. I do not have, and
should not have, direct access to any more of Richards’ interior life, symbolized by what her eye
allows. She, in conjunction with the photographer, remains in control of how transparent, or
not, her existence remains.
The Fae Richards Photo Archive associated with The Watermelon Woman, is a project
that by design produces its own external referent. The resonance of viewing Leonards’ images
arises not because of a recognition of the images themselves, but rather a haptic connection to
familiar signifiers. The textures in Leonard’s work, photographs that also appear in Dunye’s
film, have indexical ties to the past, which imbue them with contextual significance.
The experience I encountered when viewing Zoe Leonard’s photographs echoed what I
felt when I screened the film. Haptic contextual clues, as discussed by Laura U. Marks, even
within a fictional film can sensorially resonate with a spectator. The resemblance between
Leonard’s photographs and depictions of Hollywood’s past is not accidental. The photographer

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used cameras and development techniques from this period.
118
During the mid-century when the
glamor shot featured in the exhibition was allegedly taken, silver gelatin commonly was selected
for these stills. This chemical composition invokes a haptic quality when viewed. Its smooth
texture and high gloss, together, underscore a sense of tactile engagement, which, in turn links to
this era for spectators familiar with the methodology.
The impression that I can touch the photographs of Fae Richards and that the sense of
touch bridges my visceral memories of similar experiences to these images is related to Marks’
conception of haptic visuality. In The Skin of the Film (2000), Marks describes haptic visuality
as “visuality that functions like the sense of touch.”
119
The author emphasizes the link between
the materiality of video – the texture of the film, from its grain to the tactility of the screen – and
the kinds of synesthetic associations this materiality produces in a viewer. Given my perception
of the texture of Leonard’s photographs, their smooth appearance which reached back into
history, for me, made real what only could be imagined.
Applying Marks’ theory of sensory or haptic engagement and Nyong’o’s conception of
polytemporality, I further nuance my discussion of how the meaning of evidence is
reappropriated to reclaim a forgotten past. This is only possible if we broaden the methodology
for assessing validity. There is nothing valid pictured in either the images of Dunye’s and
Leonard’s work product. Yet, there is nothing false about the argument both artists make.

118
Leonard, interview with the author.

119
Laura U. Marks. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses and Touch. (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000). 22. Expanded on throughout The Skin of the Film and her later work Touch.

Laura U. Marks. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002).

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His Mother’s Voice (Dennis Tupicoff 1997)
His Mother’s Voice, by virtue of its title alone, directly engages with indexicality. The
film’s soundtrack is a recording of a radio interview with a grieving mother. Her son had just
been shot, and the interview references the 000 emergency call she made. The entire audio is
heard two times. A series of animated images which illustrate the tragedy are an artist
evidentiary depiction that reflect the bereaved women’s experience and her son’s murder. These
representations continuously display during the initial playthrough. As the narrative repeats, a
backdrop of abstract visuals, unfold in a stop-motion style. These are fragmented impressions
that complement the mother’s feelings of disorientation and distress expressed in the tones of her
voice.
The crackle of radio audio static matches an animated flickering figure on screen of a
man wearing a yellow shirt, along with a group of officers standing at the scene of what is
presumably a crime. As the visual sequence unfolds, a mother’s voice narrates her recollections
of the events. Story and the images arrive at the same moment. Memories that, for the woman
and for a viewer – at least for this viewer – feel both imminent and immediate. Past and present
coexist. As the trajectory of the documentary becomes clearer. Its emotional impact also comes
through more directly. Her son has been shot. A camera peers around a corner at a body that
falls against concrete. The sequence is revealed in slow-motion, stop-motion, possibly so I may
collect my thoughts, mirroring the mother's own disjointed reflections. The cadence of the scene,
the elements of the score, all reflect the pace of a mother’s breath, the wavering of her voice, the
horror that she is experiencing again, and that I was living for the first time.
A dark screen slowly fades into an image of a red telephone as an interviewer asks, “how
did you first learn about Matthew’s death?” A woman, responding to the question, halting every
once and a while, starts to recount her arrival at the scene, the distress “000” call, walking

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through the house, and be told that her son is dead. Shot. A teenage boy’s face, eyes staring
wide and direct-to-camera, comes into the frame as the mother continues to describe how she
felt. As we hear her voice, the sounds of a grieving mother, fragmented animated close-ups
become visible…in sections. An entry hall. A group of other boys. Presumably Matthew’s
friends. They tell her … first in the arm … then in the chest. She describes her hope that her son
may still be all right. The images become increasingly high contrast.
Eventually, these animations are superseded by images of police officers speaking to
her. We are back at the house again. The narrative shifts to paramedics informing her that she
should wait. She describes the reality in that her son is gone. Her grief is represented by hard
shadows cast by a spotlight awash on Matthew’s brother as his mother’s voice describes his
grief. The intensity of her words aligns with the visuals that symbolically capture her visceral
experience.
Then, the scene shifts and the audio repeats. The woman once again recounts the
tragedy. However, the backdrop is quite differed. Still animated. Still fragmented. A series of
sketches, as if drawn in a notebook. Unlike the first go around, these illustrations do not match
the details of the shooting, nor do they coalesce into a singular visual. Spiraling, looping lines
over abstract representations of the scene. Spool and unspool. Disorganized. Lost. Distracted.
Appearing, then vanishing, with the cadence of her voice, as if to reflect the unpredictability of
her memory. Audio and visuals line up emotionally but not literally, the experience of tragedy
embodied in a mother’s voice.
I feel a sense of immediacy and sympathy, heighted by the animation style. Sketched,
like a memory being etched as it unfolds, a tension exists in my viewing experience. I expect the
images, the lines, to eventually coalesce into a finite product, a representation of reality that

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defines itself before my eyes. However, instead, what I am left with is the reality of non-
definition. Animation itself is an inherently representational medium, representing the subjective
experience of the mother. as an indexical reality. As we reinterpret these images, our experience
is constantly given new meaning. These meanings act as points of reference and become
elements of the memories we archive.
Emotionally, this process of reappropriation creates in addition to aligning viewer with
mother a tentative alignment between viewer and mother, because there is a sense that there are
aspects of her experience which we are unable to perhaps should not fully access. Her tragedy is
both subjective and personal. Aspects of this particular experience cannot be fully represented
through are closed-off, not representable through a few short words or some brief images. Even
these sequences themselves – the phone call, the sketches of officer and the young boy- take on a
valence of abstraction as the account is inadequately actualized. Rather than conforming to
cliché or attempt to articulate what has happened, the event is acknowledged, by virtue of
animation, as fundamentally impossible to fully describe via rational means. In this way, the
documentation is both traditionally indexical and affectively representational.
The sound of a mother’s voice and the existence of a “000” call attribute authenticity to
the documenting of the tragedy Dennis Tupicoff captures in documentary film. These two
elements support the unvarnished truth of an event that happened in the real world, consistent
with Grierson’s original writings about the pedagogical potential of nonfiction media.
According to Nichols, the purpose of documentary media is to present a logical argument that
reflects a one-to-one relationship between indexical references and their meaning. Listening to
the audio in isolation, His Mother’s Voice, arguably, comes across as a conventional
documentary. My reading of and reaction to the indexes in Tupicoff’s film are rooted in my

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regard of them as reliable and verifiable forms of communication. But as a point of reference,
when the voice repeats, this device is complicated by the presence of an alternate visual
representation of the mother’s son’s murder.
As I watch the first sequence of images, I assume a one-to-one correspondence between
the mother’s voice and the animation associated with it. I soon become aware that gaps and
fissures exist in what I am hearing. There are sections where the descriptions do not match with
corresponding images, or where an image very clearly does not correspond to its description. As
the disruption between screen and audio becomes more apparent, I have the sense that what I am
witnessing is s not simply a straightforward recounting. Given the trauma, a mother might forget
details or mischaracterize memories. It is understandable that Tupicoff would reappropriate
multiple re-imaginings to convey what is, in many ways, impossible to convey – an emotional
reaction that a parent’s language cannot sufficiently describe.
By providing discrete visual representations, Tupicoff’s creative choice to include more
than one variation to capture on screen the tragedy, suggests to me that my engagement as I
watch (my body or the soma looking on) the differing perspectives of the killing (in the film or
the noema) is experiential, as well as intellectual. My feelings behind a mother’s words, more
than the language itself, propel me from image to image. This visceral influence of hearing her
voice, as it relates to ascertaining meaning from the visual scenes, becomes even more apparent
when the recording plays a second time, making me aware that my impression of and reaction to
the audio is central to the value I attribute to this evidence, even more so than the existence of the
call itself. Interpretating multiple meanings from this evidence, made even more possible when
affective associations are considered, highlights the fact that viewer response is a necessary and
contingent part of the relationship of indexicality to the argument Tupicoff makes.

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The film combines live action and animation in a way that produces a unique relationship
between animation, live action and the expectation of indexicality. In some ways the fact that
the image has been fully constructed by illustration, rather than combining live elements of either
archival or reenacted footage. The audio, on the other hand, has a direct relationship to the lived
experience of the speaker. The audio is indexical, whereas the image operates on a more
metaphorical register. However, the experience is anchored by the nonfictional – by the
mother’s voice – therefore maintaining its documentary value.
Given that spectators might leave a film with differing interpretations of an index, or an
individual might create multiple narratives based on the trajectory of evidence presented, I feel
challenges the argument Nichols raises in his earliest theorizing of documentary media when he
coined the phrase, describing the form as a “discourse of sobriety.”
120
Nichols’ notion of
sobriety is associated with singularity and verifiability. This analysis needs further expansion
and revision when considering the treatment of subjects like death or trauma. I argue that these
moments have no temporal boundaries and suggest that to limit their accounting to discursive or
sober is to overlook the affective associations spectators will attributed to the meanings of these
indexes. These points of reference derive context because they exist in relationship to each
other, prompting intellectual and emotional engagement, which in turn facilitates an observer’s
connection with the documentary and fosters multiple interpretations and possible meanings.
This cerebral and affective nature of the material presented further complicates the assumption
that what is being seen is solely a sober discourse of fact.

120
When I say, “for Nichols,” here, I am referencing his earlier work from 1990. It is important to note that in
subsequent papers, books and presentations Nichols has complicated and challenged his own assumptions that
documentary is a discourse of sobriety. I draw on this earlier definition because of its role in foundational
documentary studies and because of the role the notion of sobriety plays as a point of departure for authors like
Michael Renov and Jane Gaines central to the latter portion of my analysis.

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Acknowledging that each fact also is imbued with a valence of emotion that registers
with spectators from which they derive meaning in support of the media’s overall argument,
Nichols, along with a number of later scholars, complicated and revised the conception of the
form beyond being solely an intellectual and edifying medium. Despite this reformulation, I
believe he fails to give due consideration to spectator engagement and the affective relationship
that dynamically exists upon a film’s viewing. The subjective characteristic of this index spawns
an opportunity for multi-referential messaging, rather than, as Nichols might argue, point the
spectator toward a singular outcome. This alternative reasoning suggests that interpretation
relies on more than what is pictures in the realm of the profilmic, echoing authors such as Lippit
who have posed moving beyond the purely visual when considering indexicality.

LA 92 (Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin 2017)
It is Autumn of 2017. I have gone, with a couple of similarly documentary-minded
friends, to see an on-campus screening of LA 92 at USC. The room is crowded, and I am glad
we have tickets to ensure we will be seated. While in line to enter, I am surrounded by
conversations, a blend of excitement about the upcoming film and what people just finished for
dinner. As we enter the room, the textures and tones in the room seem only tangentially
relevant. Later, as the film begins, I become acutely aware of how the humid air in the
auditorium circulates slowly through the audience. It carries with it a languidity that captures the
essence of people, air conditioning, and garlic salad. This atmosphere becomes part of my
filmgoing experience when the lights go down and the movie begins.
LA 92 remixes recognizable images across multiple time frames with a broad cultural
context, while also being somatically engaging. Comprised primarily of found footage from

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newsreels, interviews and newspapers with a few interspersed accountings from witnesses, the
film establishes cyclic parallels between the events in Watts in 1965, the riots after the Rodney
King trial in 1992, and the community’s response to police violence in 2017, when the project
was released. This format relies heavily upon the viewer’s prior knowledge and recognition of
familiar images from this past and the present and their intersection, finding meaning between
the frames. Resonating with the context of this footage, a viewer attributes validity to this
content by virtue of this sense of familiarity. The format takes a spectator outside the traditional
narrative structure, cinematic framework, and chronology of a beginning, middle, and end. This
presentation style disrupted any sense of closure that a more traditional documentary might have
suggested. Instead, I felt anxious, restless, unnerved. The meanings I drew went well beyond
cognitive responses.
I am surrounded by movement, the presence and press of bodies against my own. The
year is 1992. Rodney King has been brutally beaten. Up ahead, police blanket the road. The
soundtrack of string instruments seems incongruous, given the setting and circumstance. Behind
me, I hear the rapid breathing of a runner. He is carrying a camera; my perspective is from its
point of view. I realize that now. And the breathing I feel is amplified by a recording device he
is holding, as together we race through the city. Filming men, women, and children marching,
in protest. So many. Their shadows flood the street. The scene fades, and becomes a newscast,
in which a reporter speaks about the numbers of people rioting in Los Angeles, before returning
to more real-time footage.
Viewing the segments from Watts 1965, my body registers movement. I see the parallels
in the images of protest – bodies moving in the streets in the 1960s and 1990s. I hear the music
that, through cadence and crescendo, builds tension that stitches together these movements into

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an experience of collective urgency. But these movements are removed from my own experience,
having occurred before I was born. My references are limited to what I see onscreen, and my
points of reference are limited to what others have recorded as history, often edited and curated.
Later in the film, present day suggests a perpetuation of violence that persists into the
moment of the film’s release (c. 2017). These images strike me differently because I saw my
friends, family and peers react to the events evoked by these moments in real-time – I have
context upon which to assimilate this information. This sense of being present means I rely on
dramatic tropes and graphic match to draw connections to the past.
I am seated in a room that is rapidly becoming too warm, in a chair that is rapidly
becoming too unforgiving against my legs, as scene after scene, edit after edit, course across the
screen, challenging the limits of my ability to not only comprehend the narrative, but also the
levels of increasing violence it portrays. Images of King’s beating are crosscut with newscasts of
the unrest that followed. Their overall impact has the effect of placing me in the frame and
produced visceral awareness. The camera tilts and pans frenetically across the action, matching
on movement of bodies and the crush of individuals passing in and out of view. Lindsay’s and
Martin’s creative curation and appropriation of evidence gives me the sense that I am, not only
present, but physically implicated in what I am witnessing. I am a bystander. At the same time,
the elegiac score reminds me that I am watching a film. The associations evoked by the
orchestration of strings suggest that what I am seeing is also a melodrama, with emotions large in
scale and heightened in tone. Further, the melodrama was built around my ability to form
connections between past and present, facilitated by the music.
There is something fundamentally strange and estranging about a film that relies on
reflection, especially for a viewer who has not lived through the events depicted in the narrative.

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I was born after 1968 and, at the time of either the Watts riots or Rodney King uprisings, I was
young and have no memories of the news. What I do remember is first leaning about them when
I was older. What I am aware of is a history that repeats itself. What I have experienced are
feelings in tandem with (alongside, as Trinh might write) the passion that animated these
moments.
LA 92 is somatically impactful. I am sensitive to handheld cameras. I was sitting close
to the front, so I had to adjust my shoulder and body regularly. But this did not matter so much
as the affective and sensory memories the film evoked. I remembered material I had read about
the events juxtaposed in the film, reflections I had learned about, once removed but now imbued
with feeling. This relationship between myself and the physicality of the people onscreen is not
mimetic. However, LA 92 made me aware of my body and its relationship to the environment.
These were feelings of resonance as the film captures the activities of individuals, scrambling to
record the moment or remove themselves from danger. Others are marching in protest and
joining in solidarity. The camera cuts between images in motion, from all directions. While I
am conscious of the practical and dramatic distance that separates me from these events, I felt
viscerally drawn into the narrative as it unfolds. The cadence of the action, the cinematic style,
was unsettling, jarring, challenging. I found myself no longer sitting quietly, a passive witness.
I became focused on the immediacy and urgency of the moment, in real time. But LA 92 took
me out of the present, situated me as a participant in sensory experience that connected me to its
past.
Incorporating the scholarship Renov and Gaines, I account for witnesses, who, in the
present, can feel engaged and curious, while also remembering a cognitive or visceral reaction.
The film left me feeling physically uncomfortable and conflicted, largely due to the disparate

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context it invokes. The recovered news footage from eyewitnesses which compromise much of
its runtime did not have chyrons identifying when and where these recordings were captured.
Instead, the evidence lacked a sense of time and place. For viewers who watched this history
unfold in their living rooms, the content is reappropriated by association and validated by their
cognitive and visceral memories as they recall this news coverage.
This reimagined coverage is highly associative due to the process of reappropriation, its
recontextualization, which has become explicitly and implicitly connotative. Images of people
marching and taking action compel an observer to become involved. Thinking of this desire as
related to a person’s network of memories joined by affective resonance, is, in part, what makes
a viewer’s response disruptive. Explicitly, it puts a human face to a political movement, which
motivates mimicry, a textbook example of Gaines’ political mimesis.121 This implicit desire to
join in protest, inspired by this contextualized knowledge of conventional images, is central to
Gaines’ thesis.
While Gaines writes that a viewer’s relationship with documentary is inherently
subjective and individual, her formulation suggests that these representations relatively
uniformly impact the bodies of spectators. I argue that this reappropriation of content
precipitates a spectator’s own unique reimagining of significance. The reformulation of this
content creates a network of reference points for each spectator, complicating her supposition of
a standardized and predictable reaction on the part of every observer. The climate of the moment
of viewing and memories of 1992 would impact an individual’s visceral resonance in
relationship to this evidence and with the events this evidence represents. I make this claim
because of the score’s tie to melodrama and the multi-referential and dialogic nature of the film’s

121
Jane Gaines. “Political Mimesis.” In Collecting Visible Evidence. Eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999: 84-103.

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style. To ascertain meaning, LA 92 relies upon the viewer’s engagement with its multiplicity and
open-ended format.
These forms of engagement in LA 92 complicated my thoughts about knowledge
production in documentary film. Specifically, the concept of eagerness to understand was
nuanced when I began thinking about the reference points from melodrama in relation to
Renov’s concept of epistephilia. For Renov, the idea of “eagerness” could be intellectual
curiosity, but also involves multiple forms of engagement that are visceral.
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My sense of
disruption drove my desire to imagine new meaning based upon the recontextualization of
archival evidence.
These reference points resonate with viewers without reliance upon a sense of sober
discourse. Instead, what is evoked is a feeling an emotional connection between disparate time
periods. By using a link that is rooted in the affective instead of the purely informational,
Lindsay and Martin encourage spectators to engage with the activity of the characters. This
sense of engagement does not rely on mimesis of the action onscreen. It inspires desire, a form
of epistephilia. It encourages us to feel across time and build intellectual awareness and an
archive of emotional experiences. This is a visceral awareness that comes from a connection
between onscreen bodies and offscreen spectators, as well as bodies in the past and present.

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The idea of desire and its registers being connected to documentary is emphasized in “Putting the Love Back in
Epistephilia,” in which Michael Renov writes: “It is not the turn to the “episteme,” that is knowledge (as opposed to
“doxa” or belief) that went awry so much as the indifference to the “philia,” the love. I would want to argue that an
erotics was always at issue for the documentary, but in the broadest sense Freud (and Marcuse after him) intended it,
as the motor force behind all human endeavour. Seen from this perspective, documentary is a very special species of
sublimation that seeks to work through compelling issues, social contradictions, or private demons” (Renov n.p.).

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Chapter Seven
Contextualization

In terms of contextualization and recontextualization, She, Puppet literally features a
repetitive process of the reappropriation of a popular video game, Tomb Raider, to emphasize the
relationship between the player’s real body and Lara Croft’s virtual one, a reappropriation that
has less to do with the content and more with the documentary experience of being engaged with
the activity onscreen. How to Survive a Plague produces a relationship with archival material
rooted in memory and mimesis to place the viewer amidst the ACT UP protests it depicts, while
Beats Per Minute provides a somatic connection between interpersonal relationships and protest
footage to draw emotional links between spectator and the historical events documented
onscreen. Chronicle of a Lying Spirit takes our somatic associations with the archive and
undercuts them, reappropriating footage to draw attention to the disconnect between the veracity
of an image and the misleading narratives institutional and colonial histories can provide. The
Sea in the Blood reappropriates images of illness to reimagine assumptions associated with
survival and vitality.

She, Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh 2001)
She, Puppet is a compilation of prerecorded motion capture footage from the video game
series Tomb Raider and showcases, in multiple genres, sequences of Lara Croft’s cycle of
repeated death and rebirth. A voiceover questions Croft’s capacity for self-determination
concurrent with this continuous portrayal of demise and respawning. I had viewed Peggy

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Ahwesh’s earlier films at Canyon Cinema’s archive and She, Puppet seemed a good example of
a hybrid documentary that factually uses fictional content to reappropriate the meanings of
evidence to destabilize notions of identity.
Many of Ahwesh’s films, She, Puppet included, incorporate elements from experimental,
narrative, and what has been traditionally identified as documentary cinema. Due to this
blending of fact and fabrication and of formal elements from multiple styles of filmmaking, these
works are not conventionally considered in studies of nonfiction. However, I argue that She,
Puppet is doing work that links the viewer and player via somatic points of reference and
allusions to genre elements, reappropriating these elements in a way applicable to a study of
nonfiction. The revolving dissolution and rebuilding of the body of the protagonist in She,
Puppet, creates polyglot and disparate reference points due to their simultaneous recombinant
relationships which are reformulated multiple times in any number of differing genres, including
horror. What Ahwesh thematically addresses, more so than the content or action of the narrative,
is my screening of the screen-captured sequences of an offscreen player’s choices that control the
onscreen play.
A mechanized body walks across a desert landscape. I recognize Lara Croft’s form in its
pixelated resolution and distinctive design from the video series, based on the game Tomb
Raider. The franchise protagonist moves in a familiar, procedural way characteristic of games
from the 1990s/early 2000s. Expressionless. I am viewing her image taken from a computer’s
screen capture program. No narration or commentary offers context. She holds two weapons,
as a tiger approaches. I passively watch when the seemingly inevitable occurs. The animal kills
her. Then she reanimates.

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Several moments later, a new fight. This time Croft is the victor. And, like before, both
reappear, walking around as if nothing had happened. The voiceover, which I would have
expected to produce an explanation, emotional reaction, or context, instead features Lara
Croft’s ruminations, sounding distant and almost dreamlike, as she contemplates her path
through the desert, her perceived lack of essence and what she may, or may not, be or become.
I grow increasingly uncertain as to why, what just happened.
It seems, so does Lara Croft.
If I were to blink, I might have missed the entire refrain of the resurrection. Though not
defined, the pattern of a woman repeatedly walking across the same stretch of desert, avoiding,
or failing to avoid, the same tiger in order to survive, or perish, is clear. This reinvention with
each recasting creates a monotony that appears at once both rote and resonant. Such instances
reverberate throughout the film. With each iteration, the material takes on an increasingly
ambiguous and complicated valence. Conventional notions of surviving and dying, a healthy
body and physical harm, all are destabilized. The violence feels removed from the action
onscreen, leaving unclear the significance of the events as they unfold.
As a passive observer of this action, I register a sense of anticipation that a better
outcome for Lara and the tiger is being undermined by this cycle of rebirth and death. This
framework relentlessly reenforces an ending that does not end well. It is a narrative of that
portrays a sense of indeterminism which decenters Croft’s body as a stable element of content or
point of reference. Her various identities are reformulated according to a context beyond her
control, and these disruptions are witnessed by me. Ontologically, the meanings that may be
interpolated, constantly are reimagined, and rewrite themselves.

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This sequence feels explicitly not-video-game-y. It is temporally extended and
fundamentally impossible to conclude. Croft’s body represents not only the actions of gameplay
– she literally moves as a result of keypresses, replicated in the screen capture used in the video –
but a removal from gameplay. What I am watching is a reproduction of a game that is positioned
like a film that drifts in and away from an individual’s mind. It is up to me as a spectator to
reconcile my knowledge of the game and gameplay with my awareness of experimental and
psychological film conventions, as the two forms sit uneasily alongside one another, both evoked
in this sequence.
Usually, when I play a game such as Tomb Raider, I spend most of my time onscreen
dying and restarting. I fight the same monsters seemingly scores of times, because my reflexes
are lacking but my determination is unrelenting. I repeat actions and try to revise outcomes. I
engage with the story only as a backdrop to allow me to focus on my success as a player. Can I
time my button presses to successfully complete the task at hand? Can I fight my way out of this
corner? She, Puppet is not about the player, even though the player’s actions are repeated
through screen-capture. The player’s memories of their choices are implicated as a means
through which they are desensitized to larger dynamics at play – namely, the attrition of Croft’s
psyche and the ways in which she is fighting against the player’s actions, albeit unsuccessfully.
In She, Puppet, by mirroring the interior monologue of a psychologically realistic
character, a disconnect exists between what I contextually know of Croft and what I am
presented with as Croft’s reality. Is she aware of my presence? I know this is psychically
impossible, but I am being asked to resonate with the character in a way that is markedly distinct
from my usual engagement with the character in her origin games. Instead of trying to win or
survive, I am asked to identify. My normative modes of experience, a sense of emotional

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distance that is arguably part of like Tomb Raider’s design, is at odds with the structure of She,
Puppet. Ahwesh’s film draws on my familiarity with video games, and then undermines this
relationship. It suggests that there is something else going on – a reinterpretation of experiences
that reappropriate the memories of familiar pieces I have played before. This encounter builds
upon but then challenges these prior experiences. As a player of video games familiar with
Tomb Raider, I come to She, Puppet with a set of expectations. However, by engaging with
elements more familiar from narrative cinema, like inviting certain modes of identification or
lending the protagonist a more robust (if still somewhat abstracted) interior life, there is a
necessary contradiction with open-ended resolution.
As I considered the visceral influence on the reformulation of meanings in the context of
this negotiation of the protagonist’s self which is restrained by the restrictive nature of the in-
game options for her character, I turned to the works of Clare, Kafer, and McRuer. I read their
scholarship in conjunction with Cvetkovich and Field. Though thinking “queer” and “crip”
histories in conjunction with She, Puppet might seem counterintuitive, I argue that the
positioning and repositioning of the body that occurs in this film is relates to an antinormative
way of conceiving both of thought processes and experiences and also of the body. The
physicality of the woman onscreen is one to which we have an unstable relation. Death and life
do not exist in chronological relationship to one another. Instead, they loop, one after the other
in a continuum that challenges the viewer’s understanding of normative structures of time and
temporality.
In She, Puppet selfhood or identity is formed as a result of the confluence of a spectator’s
internally defined self and the mediated object being observed, Lara Croft’s avatar. This
dynamic elicits both a somatic and cerebral response which then may, in turn, challenge the

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viewer’s preconceived notions of selfhood or one’s relationship to others. Applied to an
understanding of non-normative responses, this places bodily resonance, not at the margins, but
rather as an essential element in the of determination of documentary value. Rooting such value
in a phenomenological understanding speaks to a range of possible embodied experiences
centered in the spectator’s gnostic encounter with the text.
She, Puppet’s content is not a stable signifier of documentary value or embraced as a
creative treatment of actuality.
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Further, considering the analysis of Robyn Warhol, the
meaning of the content in She, Puppet is not derived from a telological contextualizing of the
media, no singular line of reasoning or conclusion is posed. The meanings derived from the
resonance that follow from the film’s factual capturing of fictional content are fungible and
open-ended, positioning notions of identity outside the boundaries of normativity. These
intangible contextualizations collectively constitute an archive of knowledge, a documentary
rooted in ambiguity.
In Ahwesh’s film, this interactive network of possible interpretations is linked together
by a sense of cognitive and visceral resonance stemming from the avisual reception and
reception of the media’s implied narrative. I theorize that the fuel to assess this validity comes
from viewer’s desire and curiosity, as Michael Renov poses. Spectators engage with and
reformulate the meanings of these sequences, based upon the visceral and cognitive
reappropriation of the meanings that resonate with their body. These meanings further enrich
their archive of experience.

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In this context, I am using the concept of “documentary value” to refer to the qualities of a work that connect it to
what might be considered traditional documentary cinema. This, in the vein of a theorist like Vivian Sobchack who
discusses this media from the perspective of experiencing the work, distinct from what is and is not considered
documentary.

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Chronicle of a Lying Spirit (Cauleen Smith 1992)
Chronicle of a Lying Spirit is a mockumentary work of experimental nonfiction.
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Made
in 1992, it is indirectly about archiving and archival practices. Through an evocative and
authoritative voiceover and a series of photographs, the filmmaker introduces the viewer to the
narrative’s protagonists. Many of the images feature an unnamed Black woman and her family.
An implicitly white male narrator tells a story that theoretically makes up the subject matter of
the project. As he speaks, the fissures between his words and the portrayals on screen become
more apparent. This juxtaposition highlights a sense of exclusion, as well as an archive
experience which enforces racist beliefs.
The film presents two simultaneous narratives: one that is colonial and one that is
anticolonial. At the level of both the presentation of form and subject matter, this nonlinear
project addresses the concept of Nyong’o’s already false world, where the interpretation of
content is subjective, suggests varying degrees of credibility, multiple meanings, and
significance depending on the viewer. This negates conventional teleological narrative structure
where resolution is the destination of a filmmaker’s argument. For Smith, the reappropriation of
content is the basis upon which viewers engage, investigate, and question the veracity of their
normative assumptions. After screening, Chronicle of a Lying Spirit, I appreciate the political
persuasiveness of the counterfactual. Pitting audio content against visual representation is
disruptive as it obfuscates the possibility of interpolating meaning since the audio and visual
provide directly, dialectically conflicting representations.

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This mockumentary film is usually credited as “Chronicle of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron).” Kelly Gabron is
a fictional figure. Two voiceovers – one male and one female – narrate the film. The real-world director of the
movie is Cauleen Smith, to whom I consistently attribute this work.

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The screening room in Canyon Cinema is colder than I expected, even with the warm
lights of the projector behind me. A stack of film rolls sits next to me – historical pieces from the
1960s, some of which remain untitled, and more contemporary works like Chronicle of a Lying
Spirit by Cauleen Smith. The piece introduces a series of faded archival images, some in focus,
some blurred and distant from the camera, sequentially stitched together with a fictionalized
voiceover.
Through the contrast between spoken text provided by a male narrator and images
onscreen, a tension emerges – one that leads me to wonder why, upon viewing these clips and
hearing this audio, I, as the viewer, perceive a persistent sense of unease. The unease carries
with it a taunting – a reinsertion of images and figures into history that otherwise would not be
visible. This past is invented and appears in sharp contrast to the official record presented by
the voiceover.
The lights come up. I stretch out my legs, pace the length of the room, and stop for a
moment to think. I had heard of Smith’s film, produced when she was a graduate student at
UCLA, and I was familiar with the discourse around it. I had experienced the ways in which her
work was understood to write Black women back into records which historically have excluded
figures nonwhite and nonmale. I also am aware of the labels associated with Chronicle of a
Lying Spirit; descriptions similar to The Watermelon Woman: false, mockumentary, cult,
experimental, subversive. None of those terms resonate with my understanding of the film, and
none capture what interests me the most. My focus is on the different techniques Smith employs
to recreate history. Her approach encourages me to construct a unique conception of the role
temporality plays in documentary cinema and vocabulary to better understand the process of
rewriting and unwriting events.

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The effectiveness of Chronicle of a Lying Spirit is very much dependent upon Jaimie
Baron’s concept of the archive effect. Grainy footage and an authoritative voiceover gesture
toward a sense of familiar visuals and aesthetics from nonfiction narratives, as with other hybrid
mockumentaries. Though the original piece or the noema might be fictional, the narrative
interfaces with the soma of a viewer invoking a gnostic experience analogous to that of a
nonfictional piece of media. This in turn creates an archive effect stemming from this gnosis.
Expanding upon Baron, Smith’s film builds this collective repository or an archive of meanings
within the context of the work, employing a nonlinear teleology. Each of the elements is related
via a network of associations and each informs the other. The film is a compilation of
photography-centric evidence that reimagines a past in the present, from the perspective of a
present that reaches back into the past.
In Afro-Fabulations, Nyong’o’s “already false” world routinely negates Black lives.
Narratives of past lives cannot be assumed to be factual as long as these histographies
systematically exclude tangible experiences of lived Black lives, and as long as the temporal and
spatial landscapes produced by modes of archiving normatively accepted as true cannot possibly
be true, because these records are systematically exclusionary. This awareness fosters an
inherent need to question the integrity of the archive. For meanings to be extracted, the work
should be viewed as a tapestry of truths that questions normative assumptions by virtue of their
negation implicit the narrative’s structure.
Negation, as a form of disruption, relies upon two constructions. The first is the concept
of the single-strand dominant narrative of the voiceover, which emphasizes a certainty, while
also enforcing particular discourses that facilitate erasure. The second construction is the
existence of the conflict between spoken text and the narrative the images tell. The concept and

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the conflict are irreconcilable, as a definitive description that fails to reflect what it describes
only can be resolved via the negation of one in favor of the other.
In Chronicle of a Lying Spirit, the filmic image carries more significance than audio. The
disconnect between the narrator’s voice and the visual leads me to place more authority in what I
see and interpret versus what his explanations provide. This negation also inverts normative
power relations. Instead of a voice of authority interpreting images and straightforwardly stating
what they mean, this content produces the opposite dynamic. The images are the final authority
in regard to reappropriation of their meanings. This reimaging happens as a consequent of the
disruption that occurs when the two narratives conflict.

How to Survive a Plague (David France 2012)
Beats Per Minute (BPM) (Robin Campillo 2017)
How to Survive a Plague is a traditional documentary comprised primarily of found and
archival footage cataloging the work of ACT UP in New York in the late 1980s and 1990s. The
marching and the assembly of crowds on Main Street, the movement of their bodies onscreen,
the way the scenes make me feel and my body respond, are, by Gaines’ analysis, a call to action.
Unlike a phenomenological visual experience where the perspective of the eye of the observer
tracks with the eye of the documentary subject or performer, in How to Survive a Plague, the
body of the viewer mimics, as theorized by Gaines, the bodies onscreen. As black and white
figures faded off and on and off, this visual technique accentuates a sense of activity, compelling
me to join in the event, as a demonstration of the resonance I feel for their cause. The narrative
inspires mimetic engagement. These scenes are intercut with interviews. While my focus is less
on these personal accountings, I feel a greater sense of identification with the crowd’s pervasive

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sense of commitment. My reaction to How to Survive a Plague is predominately visceral. My
heartrate reflects the pulse of the moment. I feel driven to imitate the passions reflected of those
who gathered to protest.
Brandishing signs, protesters march down Main Street (I think), flood onto the sidewalks,
in an unruly force of motion toward City Hall. Momentum courses through the group, and
through me, as I am swept up in the cadence of their feet against pavement and the rhythm of the
refrains they chant. Excitement – Hope – Anger – Enthusiasm – Frustration. Combine into a
cocktail of determination. This display of activity folds into another, then into halls where
people argue.
I am a fly on the wall, observing. From a safe distance, I share their sense of
commitment. Then the camera shifts, and I move with it. I’m in a press of bodies. Now held at a
distance only by a lens that provides little separation between seeing and being a part of the
demonstration.
Later in the film, a series of interview segments capture the dialogues that occurred in
various groups within ACT UP around the cost of AZT in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
Footage shows active protest, appeals to local and national governmental bodies, and news that
captures this process. The images appear to emanate from a handheld perspective, maintaining
a vantagepoint that places me in the action. Interestingly, much of it also is decontextualized.
Either it is assumed that I know the context of what I am being shown or that the emotional
impression of the material is, in effect, more important than the historical context that the
footage lacks. Whether or not I knew much about ACT UP before this documentary, the emotion
conveyed in How to Survive a Plague is clear. I feel a mixture of determination and desperation
that translates into persistent, passionate, and strategic action.

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BPM is a fictional love story tracing the lives of two men who were involved in ACT UP
Paris during the 1990s. Juxtaposed narratives capture the events of the movement and the
undeniable attraction of one of the movement’s charismatic leaders, Sean (Nahuel Pérez
Biscayart). These storylines overlap, both somatically and thematically. The film’s lead is
swept up by the passion he expresses for the cause he protests and the anticipation of the
possibility of falling in love. In the neighborhoods of Paris, bodies march in the streets. They
are drenched in fake blood to symbolize the inadequate or lack of available health care that is
killing themselves and those they love. Inside on a dancefloor, figures awash in emotion and
light, press against one another. Screentime is equally dedicated to the historical realities of the
outside demonstrations and inside to a room illuminated by neon and a sense of hope, where the
promise of romance is being celebrated. Often these two tones mesh together in one scene, or in
sequence, as here:
In handheld footage, two scenes are captured in which different members of ACT UP
Paris burst into high school classrooms. Bearing safe sex pamphlets and brief-prepared
remarks, they are met in one case with resistance and another with support from the instructors.
They proceed to do their best to educate the students, before regrouping in the school courtyard
and asking the principal why the building has not provided condom machines to their students.
This AIDs-prevention activism transitions into romance when, upon being confronted by a
student who calls him a homophobic slur, Sean smiles and kisses his lover. The rhythms of the
protest then shift to a synthesizer-score, where roving neon lights illuminate the bodies of
protestors on the dancefloor, then follow the leads into a bedroom where the two consummate
their attraction. Thematically, personal passion is linked to larger narrative about sex,
sexuality, and local institutional support for AIDs education. Somatically, the rhythms of the

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protest become the rhythms of intimacy, drawing a link across these experiences both
intellectually and physically.
BPM’s blending of fictional and mockumentary or in some cases nonfictional footage
contrasts with the straightforward documentary presentation in How to Survive a Plague.
Though, like How to Survive a Plague, the overall atmosphere of BPM mirrors an archival
recording of actuality. In BPM, the passions of these artists, as activists and lovers, the audio of
them breathing, are tangible representations of their humanity. It is what makes their fiction
approachable and the meaning these moments communicate able to be reappropriated from the
context in which they are being viewed. This somatic engagement that resonates within my
body, is further validated by the associations I make with the music that underscores the film’s
throughline.
Vibrant red lights flash across the dancefloor. As their beams morph into bloody scars
across bodies in motion, the reappropriation of this frightening visceral visual is a reminder of
the fragility of life. Choreography that honors those who have been lost is disrupted by tropes
reappropriated from the genre of horror. The invoking of and attributions associated with the
tinge of red connote more than color. Against a canvas of dancers and a backdrop of crowds
engaging in acts of civil disobedience, the context of these representations both undermine and
sustain the theme of possibilities, manifested in the romance between two men in the community.
The somatic content in BPM resonates with a viewer’s awareness of one’s own physical
self. The undercurrent of simulated heart and respiratory rhythms, their titular “beats,” furthers
this sense of visceral association. Even when images cannot be seen or lack a visceral context,
the film’s score combines synthesized music with the sounds of a pulse, an on-beat – off-beat
syncopation that aligns with a viewer’s breathing. In contrast to the recognizable physical

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attributes associated with protest in How to Survive a Plague, the audio in BPM is intimate,
immediate, and somatic. It does not send a black or white message inviting viewers to get on
their feet, take to the streets and join the march. Instead, spectators reflect on open-ended,
multidimensional lived experiences, considerations catalyzed by the complexity of multi-
referential context.
Whereas in How to Survive a Plague, political mimesis is exemplified, the significance of
movement in BPM is an example of reappropriation. The call to action is a reimagining of
association with the content on screen. The primary difference has to do with how audiences are
engaged, not just in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of the types of questions that are
raised, conversations facilitated, and the range of somatic reactions evoked. How To Survive a
Plague initiates and prompts a specific viewer response: bodies marching onscreen urge viewers
to become bodies marching offscreen in a conventionally mimetic process. However, BPM’s
representation of the physical form, the use of relatable audio, the invoking of color as metaphor,
all prompt a sense of engagement that is reflective of one’s own mortality. Its contextualization
of content ties more closely to cognitive and visceral memory, than the impulse to take to the
streets.
Prompts of a heartbeat align with the music and parallel with the visuals. The context of
the treatments of actuality is left for the viewer to interpret, their meanings result from their
reappropriation. BPM lets viewers draw their own connections between the lives on screen and
their own experiences, and this resonance potentially reformulates existing knowledge. It also
could give rise to new experience if the meanings a viewer interpolates are validated by a sense
of their visceral credibility, even though the connotation of the content is unfamiliar. Prior
knowledge is reformulated, or awareness is created that did not previously exist.

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How to Survive a Plague is based on verifiable information and BPM, as a hybrid, is a
fiction that makes use of archival footage and employs documentary aesthetics. Both
thematically focus on the appropriation of the body as an archive of felt and lived experience.
From a phenomenological perspective, the experience of the body through the lens of the viewer
is reappropriated at the moment of encounter. Both offer a nuanced vocabulary to further
understand the function of resonance in the equation of disruption, appropriation, and
reimagination.

Sea in the Blood (Richard Fung 2000)
Resonant points of reference can emerge from indirect and poetic texts. These
documentaries employ imagery and allusion, drawing upon memories of the past, events in the
present, and imaginations of the future, to construct a discursive argument by association. This
approach to creating intrinsic meaning is apparent in Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood. The
filmmaker viscerally portrays themes of vitality and death, what can only effectively be
represented avisually, by reappropriating the meanings of water, blood, and the body as
metonymic visuals.
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The documentary is Fung’s poetic gesture that reimagines his emotional
and psychological landscape of living with the knowledge that Nan, his younger sister, was born
with and died from thalassemia and his partner Tim has been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and is in
the early asymptomatic stage of the illness. These are themes which cannot be nuanced visually,
therefore must be indirectly evoked through alternate means. These means can be read alongside

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For avisuality, see Akira Mituza Lippit. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). (Minneapolis: University of Michigan,
2005).

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theories of nonlinear narrative to more fully analyze the implications of invoking avisual and
experiential representations of content to document unimaginable experiences.
The opening sequence features a young Richard Fung and his longtime partner Tim
McCaskell in a pool, swimming together and around one another through red-tinted water. The
waves and their bodies lap toward the camera. Embracing their forms, I sense the water ebb
and flow. Its character has dimension, texture. Fung and McCaskell are positioned in the
foreground, in full shots, at angles which distort their images. Appearing to me as though they
are projected through prisms. An altered frame rate draws my attention to the scene’s movement
and increases my perception of depth. The waves their bodies generate feel within my reach.
Later, from a photograph, I am introduced to Nan, Fung’s younger sister. He grounds
their relationship in the experiences they shared. Memories of their childhood together.
Through written communications, I meet Arlene, his elder sister, and learn about her presence
and influence on Nan’s and Richard’s lives as they grew up. Only later, after having a clear
picture of Nan in my mind, after seeing and hearing of Fung's love for her, do I realize that Nan
has died. Within myself, I touch a reserve of emotions built from and connected to personal
recollections his narration and these images have inspired.
An audio description of Nan honoring her presence in his life dissolves in clinical
depiction of diseased blood cells. Ghostly traces of a typewriter’s text appear across the
backdrop of this red draped screen with details of Nan's illness. Fung gives the cause of her
death as thalassemia and describes this blood-born illness. His delivery is cold and clinical,
unlike the joyous recollections of a young boy and girl playing outside in the bright sunlight.
Fung illustrates the symptoms of the disease by displaying pictures of damaged platelets to
viscerally illustrate how this condition insidiously spreads through the body.

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Fung’s message is – Nan's life is a warm, welcome memory for Fung; her death is an
objective reality. A reality which continues to reverberate in his writing to and letters from
Arlene, as they exchange details of the loss of Fung’s partner Tim to AIDS. The contrast and
juxtaposition of emotions leaves me with a sense of admiration for the filmmaker. His
authenticity stems from the range of responses he inspires.
In contrast to a narrative based upon proof which can be seen, Fung’s work does not
suggest a singular message as dictated by the film’s creator. It moves beyond image-as-referent,
where dichotomous moments evoke a range of emotions for which no visual representation
exists. Instead, these states must be expressed through implication, metaphor and
metonymy. The ambiguity that results is attributable to the disjunction between what is
portrayed and what cannot be seen, between what one expects to experience and one’s reaction
to what is profilmically provided. Fung leaves undetermined the significance of this content,
depending upon how it is reappropriated and reimagined and what emotional and intellectual
valences it stimulates. By allowing for this sense of subjectivity, Fung does not dictate how any
individual viewer must perceive his message. But the risk exists of introducing non-
normativized messages to audiences who are unfamiliar with these themes. I believe Fung’s
focus on the fragility of life is why Sea in the Blood transcends this potential pitfall.
Fung’s allusions to water, blood and the body reflect, refract, and inform one another.
Not only are these concrete and abstract images overlaid, but each image has multiple valences,
imparting a polyvocality, as opposed to the more dialectic point-counterpoint of comparing and
contrasting images, each with a single meaning. I argue, Fung uses these techniques which, by
virtue of their textural and haptic nature, activate the body of the spectator and prompt a dialogic
conversation with multiple paths that lead to many possible meanings. By making possible

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ambitious re-orientations with respect to the subject, the filmmaker provides an open-ended
discourse within a nonfictional context.
Returning to Merleau-Ponty, I attribute resonance as a phenomenological dynamic that
occurs when the viewer and subject of the documentary interact, strongly influenced by the
subjectivity of the individual observer and less on the subject matter being viewed. I suggest an
alternate formulation that places the burden of evidence on the body of the viewer, who bears
witness to the events being described and where subjectivity is introduced.
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These accountings
or allusions resonate with an individual’s interior sense of mental and physical self. In the case
where the initial stimuli are unfamiliar, the archive that Lepecki references is created anew upon
reception and perception. The archive represents an individual’s capacity to be curious, to
engage, not merely to resonate with an existing a-posteriori artifact. Because in Sea in the
Blood, meaning follows from abstract concepts like kinship, poetic metaphor and melodramatic
tropes to express the emotional impact of illness, each engagement with Fung’s ambiguous
context holds the potential for new archives of feeling.
While the context of the literal dwells in the realm of the cognizant/conscious and
exterior, Fung is equally interested in his and the viewer’s interior. Images and references to
blood, water and the body convey the unreconciled tension that humanizes Fung’s narrative and
renders it relatable. These allusions represent fragility and vitality, recognizable to most
observers. It is useful to reference Lippit’s writing on avisuality when interpretating this
metonymic imagery. As discussed before by Sobchack, the unrepresentability of death fuels this

126
I use “bear witness” here both in the specific ways the term is used in trauma discourse and in the broader sense
of “to serve as viewer of events which one then can testify to.” There is therefore both a philosophical
/intersubjective and practical dimension to this term, as there is too much of the discourse I analyze in what follows.

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need for alternative modes of representation to express a universal psychological condition
which accompanies the unseen, a state of lack or loss.
127

I suggest this is connected to the Deleuzean notion of the “crack” between the corporeal
and the psychological. Lippit writes: “The crack, for Deleuze, is neither a sign nor a mark, not
even material, but energetic; a movement that establishes a secret opening, temporary and
irregular, between inside and outside”
128
Sea in the Blood provides a forum to express and
interpolate this relationship between the inside represented by Fung’s interiority and the outside
or specifically the signifiers of the experiences which connect Fung to his emotional past. Even
as he recalls his deceased sister’s illness, Nan’s life looms large in the background. His sense of
melancholy is not an end, but rather loops back around to a celebration of life. These sequences
literalize the metaphorical tension between internal and external states which runs throughout the
film.
Aligned with Renov’s discussion of the epistemological effect and visceral affect, Sea in
the Blood inspires a sense of engagement, curiosity, and multifaceted forms of desire. Blood
may have been linked to Nan's and Tim's illness and ultimate death, but it also is a sign of their
life, which lives through the memories of those who loved them. Water brings to my mind
refreshment and restoration, purity and positive health. These elements serve as signifiers of
multiple meanings and connotations beyond the literal and engage with multiple affective
registers.
129

127
See also Vivian Sobchack. “Toward A Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience.” In Collecting Visible
Evidence. Eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 241-255.

128
Akira Mituza Lippit. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). (Minneapolis: University of Michigan, 2005).77.

129
Lawless describes the red hue of the pool as an accident occurring as a result of the lens Greg Woodbury, Fung’s
cinematographer, used.

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A viewer’s visceral reactions to these memories must be reconciled with the disruption
that exists between realistic images and representational constructs. Marks analyzes the
presentation and representation of water in the first sequence from the perspective of haptic
cinema. Perceived as texture, its traditional connotations are challenged. On a
phenomenological level, its tactile quality is abstracted. What is depicted is both recognizable
and no longer familiar. It has been reappropriated. When realistically represented, water is
clear, blue or blue/green. In Sea in the Blood, initially, water is rendered threatening, possibly
dangerous, exemplifying a juxtaposition of known content with imagined context. A subsequent
scene, similar to the opening, features home footage of young Fung swimming with his sister
Nan. Both appear healthy and happy. Their body language communicates the connection they
both share. The water is inviting, not colorized as in the film’s opening. While this plays, red
text describing Nan’s illness, passes beneath their images. Yet, at the time this scene was
recorded, Nan’s symptoms had not manifest.
Katherine Lawless has written that Fung’s opening shots invite personalized
interpretations when individuals attempt to reconcile what is apparent with what is implied. They
become drawn into Fung’s visual and emotional world. These irreconcilable disparities, in turn,
foster a desire on the part of audiences to know and feel more, thus facilitating a multifaceted,
epistephelic curiosity. By stimulating affective as well as intellectual experience and by
producing imagery which provides space for interpretation, reinvention and interpolation, Fung
enrolls the audience as active participants in the process of making meaning of the unimaginable.

See Katherine Lawless. “(Re)Circulating Foreign Bodies: Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood.” Feminist Media
Studies. Vol. 12, no. 1 (2012): 119-132.

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These meanings do not prompt a looking away, as might horror or a compulsion to
watch, as might be seen in a pornographic attraction. Instead, the filmmaker draws upon Jane
Gaines’ notion of resonant sensations that transfer from, in this case, a traumatized or less able
body or bodies onscreen, to the body of a viewer. As discussed by Lepecki, the viewer’s body is
an archive preserving visceral memories. This affect stems from the protagonist’s unspeakable
loss, unimaginable trauma, or response to illness. Even though no a-posteriori knowledge exists
upon which to validate the visceral evidence, Fung’s message still is informative and impactful.
In the context of Sea in the Blood, a viewer’s knowledge is constantly being informed by the
poetry and reappropriation of Fung’s imagery.
The depth of Fung’s grief over the loss of Nan is measured by the emotionally weighted
images he selects to infuse affect into her memories. He says his sister’s death was a reality he
always lived with, “like mangos in July, or Carnival before Lent.” This quote draws upon a
range of imagery to express the complexity of Fung’s past and present emotional responses
which brings the past into the present, while layering in present reactions. At one point, a
representational drawing of his sister as an angel, morphs into hand drawn blood cells that look
realistic, almost clinical. Lawless associates these cells with the abstract concepts of “kinship”
and “circulation.”
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The superimposition of shots underscores the psychological connection between Fung
and the film’s narrative, an emotional discourse which can only be accessed through
representation. As the sketches of blood cells merge with images of emails exchanged between
Fung and Arlene, his other sister, after Nan’s death, the images of the cells also remain visible

130
Katherine Lawless. “(Re)Circulating Foreign Bodies: Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood.” Feminist Media Studies.
Vol. 12, no. 1 (2012): 119-132.

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onscreen, screened at fifty percent. Nan’s ghosted blood haunts Fung’s memory of Nan. This
effect creates a feeling of disruption that pervades Fung’s recollection and recreation of his
exchange with Arlene. This marrying of content and imagery with a nostalgic valence, lends
multiple connotations to these contextually weighted moments. The relationship between the
affective and the cerebral emphasizes the unspeakable nature of Fung’s loss and also the multiple
ways in which he engages a spectator in a conversation around this loss, expressing his
interiority intellectually, symbolically, and somatically. The presence of the cells represents
flow, continuity, and consanguinity. This scene ultimately fades into and returns to the
association of blood with kinship.
The human form as a symbol also represents Fung’s response to loss and longing. By
drawing on Williams’ writings on body genres and Lepecki’s scholarship with respect to
presentation of the body as archive, the body as an archive of experience is the index through
which Fung conveys memory. In Fung’s work, bodies articulate what language cannot express,
the unrepresentability of loss. Human form is first introduced in the opening montage, that of
Fung’s and McCaskell swimming together, their shapes intertwined. Then again in the footage
of Fung and Nan as children. Fung’s mother’s body is treated as a metonymic representation of
his childhood. At one point, Fung asks about her recollection of Nan and plays a home movie
that features his mom with Nan. Watching the screen, his mother asks, “Could that be me?”,
referencing a woman who appears to be her younger self. Her portrayal in the video is tranquil.
The viewer does not see Fung’s mom observing this recording but hears her reaction. On the
tape, she and Nan’s bodies are stylized. Their images are grainy, reflecting an older technology.
Their mood nostalgic, as an homage to their history. Viewing it feels unlike rest of the film,
which was shot in the present. In discussing his mother’s image, Fung speaks with her about her

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memories of this event. His mother’s question, “Could that be me?” accentuates her visceral
engagement with the evidence of her past when it pertains to the self. Fung relies upon these
reflections, albeit subjective, of his mother and others to recall the interactions between himself
and Nan. His mother’s presence embodies the archive of Fung’s past. The media, as an object
which Fung and his mother share, takes on an almost talismanic meaning, as a signifier through
which they might access their shared life experiences.
To further explore the implications that result from this archive of feelings, I reference
Gaines’ and Williams’ writings on documentary and body genres.
131
In Sea in the Blood, no
specific political action engages with a viewer’s desire physically respond as a dialectic
consequence of an observer’s kinetic response.
132
Gaines writes primarily of audiences who
watch and experience moments of activism by mimic what they witnessed onscreen. I extend
Gaines’ theory to suggest that in Sea in the Blood despite this absence of politically motivated
activity, the film does inspire a visceral resonance that is cognitively mimic and politically
compelling. Fung’s symbolic representation of the physical form is reappropriated, and
consequently the meanings and call to action that follow from its interpretation are both
subjective and ambiguous. Observers engage with and become the authors of this meaning, and
through the lens of their individual experiences, their call to action is unique. Without this
specificity, the film effectively elicits a broad range of physical responses that connects with a
diverse community of viewers.

131
Jane Gaines,. “Political Mimesis.” In Collecting Visible Evidence. Eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 84-103. and
Linda Williams. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess.” Film Quarterly. 44.4(1991): pp. 2-13.

132
This formulation echoes the writings of Brian Winston and Tom Gunning in their characterization of epistephilia,
or a mimetic reaction to images onscreen as analyzed by Jane Gaines in her writings on political mimesis.

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Though the term mise-en-scene has many valences in fiction film criticism and has been
taken up by Peter Brooks and many others in the context of narrative, the primary focus is on the
potential of melodrama to empower the bodies of performers and elements of the narrative to
speak to what cannot be literally expressed in words, aspects such as unspeakable trauma or a
protagonist’s reaction to unspeakable tragedy.
133
Rather than a direct call to action, I posit
Fung’s creative curation of images promote, never discursively command, affective viewer
curiosity. This mirrors physical activity by engaging with an individual’s motivation to
cognitively and viscerally weave together meanings out of a tapestry of avisual evidence. This
activity is political in that Sea in the Blood effectively communicates what the profilmic fails to
adequately represent.

133
Peter Brooks. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

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Chapter Eight
Symbolism that Disrupts and Reappropriates

These films blend past and present, familiar and unfamiliar, and archival and imagined
using symbolism to disrupt and reappropriate the contextual representation of evidence. In Blue,
the viewer’s sense of sound is employed to challenge their sense of normative visuality and to
reimagine Jarman’s relationship to his life and illness around the viewer’s reappropriation of
familiar images. Forbidden Love does so to reimagine lesbian life in the mid-century, using oft-
maligned pulp fiction as a disruptive narrative allowing for the reimagination of queer life and
queer experiences. In “what don’t you see when you look at me,” the viewer is challenged to
question their understanding of images associated with violence as they are reimagined and
reappropriated as images of play over which the filmmaker and performer have agency.

Blue (Derek Jarman 1990)
Derek Jarman’s work Blue decenters the visual and prioritizes an a-posteriori
experiential framework, the formulation of which is aligned with Lippit’s concept of avisuality.
All that is projected for the entire forty-five-minute duration of the film is a monochromatic field
of blue in various degrees of saturation and texture. Avisuality, as defined by Lippit in Atomic
Light (Shadow Optics) references that which cannot be seen or photographed, but what must be
inferred by a viewer. This evidence, as a supplement to and in support of the visible, might be a
function of a trace left by a long term or chronic process that cannot be documented in a singular
moment. It might speak to histories of emotional, affective, or traumatic states, impossible to
record and preserve, accurately and honestly.

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In the case of Blue, the work’s documentary value stems from the audio accounts
provided by Jarman’s voiceover, in which he describes what it is like living with HIV/AIDs, and
his progressive loss of vision due to this illness. However, his choice not to focus on the absence
of his vision as a form of loss creates the possibility for each listener to image how AIDS does
not define the filmmaker. The project, notable in this context for its format, often is discussed in
(dis)ability studies, queer theory, and the history of queer and LGBQIA+ cinemas. As Eli Clare
writes with respect to his own experience with cerebral palsy, as Jarman’s health status changes,
the filmmaker does not view the absence of certain senses and sensory responses as a loss or as a
disability. Instead, consistent with the writings of Clare, Robert McRuer and others, the
distinction is simply, “a marker of a difference.” Any hierarchy or stigma associated with what
is occurring in Jarman’s body does not exist, even as he moves from sighted to blind.
I picture a kitchen in the house where Jarman lives with his partner. The scene is simple
enough for him to describe. His voice feels matter-of-fact. I listen intently, as there is nothing
visual to distract my attention. All I am able to see are textures upon a pale blue screen. The
grain of the film stock. All I hear, along with the narrator, are amplified Foley sound effects –
the rhythmic chorus of a whirring projector and, designed with a similar cadence, the pops and
crackles of worn-out celluloid as it passes across the projector’s lens. Jarman speaks as if he
has rehearsed what he will say and resolved himself to its reality. He paints details with his
words. The yellow discharge that surrounded his own eye as he progressively experienced
vision loss due to HIV/AIDs. Describing the gentle noise of the refrigerator in the apartment he
shared with his partner. I imagine and recreate its mechanical refrain from my own experience.
One that invites me into his home. Enables me to mentally walk through the welcoming space
where Jarman is also at peace. Even his recounting of symptoms feels strangely nostalgic.

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Yet as his story unfolds, I anticipate, based on the trajectory of events, that Jarman’s
health is on a collision course which threatens to erode the sense of stability that the calmness in
his tone currently conveys. That awareness on my part is unsettling. His narrative tries to put
me at ease by reassuring me that when his sight eventually vanishes, he still will be able to
access his memories. That for Jarman, and I realize possibly for others, vision is not essential
for their experience of life.
Blue is not just a visual experience, but also a visceral one, produced by the multiplicity
of voices, filling the screen. Jarman is joined by friends and collaborators who recall key
moments in his life. This creates an interwoven tapestry that is constantly expanding and
revising itself. There is a sense of power, fueled by a connection to community and belonging.
As well, a melancholic awareness exists because I, the viewer/listener, know that each of these
presences is someone who was touched and impacted not only by Jarman’s life, but also by his
death, a reality that also is foregrounded in the work.
The film itself, therefore, possesses a curious temporality. Like any project that depicts
an individual who has since passed away, Blue captures in amber a moment in this person’s life
and their networks of relationships. This gives the indexical image an inevitable emotional
weight, underscored by the many who enrich the audio. However, the narrative also describes
illness, and, arguably, depicting a form of in-progress dying. This loss is not necessarily tragic –
the highlighting of aurality recenters the viewer as listener – but it nonetheless is foregrounded.
Jarman’s voiceover conveys his sensory experience and draws connections between his
body and that of the spectator. His words shift the emphasis of the film away from visuality.
The blue that ripples across the screen conveys one color and many tones, constantly shifting and
changing, a phenomenon symbolically representing the rethinking of the visual index. This

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stripping away of customary external signifiers and other images invites our focus inward. As
Lippit has written, the blue in Blue is not just one shade. Mirroring the idea of communal
memory and interpretation, it reveals itself to be not one, but many textures, itself a communal
derived index. What appears to be singular and fixed in meaning, a sole reference point, is in
fact dynamically altered and continually reimagined with each added minute of viewing,
contextual complication, and voice layered into the soundtrack. The nuance of the narrative also
manifests in a spectator’s relationship with the Jarman’s focus on the medium of vision via
avisual.
As Sobchack writes about the relationship between the eye and the documentary image,
the site of spectatorial response exists at the intersection of reception and perception similar to
the merging of the “eye” / “I” which places the viewer “being as” or aligned with the subject.
Returning to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the porous membrane, the eye is no longer the
medium through a viewer receives and perceives an object or evidence. Likewise, in Jarman’s
experience of the world, access to actuality via this membrane is increasingly becoming denied.
Without the reception of visual references to ground Jarman’s experience, both the viewer and
Jarman must abandon dependence on what is visible and reappropriate the meanings of the
information they receive through other senses. Providing nothing more than the monochromatic
screen, the sound of his voice, Jarman leaves audiences with no other choice, but to listen and
imagine.
A viewer’s only means of accessing information upon which to assess the veracity of
Blue’s argument is via the reimagination of what normally is visualized. In contrast to Jerry
Kuehl’s conception of arguments rooted in the visual and specifically tied to photographic
evidence, Blue exemplifies how associations received and perceived through the senses evoke

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associations, which verify the evidence and validate the narrator’s content. Absent this
traditional mode of discourse, the only source of visual clues is the various hues of blue and the
patterns of dots and lines that are discernable on the screen. While Jarman speaks, a spectator
might attempt to discern meanings from these textural distinctions. Albeit limited, this stimulus
provides a haptic connection between movie and moviegoer, consistent with Laura U. Marks’
analysis of a spectator’s relationship with video.
The small-scale invocation of Jarman’s creative choice to include mundane observations
plays upon the notion of quotidian, drawing a viewer’s attention toward commonplace details
and away from the extraordinary physical and emotional challenges he faces on a daily basis and
that are potentially unrelatable.
134
Spectators, after hearing the filmmaker describe the
refrigerator’s distinctive noise, might recall and relate it to their past. To paraphrase Oprah
Winfrey, “Everyone ‘gets’ a refrigerator!” Most people have kitchens, and a kitchen is a
connotative space associated with domesticity. Connotations abound, stemming from their
inclusion, and the associations they generate become a spectator’s points of reference. At
different points in the film, Jarman’s memories of smell, touch and even taste also are described.
To resonate with these familiar sensations, viewers must reference their own contexts, which
necessitates they actively participate in their own meaning-making process and ultimately in the
determination of the veracity of Jarman’s content.
These slice of life moments, while reflecting his humanity, substantiate the vitality of his
life. Following Jaimie Baron, Jarman’s words, because of their relatively neutral and open-

134
For more on Jarman’s symbolism and specifically a meditative interpretation of everyday, though highly specific,
color, see Akira Mituza Lippit. Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video. (Oakland: University
of California Press, 2012).
and Alexandra Parsons, (2018). “A Meditation on Color and the Body in Derek Jarman's Chroma and Maggie
Nelson's Bluets,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33:2, 375-393.

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ended valence, evoke a range of resonances for each individual or differing associations from
one person to the next, rooted in a spectator’s own experiences. Without privileging the visual,
Jarman’s life appears familiar. The experiential reappropriation of the meanings of ordinary
visual referents underscores the political potential of the everyday-ness of Jarman’s narrative.
Jarman’s experience of the mundane is different, not disabled, by his illness.
Though Jarman never physically appears onscreen, Blue is very much about his body,
and indirectly my body, as well. As opposed to a concept of the body as archive postulated by
Andre Lepecki in which the body of performers or filmmakers become a repository for
knowledge based on their associations, in the context of Blue the archival body is that of the
spectator.
135
Jarman’s body also holds an evidentiary connection to experience, and his lived
experience is undeniably part of the film. However, for now, I am setting aside the archival
knowledge of the body of the performer and focusing on the response that takes place in the
body of the spectator.
By positioning viewer as meaning maker, instead of looking to the viewed “subject” ’s
body for validation, which in Blue is unavailable, the validity of the moment exists as a function
of and in direct relation to the viewer’s experience.
136
In the end, what I feel, is what registers as

135
Cf. Sekula, who treats the body in a different context but also looks at processes of indexing and photographs of
prisoners. Sekula’s work focuses on how the body is indexed by state bodies (i.e. the prison system). In the case of
Jarman, the contrast with a visual language that maps a “diagnosis” onto Jarman’s body and associated identifiers
(such as naming him as “sick”) is notable here. Rather than use visual descriptors to reproduce a medicalizing
discourse (or potentially reproduce it), Jarman remaps our somatic associations as viewers, focusing on the avisual
and the metaphorical and representational modes. This is also related to Jarman’s desire, quoted in Parsons, to move
away from the “overdetermined” body used to represent a person with AIDs (Lawrence 243, qtd in Parsons,
Alexandra Parsons. (2018). “A Meditation on Color and the Body in Derek Jarman's Chroma and Maggie Nelson's
Bluets,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 33:2, 375-393.

136
I use the term subject here deliberately to invoke the history of subordination of the documentary participant.
Though I and many of the filmmakers I analyze seek, both theoretically and practically, to move away from such
subordination, I think here the idea of the subject being viewed by the spectator is key, especially in the connotative
context of meaning making being shifted onto spectatorial response. There is a way in which the subjectivity of the
documentary participant always remains fundamentally somewhat obscured in this understanding of referentiality
that moves against subordination in ways that I will outline further.

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valid within my body. My associations, my memories, what I image or imagine, is what assumes
archival significance. By positioning viewer as meaning maker, instead of looking to the viewed
“subject” ’s body for validation, which in Blue is unavailable, the truth of the moment exists as a
function of and in direct relation to the viewer’s experience. In the end, what I feel, what
registers as truth within my body – my associations, my memories, what I image or imagine – is
what assumes archival significance.

Forbidden Love (Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman 1992)
Forbidden Love, a documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada, utilizes
affective links to address questions of archiving, memory, and preservation by examining non-
teleological structures from a queer historical perspective. The 1992 piece intercuts reenacted
segments from 1950s pulp fiction with the experiences of queer women reflecting upon those
fictional works. These queer women explore how their relationships to messages and images
conveyed in this literature and in media furthered or complicated their sense of identity and own
community. They speak to having access to texts that shaped their understandings of what it
meant to be queer in the mid-twentieth century.
This relationship between a viewer’s identification with the film’s narrative and the
observer’s perception relates to an analysis of normativity similar to Jones’s discussion of
“seeing differently” in her 2012 book of the same title. Specifically, Jones’ conceptualization of
anamorphism is a key to discussing this relationship.
137
Jones writes, “we must still account for
identification (if not ‘identity’ in the 1970s sense) in acknowledging how we interpret and give

137
See endnote 44, Chapter Two.

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value to art or visual culture.”
138
Anamorphism, to appear normative, requires that a work of
visual art, and by extension film or a game, be seen from a singular perspective. According to
Jones, this singular vantagepoint is a form of distortion that only allows art to be viewed
“correctly” from one subject position, as in Housing Problems. As discussed earlier, in
Grierson’s documentary, literally a viewer has to observe from the angle the narrator dictates, or
the images look wrong.
139

Revisiting Housing Problems, positioned behind the camera as I visually travelled the
streets, the filmmaker structured my experience so that I might support the government’s planned
solution. Any deviation from that virtual path would result in, according to the logic of
anamorphic design, a fundamental mis-recognition of the text. In other words, I would be seeing
it incorrectly. In this context, in “seeing differently,” I would be approaching the
problem/solution from an alternate position, referencing Sara Ahmed’s discussion in queer
phenomenology.
140
My stepping away from the camera or choosing a different subject position
allowed me to question what made the film’s perspective appear correct and challenge the
systems of authority that curated this narrative.
In Forbidden Love, the past is an archive of evidence, a source that validates the
existence of otherized groups that might have been unknown to queer individuals growing up
insulated and isolated in their respective neighborhoods. Through this genre of pulp literature,
many learn about vibrant gay communities in Greenwich Village, about the history of the bars

138
Jones, Amelia. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification in the Visual Arts. (New York:
Routledge, 2012) 1.

139
See endnote 44, Chapter Two.

140
See discussion of Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). in Chapter One.

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and centers of gay and lesbian activity that are by implication still alive and “well” in New York.
Though fabricated, these novels motivated readers to imagine what their lives would be like if
they moved to the city, and their fictional protagonists serves as role models, guides into this
world. Forbidden Love thematically explores this intersection between fact – the lives of this
audience, and fiction – the pulp content that affectively relates to their lives. It is about the
process of constructing an emotionally resonant narrative the serves to disrupt assumptions
related to the place of gays and lesbians in society place, reappropriate their sense of self-worth
and engage with their imagination to envision a life of possibilities.
I screened Forbidden Love twice in an academic setting, once as an undergraduate when I
was eighteen, new to the worlds of documentary studies and queer theory, and then again as a
graduate student, older (maybe a bit wiser), more well-viewed and well-read. I understood the
film to contain a capacious romp through a fictious world, but also an homage to a history that
for most viewers was unknown, populated with comic book referents that are ambiguous, that
rely specifically upon a-posteriori knowledge. The interstitial segments, fictionalized
temporality that are simultaneity past as present, made me wonder how time and space could
stretch back into a history that I was not part of and forward into a context of scholarship and
present experience to which I could relate.
141
As I watch Forbidden Love, I formulate a narrative
of affective recollection, consistent with constructions both of loss and reclamation.

141
This resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s writings on temporality the idea of being transported to a “time before my
time”: “I make contact with time and learn to recognize its flow in my ‘field of presence,’ taken broadly to include
this current moment that I spend working, along with the horizon of the day that has already gone by behind it and
the horizon of the evening and the night out in front of it. The distant past, of course, also has its temporal order and
a temporal relation to my present, but only insofar as it itself has been present, insofar as it was ‘in its time’
traversed by my life, and insofar as it has been carried forward until now” (Merleau-Ponty, 438). This notion that
time is a flow which carries with it traces from the past as well as present, and that the past and present can inform,
constitute and influence one another experientially is a key concept that influences the way I connect
polytemporality to this paper.

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A highway, the kind of space that stretches across the horizon and extends into forever, if
you let it. An old sedan, worn by time and chipped by use, kicks up dust trails. The sedan is red,
as is the coat of the female passenger, a young woman of eighteen, whose gaze fixes outside the
window and who looks back, toward something she remembers and that we cannot see. My gaze
– the camera’s gaze, I should say – does not follow her. It stays distant, near the shoulder of the
male driver, near the radio that plays a song that gives a clue to what is on the woman’s mind.
The song, a teen-tragedy piped through an aging speaker that crackles and fades, gives me the
referential vocabulary I need, and the impression to understand, what I cannot see:
“Tell Laura I love her
Tell Laura I need her
Tell Laura not to cry
My love for her will never die […]

Tell Laura I may be late
I’ve something to do that cannot wait…”

Further along in the story, the women in red, now buttoned-down in long coat and
moving with an awkwardness that reveals her reticence, enters a lesbian bar for the first time. I
now know her to be our protagonist, and I now know her name to be Laura. She almost
immediately is seen by a second woman at the bar, who moves with exponentially more
confidence and approaches her with clear intention and expectation. She asks Laura, “where
are you from?” Laura responds, “nowhere.” The second woman answers, “Yeah, I’ve been
there, too.” Thus, in a few lines of stock dialogue and a self-conscious tone of pulpy excess, the
film-within-a-film’s core romance is born.
The screen goes dark, the lights come up, and the professor of my Queer Theory seminar
faces a room of undergraduates, wanting to know what we thought about the film. Most students
speak with lively engagement about the range of interviewees, the excitement of hearing about

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early gay bars and at Forbidden Love’s detailed recounting of complex gay and lesbian
relationships. This reaction is offset by some who feel scenes are too campy, too stilted, too
overdetermined. They reference dramatically reenacted moments. Scored with period-
appropriate pop music, these sequences come across as being stilted and consciously
melodramatic, written with the kind of so-jarring-it’s-musical tone readily identifiable from pulp
fiction of the mid-century. I wanted to understand why to some members of my class the quality
of “too-much-ness” had felt so intentional, while also being intriguing. So as a Ph.D. candidate
in my analysis of this self-conscious quality, I discuss what makes these interstitial segments
indicative of a particular type of referentiality.
The year is 2018, and I am reviewing readings and screenings for my qualifying exams,
which has led me back to Forbidden Love, and also motivated me to hunt down the six books of
the “Beebo Brinker Omnibus” from ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive at USC Libraries,
where I have been interning and volunteering for the past four years. My supervisor, seeing me
arriving, is happy to lend me the pulpiest pulp fiction the archive has, fiction that now forms its
own library section in my apartment, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic barred me from
returning to ONE and placing the books in their rightful place. Now they are out of place and
out of time, in a way that feels strangely appropriate, sitting alongside An Archive of Feelings in
a literalization of the metaphor that the film Forbidden Love enacts. The books have that same
kind of weighted, dated prose that carries with it the perhaps impermanence of having been
written in and for the 1950s and 1960s. But in the references and allusions, I find connections
between the documentary film and theory I had been reading, and the language for these fictional
segments.

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“Over the gulf of years and the famous ‘well of loneliness.’”
- Ann Bannon, Journey to a Woman, n.p.
This quote itself is an extract from the end of the second-to-last book in the series and
contains within it the technical frameworks that both exemplify how Bannon’s own work looks
backward and forward, and how Forbidden Love inspires its viewers to do the same. Layering
direct meaning and indirect implication, Bannon’s quote alludes to past fiction. Forbidden Love
similarly encourages those familiar with historical reference points to reach back into their lived
or learned memories of these pieces to understand the larger significance of an affective past.
This past, I think it must be said, is a fundamentally hopeful one, even if tinged with melancholy.
That is why the use of the phrase “well of loneliness,” the quotation in Bannon’s quote, bears
such significant weight.
Well of Loneliness, written in the early twentieth century by Radclyffe Hall, is associated
by Heather Love with early modernist queer literature of melancholy. The book questions what
today might be characterized as queer(ed) sexuality and gender presentation. Offloaded onto the
protagonist is a heavy burden of shame, culminating in tragedy. An embedded sense of
difference that, in the book’s logic, can only be understood as “deviance.” Love examines this
work as a problematic “object” to be reclaimed in the annals of queer theory, and Bannon,
writing much earlier and in a less academic format, might be interpreted as making an argument
about this literature of melancholy.
142
Specifically, Bannon’s use of Hall’s phrase acknowledges
this work as a key entry point for understanding queer experience of many women in the early
twentieth century.

142
Whether or not Bannon actually read The Well of Loneliness, my interest is in the hypothetical connection
between the two literary works, through this strikingly evocative phrase.

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But her reference to Hall is cheeky, in the context of a woman mourning the loss of her
first love, not to death or marriage, but to time (the woman is question is named Laura and she
simply has moved to New York, seeking her fortunes in Greenwich Village). The “well of
loneliness” reference therefore might be understood to say, at once, “I know there was a past of
queer literature before me,” and “this is a new literature born not of shame and loss, but of
connections lost and gained and survivability.” This tension is an allusion to the past and a move
forward into the present. This was the theme and the perspective from which I analyzed
Forbidden Love.
I look to queer theory and theorists to analyze the relationship of the disruption and
reappropriation of alternatives narratives to the determination of the documentary form. Instead
of a teleological structure in which a single question, or problem, is introduced then eventually
resolved, works such as Forbidden Love incorporate ambiguous references to engage a viewer
without offering solutions. They also intervene in the argument implicit in Jerry Kuehl and John
Grierson’s definitions of truth claims and documentary. Fernie and Weissman offer a-posteriori
knowledge that can be accessed by a viewer in an edifying way.
Young considers the notion of a woman's experience as distinct from the universal
subject. She and other feminist phenomenologists after her, posit a relationship between the
soma and noema that holds the unique perspective of women at the center of her experience in
relationship to the world. I incorporated aspects of feminism theory differently, as my notion of
phenomenology does not rely upon a gendered binary or upon the social category “woman” on
which much of feminism phenomenology depends. I recognize the importance of
acknowledging, as Young might write, the requirements of childcare or other considerations
unique to traditionally feminized or female gender roles change the way one is able to sit at Sara

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Ahmed’s desk.
143
In my use of feminist phenomenology, I am less focused on the category of
the sitters, and more on the position of their bodies relative to the desk. Queer feminist
phenomenology for me is one that explicitly does not rely upon the experiences of bodies in the
world, only in orientation relative to those experiences, as Ahmed writes, away from dominant
modes of being (i.e. heteronormativity, but also gender norms, norms around ability, etc.).
The teleology in the context of Forbidden Love in relation to content can be considered
temporally. In theorizing a queer and feminist approach to contextualizing evidence as
experiential, I draw from the ways in which Jones reimagines Merleau-Ponty’s existential
phenomenology via a lens of Jones calls “queer feminist durationality.” Drawing from queer
theorists like Freeman, queer feminist durationality is a reconceptualizing of the relationship
between viewer and viewed subject and the interpolation of past and present experiences. As
these two timeframes conflate in works like the fiction pulp in Forbidden Love or the fabricated
art in The Fae Richards Photo Archive, durationality refers to the conceptional interval when
gnosis manifests.
Jones references queer time and constructions of the self is Seeing Differently,
contrasting her phenomenological reading with the phenomenology of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, who suggests that understanding the other from the perspective of the self is part of
phenomenological meaning-making.
144
I follow Jones in interpreting the concept of relating the
other to the self, using the self as a starting point and denying the spectator agency, thereby

143
Referencing my discussion of Queer Phenomenology (2006) in Part One. Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
144
Amelia Jones. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification in the Visual Arts. (New York:
Routledge, 2012).

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reaffirming systems of control on the part of the filmmaker.
145
Also like Jones, I read Hegel non-
binaristically. Jones understands Hegel not to be suggesting a linear master/slave relation
between filmmaker and viewer. Underscoring a self and other dynamic in Hegelian
phenomenology, however, reifies a system of control which denies the spectator agency.
146
The
repositioning of viewer as meaning-maker, in contrast, is anti-Hegelian and consistent with
Jones, in that it does not figure a relationship between self and other, but rather, to slightly
reimagine the phrase that Jones uses to title her 2006 book, a way of reimagining self and image
as co-constitutive.
147

Drawing from the idea that “Queer is the impossibility of a meaning or subject staying
still,” I follow Jones’ use of the term queer to indicate a way of seeing and experiencing work
that dissolves conventionally held binary modes of thought rooted in fixed expressions and
divisions (i.e. active/passive, meaning-maker/meaning-receiver).
148
Instead of figuring the
viewer as receiver of knowledge and filmmaker as arbiter of that knowledge in a linear power
relation (i.e. the filmmaker has power, the viewer passively receives information), Jones draws
from the Hegelian complication to this binary, suggesting more of what I argue can be thought of
as a dialogic exchange, in which viewer and filmmaker share in meaning making and production.
I also draw from Jones’ use of “touching across time” (the notion that a queer durationality or a
queer conception of time where at the moment of gnosis past and present are interpolated) can

145
For Hegel and imperialism in Jones, see Amelia Jones. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification
in the Visual Arts. (New York: Routledge, 2012). 37.

146
For Hegel and imperialism in Jones, see Amelia Jones. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification
in the Visual Arts. (New York: Routledge, 2012). 37.

147
Amelia Jones. Self/Image. (New York: Routledge, 2006).
148
Amelia Jones. Self/Image. (New York: Routledge, 2006). 174.

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have unique political implications, especially when considering communities and individuals
who, on the basis of nonnormative sexual and gender identification, have been violently
oppressed or erased from dominant records. The ability to see past and present simultaneously,
therefore, and in a tactile way rooted in affective relationality, as well as cerebral
conceptualization, is key to accounting for a past felt as much as cognitively known and to, as
Jones writes, avoid repeating violent acts of the past in the present.
Applying Freeman’s constructions of chrono-normativity as it relates to how the body
internalizes and processed time and space in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(2010), Forbidden Love’s work inspires a viewer to think backward into history to understand
the progression forward through the plot that is consciously anti-normative in its construction.
149

Love writes about the “look backward” as governing “myth” that is prevalent in a great deal of
queer literature. It has been a dominant influence as to how being queer, specifically gay and
lesbian sexuality, is perceived in the "modern” (twentieth) century. Looking backward refers to
negative stereotyping of queer experience and queer life. This myth is based upon the
conception that melancholia and tragedy are inextricably bound up in a certain experience of
queer history. Love also writes about characters in literature, from Lot’s wife to Orpheus in the
Orpheus and Eurydice myth, whose act of looking backward is linked not only to tragedy but, to
extend her reasoning slightly, to a rejection of normative modes of experience and proscribed
courses through the world.
I examine the look backward from the perspective of what happens when an alternative
past is depicted as influencing, not determining, the present. I argue that this formulation is more

149
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
2010).

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reciprocal that omnidirectional, that my focus is on the past, albeit tragic, as an archive of
memories whose contents is reappropriated with the infusion of new context stemming from
present experiences. This suggests that the temporal relationship of past and present looks both
back and forward, that this dynamic engages with the process of narrative production that is
constantly and continuously reformulating. To flesh out this relationship, I draw upon works
related to Love’s, stopping at Cvetkovich’s 2002 book An Archive of Feelings. The Archive of
Feelings addresses the internal narratives a viewer maintains and draws upon when
contextualizing traumatic and tragic events. These archives, those that engage in memories of
queer or queered pasts, often are based in discourses of tragedy. The experience of viewing
Forbidden Love has the potential to disrupt the myth that perpetuates this premonition that queer
suffering is an inevitability. Through an appropriation of this tragic past, the narratives of queer
present lives can be reimagined.
Reflecting upon Forbidden Love in this context, I think back to the fidgeting discomfort
of my classmates, who were unsure as to how to characterize the pulpy segments of the film.
Moments represented a patchwork of meanings that did not reveal themselves denotatively, nor
do they diminish the strangeness of this narrative. Through a look back and forward, Forbidden
Love’s Laura can be read as Ann Bannon’s Laura. The scene at the train station echoes the
ending of Bannon’s first book in the Brinker Omnibus, in which her Laura leaves that first love
(the one who laments via “well of loneliness”) at a similar station on her way to the city. The
segment is at once dated and timeless, encouraging a viewer to think about the past as more than
a prelude to the present. Given the constant contextualization of these experience, neither
predicts the other.

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When I considered the students’ responses to Forbidden Love in the context of Love’s
reference to melancholy as an affect that looks backwards and feels backward, I perceived they
were reacting to three divergent temporal reference points being invoked. In the design of the
film, certain sequences set in 1992, viewed in 2012, felt stilted. The implicit and disparate
comparison of 1992 performances with 2012 standards of naturalistic film performance might
have been unsettling. Finally, in the context of other contemporaneous 1992 films, along with
Bannon’s work published in 1959, the juxtaposition of these sources might have been
unrelatable. I pose Forbidden Love suggests an alternate modality through which attachment can
be figured. By producing multiple reference points that allow a range of entry points into the
material, this open-ended structure, not only creates many opportunities for resonance, it
generates an interpretation that is not foundationally defined by tragedy or teleology.
While Love recognizes the non-teleological spatialization of affect, this idea of the
backward and forward look still suggests a linear structure, indicative of more traditional
dialectic media and in contrast to the direction in which dialogism and multiplicity operate in
Forbidden Love. The affect in Fernie’s and Weissman’s work, in addition to moving forward
and backward, also shifts laterally by appealing to a viewer’s context. These temporal references
inform a sense of reciprocal looking, in the same way that Love remembers and I reappropriate
attachment to stories of queer melancholy. By utilizing a narrative format and one which has
evocative associations to other media, Forbidden Love is an example of nonfiction that makes
creative use of history by interweaving fictional reference points into its fabric. This blend of
content and context encourages both linear and nonlinear engagement, which in turn produces
new sets of meanings, and in the case of Forbidden Love enables viewers to see and see
themselves differently.

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As my investigation began with the work of Zanele Muholi, it is only appropriate that it
end there, as well. The 2008 performance piece “what don’t you see when you look at me,”
directed by and featuring Muholi, is a media recording of experimental dance that encompasses
and incorporates many of the theories of appropriation and disruption that so far have been
analyzed. In a specifically symbolic register that transforms content as something new, Muholi’s
argument engages in an open-ended dialogue with the viewer based on shared points of
reference. In the vein of the Socratic method, during the Q & A section after a discussion of the
project, a faculty asked me what drives the documentary value of…

“what don’t you see when you look at me?” (Zanele Muholi 2008)
In 2008, Zanele Muholi recorded a video performance piece entitled, “what don’t you see
when you look at me?” The performance reflects the politics of personal agency, as Muholi
reappropriates the meanings of ordinary objects to symbolically reimagine traumatic atrocities
that stain South African history. In doing so, what is not seen, what is only imagined, is a
disruption of authority wielded by those who commit the crime of necklacing against
LGBTQIA+ Black South African communities. More than taking a life, necklacing describes
the action of forcing an individual’s upper body through a tire, rimming the neck. But this
necklace binds both shoulders and arms. Next the tire is filled with gasoline and set on fire, at
which point the person burns alive. Those who committed these crimes were not, and still are
not, often prosecuted. The crime itself is not openly talked about, implicitly referred to, or
recorded in formal repositories of South African history.
150
These atrocities took place before

150
See Helene Strauss. “Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in
Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi,” Safundi, 15:4, 471-49. (2014).

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1997, during Apartheid, and continue to this day, common in townships and cities across the
country. Born in the township outside Durban, Muholi is a Black LGBTQIA+ South African,
and this narrative is part of Muholi’s history.
Beyond a concerted effort to deny or bury the actuality of this atrocity, I believe this lack
of the formal mention of necklacing speaks to the difficulty of honestly portraying rupture,
uncertainty, and the fear that exists in the LGBTQIA+ Black South African communities.
151
By
design, Muholi’s cooptation of a tire, feathers and sausage give voice and expression to the
silence and absence of historical references, in contrast to modes of representation that draw on
this same Apartheid and post-Apartheid period and overlooks this history. This disjunction
drives much of my interest in and engagement with the artist’s work. The references to “you” /
“eye” and “me” / “I” in Muholi’s title suggest a relationship that invites the former to engage
with the latter. I accepted this invitation and watched this piece on YouTube via my laptop, in
2012.
Against nothing but a white backdrop, Zanele Muholi dances. Wearing a feathered boa
that drapes the body. Dominating a giant sausage. Ducking through and around a suspended
tire. I realize in the moment and later recognize the significance of these three connotative
props. In voiceover, Muholi repeatedly invocates the words “I ache for you,” the title of a poem
by Yvonne Onakeme Etaghene. The cadence of the recitation is even, evocative and
synchronized to the motions of Muholi’s the dance. The performance is meditative and
deliberate, while also playful.

151
This opinion is supported by the work of Kylie Thomas, who has written about Zanele Muholi in conjunction
with Bernie Searle and both artists’ desire to counteract the fear and violence usually associated with necklacing by
reappropriating imagery of tires.

For South Africa as “Rainbow Nation,” and how Muholi, Searle and others offer counter or contrasting narratives to
this: Jacklyn Cock and Alison Bernstein. Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations: Conversations About Difference in the
U.S. and South Africa. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

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The visible aesthetic of the white wall which highlights the artist’s movements is
undeniably bright and uniform. Given its absence of detail and distraction, my focus is on
Muholi’s form, the tire, feathers, and sausage as the dance plays out. These elements of the
visual narrative are what I see, and only what I see. In the absence of context, as I watch, I am
curious about their meanings, significance, and what I am being asked to interpolate.
“what don’t you see when you look at me?” introduces me to a vocabulary that harnesses
the power of context to actualize what has not been preserved in conventional archives. This
awareness occurs at multiple levels. First, in the context of Muholi’s performance, as a Black
South African during Apartheid, the movements of the dance and the affect they evoke resonate
as an archive of feeling. Next, in the context of my interpretation and interpolation, I read
significance into the artist’s choreography and control over props in relationship to this history.
Were it not for my knowledge of Apartheid and post-Apartheid experiences of LGBTQIA+
South Africans living in townships, I would have limited context to draw upon beyond a tire’s,
feathers’, and a sausage’s respective conventional associations and practical uses. Finally, when
both these contexts are juxtaposed, Muholi’s message, as it is dynamically defined by my active
participation in the determination of meaning, feels very personal.
In Muholi’s work, there are two bodies being interrogated and examined. The first is that
of the Black South African queer performer, as living evidence of this history. The second is the
body of the viewer as an archive of the representations secured in the body’s non-extant archives.
“what don’t you see when you look at me?” places two physical experiences in conversation.
The first is Muholi’s physical experience of dance, and the second is a viewer’s ability or
inability to emotionally, intellectually, and viscerally connect with that experience through what
they do not see.

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As Helene Strauss has written when describing the work of Black artists working in
South Africa post-Apartheid, specifically Zanele Muholi and Berni Searle, “what don’t you see
when you look at me?” takes images of violence and reclaims them as representational to be
controlled and manipulated, granting agency to the performer. Strauss, as an example, refers to
the tire which is associated with the execution of necklacing and reimagines it as
nonthreatening.
152
Searle records a series of burning tires swinging from trees, as a metonymic
allusion to this horrific practice wrought at the time of Searle’s installation art.
153

While Searle’s images are aesthetically arresting, Muholi’s performance defiantly refuses
to directly refer to this ritual killing. Instead, the tire is devoid of signifiers that might represent
this practice. Open to multiple interpretations, the process of interpolating meaning also
encourages viewers to consider what is not visible. The ask in “what don’t you see when you
look at me?” addresses what the artist leaves to the imagination. In addition, Muholi, in posing
the title of the piece as a question, intentionally shifts this power of authority from artist to
audience. The authority associated with this initiative grants viewers the legitimacy to allow a
space of experience and memory to exist, following Field’s conception of an ellipse, and to
embrace that power, as call to action, to reimagine meanings that fill that void with context that
resonates with and restores this forgotten history.

152
Helene Strauss. “Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in
Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi,” Safundi, 15:4, 471-49. (2014).

For a broader analysis of Muholi’s photography, see also: Kylie Thomas. “Zanele Muholi's Intimate Archive:
Photography and Post-apartheid Lesbian Lives.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 11:4,
421-436. (2010).

153
See Helene Strauss’ writings on Berni Searle in Helene Strauss. “Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment:
Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi,” Safundi,
15:4, 471-49. (2014).

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By virtue of Muholi’s reclaimed agency, the artist and by extension the viewer seize the
power of authority and the dialogic potential to reimagine this tragic past and lost content.
Meaning and ultimately the validation of Muholi’s performance are determined by the
spectator’s relationship with what the dance represents. If the power for the determination of
meaning resides solely with the performer or the “self” as defined by Jones, for as long as
Muholi remains in control, the spectator will be relegated to the subject position of “other.”
154
If
that were the case, a work like "what don't you see when you look at me?" would collapse.
Muholi inverts this distinction. Just as Muholi manipulates these artifacts, the artist
simultaneously relinquishes the authority to interpret their meanings to the viewer. The political
call to action is this shift of engagement which places the responsibility of writing this history
with the observer.
The political message of awakening a spectator to the traumatic past of Black South
Africans is both indirect and effective via an affective route. “I ache for you” is a direct address
by the performer “I” to the audience “you.” These entities are connected by shared moments of
performing and viewing, while also having bounded and distinct individual experiences. “I” and
“you” are aligned in accordance with the cadence of the poem that registers with me and the
synchronized movements of Muholi’s dance. Despite this resonance, there is a recognition of
distinct histories. “You” is not “eye” in the sense of one being able to substitute for the other, as
in “being as.” This is an implicit reminder of the challenge of achieving an unfettered transfer of
meaning from performer to spectator. Muholi’s use of reappropriation attempts to transcend that
challenge through the use of metaphor. Viewing is disrupted by a sense of epistephilia or a

154
This distinction between “self” and “other” relates to Amelia Jones’ discussion of colonial imperialist control
when reading Hegel. Hegel is introduced in the discussion of Forbidden Love.

185

viewer’s desire to interpret meaning implied in the dance. In this context, newly established
knowledge operates as reference points or that gesture toward and act as a repository of history’s
forgotten past. This phenomenon ties to Cvetkovich’s notion where communal and intangible
artifacts of events and affective experiences which cannot be visually represented are brought
together and preserved.
As Rangan noted in Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary, the
determination of meaning often is predicated upon the assumption that a viewer can empathize
with an “othered” participant. Rangan argues that this dynamic is rarely desirable to validate
evidence because empathy for another’s experience that is unfamiliar to the spectator is an
unreasonable assumption and ethically disingenuous. I argue that, instead of assuming empathy,
which positions the emotional resonance of a spectator aligned with the feelings or
circumstances of the othered, I return to the concept of “speaking nearby” by Trinh, where the
visceral response of the “eye” might not mirror the action of the “I” do to a lack of a common
context, but there is a perception of affinity that relates the two experiences.
155
The context of
the meanings that this viewing inspires is impactful because of the inferences interpolated
through this indirect process of engagement.
Muholi’s performance conveys an aesthetic that at once engages with the artist’s specific
experiences and which produces reference points and modes of address that reclaim this often
unspoken past. This aesthetic is explicitly affective and implicitly reliant upon reviving what
Field introduces in her discussion of Black American filmmaking in the early Twentieth Century,
a “non-extant” archive. This is an archive of missing or in my analysis reappropriated evidence,
resurrected or reimagined as a result of a viewer’s resonance with recontextualized histories. I

155
Referenced in Part One.

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apply Field’s conception of the ellipse and the non-extant archive to narratives that, being absent
from documentaries, must be construed and constructed from the interpolation of evidence. In
“what don’t you see when you look at me?”, this movement away from the visual can create an
alternate record that produces a uniquely affective relationship with otherwise painful, violent, or
exclusionary memories. Muholi’s emphasis is on filling the gaps by reasserting the experiences
and agency of survivors absent from these records and reclaiming interpretative control over
events that historically have suppressed and oppressed them.
This suggests a necessarily affective component to the interpretation of the text which
facilitates specific forms of memory, and where theorizing “what don’t you see when you look at
me?” alongside Field and Cvetkovich becomes useful. An archive is not only of feelings, but
that which produces new feelings which in turn, for a given viewer, validates a reconstructed
narrative of the past. Theorizing Muholi’s work provided a useful framework to suggest how the
experiences of the LGBTQIA+ communities can be brought into conversation in an attempt to
bring back into the light, these dark, and in many instances, invisible narratives. While Field’s
and Cvetkovich’s discussions might seem to be distinct from one another, and while their
scholarship comes from different disciplines, historical contexts, and subject positions, together
they offer a vocabulary for thinking about the relationship of authority and authorship.
Muholi’s “what don’t you see when you look at me?” by its title is a call to action. Politically, it
drives viewers to reappropriate what they imagine, what they don’t see, what history has
overlooked.
Referencing the media analyzed thus far, a relationship exists between a filmmaker’s
authority to curate a narrative that represents actuality, and a viewer’s desire to reappropriate that
representation. “The story you are about to see…” is a presumptive declaration to engage with

187

the narrative’s truth. “what you don’t see…” is an invitation to audiences to determine a their
own truth through their experience of viewing. Both statements involve “seeing” and
“engaging.” Both statements determine that what follows is of documentary value. As Plantinga
and Eitzen suggest, when a viewer watches media that is presumed to be fiction, the question of
the veracity of “what you are about to see” is moot. I pose that both the presumptive declaration
of the validity of content and the desire to reappropriate its representation are how I am
reimagining documentary.
If one were to substitute the word “reimagine” for “see” in each of the respective
statements, taken together, they would define the boundaries of documentary. When I look at
each statement through the lens of phenomenology, the determination of documentary status is
not a function of either the result of assessment or the experience of engaging, but the call to
actively contextualize actuality and reappropriate meanings to create a cognitive and visceral
archive of knowledge. I pose that documentary is not defined in terms of either being a thing or
an experience. It is characterized by both the expectations of truthful/not lying content and the
experience of engaging with this content.

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In Conclusion
Epilogue

For Kuehl, a “truth claim” relates to the content of the media itself. A photograph, a
recording, or another form of nonfiction evidence makes a claim to be true, and that material is,
by Kuehl’s definition, documentary. For me, irrespective of content, meaning is appropriated
from context. When it is implied that “what you are about to see is true,” the filmmaker asserts
that the material a viewer is about to witness has its roots in nonfiction. Whereas Kuehl’s
definition references the ontological status of the profilmic, mine references the
phenomenological status of its reception. In the case of this phenomenological relationship,
attributing veracity to content is no longer a function of the filmmaker’s authority, but rather an
open gesture to engage.
In a time when “fake news” is oft-cited as “authentic fiction,” uncertainty and ambiguity
are the terms de jour of political discourse, I am not suggesting that truth, as a construct, does not
exist in documentary media, nor do I elevate belief as a substitute for fact. In other words, when
a tree falls in the forest, the existence or imagination of the spectacle and the sound it makes is
not my concern. Relevant to my argument is the subjectivity of the experience of being present
as it drops – receiving and perceiving, relating to and sustaining an archive of knowledge based
on watching and listening. The description of it descending and the space where it once stood,
the audio of it hitting the ground and the reverberation of its aftermath, all are documentary
moments.
Whether the space is a darkened theatre, a comfortable living room couch or a curated
exhibition hall, the experience of documentary media is subjective and exists apart from the

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work’s evidentiary content. During the moment of viewing, the phenomenon that determines
meaning is informed by an archive of memories and a sense of looking to a future of interpretive
possibilities, constantly changing, and continually emerging. These self-directed narratives
challenge the authority of polemic presentations and the pervasiveness of normative assumptions
that reflect socially and politically accepted subject positions. I argue that analyzing
historiography as an intersection of subjectivity, referentiality, and factual evidence expands an
understanding of the act of narrativizing that emerges from the viewing of what is predetermined
to be documentary content. When a definitive determination of nonfictional status is no longer
self-evident, the valence of its message is subject to interpretation and interpolation, and the
hierarchies of knowledge and their related modes of discourse collapse.
Thus far, I had reviewed the origins of documentary truth claims and posed expanding
the scope of this domain beyond the limits of the profilmic by recognizing the influence of
context in the determination of meaning. I looked at the spectatorial reception, perception, and
interpretation of evidence and tied in the notion of engagement and resonances with somatic and
avisual referents to allow for the inclusion of what images and soundtracks, alone, could not
fully capture and convey. This approach also legitimized a spectator’s restoration of a lost or
forgotten past by filling in the historical gaps, excluded from dominant records and traditional
Hollywood archives. I addressed the dynamics of engagement, resonance, and meaning making,
centered in a viewer’s responses and the body’s archival reactions to media as referents. I
argued that attributing authority to a work, subverts a spectator’s agency as an author of
meaning. Spectators have the capacity to, as Ahmed writes, disorient themselves in relation to a
work’s truth claims and, by changing their subject position, perhaps queerly, make possible a
wide range of experiences, sensory inputs, and phenomenological frameworks.

190

Classifying media has unintended consequences. While the labels assigned remain
constant, the meanings attributed to these delineations vary with culture, time, and context. In
the same way that queer theorists such as Ahmed have challenged the unmarked categories of
heterosexuality (as well as other categories such as cisgender identity and whiteness) as
normative, perceiving a documentary filmmaker’s claims, not as unmediated fact, but as a
normativizing one-sided discourse, can help to denaturalize them. Consequently, the narrative
that is born potentially questions, disrupts, and reimagines traditional notions of normativity.
What begins as a classification, becomes a narrative, with sociological, political, and
psychological ramifications. In the current media climate, a feature might be viewed by some as
fact and by others as a distortion of actuality, approaching fiction.
Rather than commenting on where documentary belongs along the spectrum of non-
fiction, my analysis of experiential media approaches this form from the perspective of reframing
the experience of viewing. Along with Renov and Gaines, I regard the writing of history as an
activity which is conducted by a situated subject through an interpretative lens and where this act
of interpolation is a function of engagement and results in a call to action. I argue the
reinterpretation of text via phenomenology stimulates an individual’s epistephelic desire to react
intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally to the text in ways that produce a more ambiguous
nuanced and affectively charged call to action. With regard to cinema, this question pertains to
spectatorial response, as documentaries and fiction films alike increasingly provide opportunities
for multiple interpretations or seek to inspire more questions than answers, crucial as I reflect
upon my experience of the influence of media on shaping my identity and its relationship to my
history as I read the Babyloniaka and I watched Shoah.

191

Which brings me back to my experience recognizing realistic representations of non-
normative identity in formulaic fictional images and contextualizing my reaction to narratives of
actualities that no words, no images, could ever fully represent. I suggest that Jones’ scholarship
regarding a spectator’s phenomenological relationship to art and identity also applies to a
viewer’s engagement with content and identification with truth as deriving from a capacity to
find a sense of validation in documentary images, as profilmic evidence and emotional
resonance. By placing the determination of meaning with the spectator and the power of that
validation back onto the viewer in a nonlinear dialogic process, experimental and experiential
documentary can be studied as a queer feminist durational experience.
When audiences are expected to “see” in only one way, their capacity to reappropriate
meaning is limited. Following Jones, there is a “right” and “wrong” angle at which to view the
media. This content can be true or false, but these determinations are made on the filmmaker’s
terms. The viewer might be on a journey, but course, map, and destination have all been
highjacked, as in the case of Housing Problems. Many films encourage a reappropriation of
meaning, and this is where the emphasis shifts from the “I” of the filmmaker to the “eye” of the
viewer. Taking an allegorical example, this is the dynamic I experienced when reading a
Babyloniaka. It is an act of connection and stitching together of meanings. In some cases, this
comes from what Jones considers identification and in others, resistance or disruption with
regard to identity. Either way, the viewer is active in an explicitly phenomenological process
which engages with cognitive and visceral experiences. In Babyloniaka, I identify with the
protagonist based on my present-day experiences and the factual knowledge I have learned of the
past. In The Novice, I can both relate to and resist Alex’s painful journey while also knowing
that it is semi-autobiographically inspired.

192

The notion of reappropriation implies an active relationship between soma and noema. In
the case of The Novice, this might be a genre expectation coming from sports films or coming of
age romance, and in the case of Gone Home, it might be an expectation based on my recognition
of the mechanics of the game that lead me to believe I will gain more information and contextual
understanding from picking up the objects placed before me. In the Babyloniaka, my ability to
relate to the narrative is not from the plot twists of this unconventional adventure, but because of
my readings of feminist themes in Classical literature. As a result of this context, I reappropriate
the narrative and interpret its significance in terms of being a disruption of conventional
assumptions of marriage and stories when they end, are supposed to end well.
Disruption and reappropriation work together in “what don’t you see…” where authority
to interpret meaning is transferred to the viewer. The tension that exists between the Muholi’s
“I” and the viewer’s “eye” is positive rather than disruptive. It fuels the reappropriation of the
symbols over which the artist exercises agency. This agency attributes the authority to turn over
the reimagining of their meaning to the viewer. “I” and “eye” need not be aligned. Instead of
telling audiences “what you are about to see,” the negation in title suggests that the filmmaker is
not providing the lens through which these object and the interpretation of the dance must be
imagined. “what don’t you see…” is a dialogue. The question mark at the end of the title is a
provocation to engage. The images around which Muholi dances become subverted when their
meanings become reappropriated into something playful. This text becomes the viewer’s
vocabulary to reimagine South African history. “what don’t you reimagine…” emphasizes that
documentary is a dialectic experience in which meaning and knowledge are a fluid constructions
in a constant state of reformulation.

193

Which brings me back to my experience viewing Shoah. After nine-plus hours, part of
me was relieved that the film was over. I was viscerally exhausted. The Diary of Anne Frank is
the story of one individual. Schindler’s List is about the fate of one community. Shoah is about
the disruption of my history and a reimaging of my faith in humanity. I felt for the entire
duration of the documentary, Claude Lanzmann never transfers the authority to make meaning to
me. This created a relentless tension between the resonance I felt and my inability to
reappropriate meanings from the images I witnessed and the stories of people that could have
been my relatives. But rather than dismiss this content as fiction, my ability to ascertain meaning
came only after the last frame of the film. It still haunts me today, especially given what is going
on in the rest of the world, as with images from Ukraine. Seeing Shoah through my
phenomenological lens of reappropriated meaning, I wonder how viewers who filter
documentary through a different context of experience might interpret this past and incorporate
the meanings they derive into tomorrow’s historical narratives.
“Reimagining Documentary” suggests the disruptive potential of Shoah lies not in its
content nor in the experience of this content. That is not do dismiss the tragedy the film portrays
or the stain on humanity that remains in the wake of the Holocaust. Rather the documentary’s
significance lies in the tension it generates between what is imaginable and a viewer’s insatiable
desire to make sense out of the world. I believe this could not be achieved in the representation
of the life of a single individual or the fate of an entire community. It takes nine and a half
continuous hours, a length of time that disrupts traditional expectations of the duration it takes
documentarians to make their arguments. It disrupts the expectation of how, from an ethical
perspective, viewers want individuals and evidence be treated. It subverts the desire to
reimagine meaning.

194

In “Poke in the Gnosis,” I have attempted to recast how documentary might be perceived.
By utilizing theories with origins in queer phenomenology and cognitive narrative theory, I
reimagine documentary as a “thing” that is created in the duration when the soma engages with
the noema, when “I” comes face to face with “eye.” This broadening of the breath of content
that falls within the boundaries of “what you are about to see” and “what you are about to
imagine” accounts for the ambiguous meanings associated with dialogic, experimental, and
experiential media. My analysis of documentary challenges the view that facts and knowledge
are stable objects. Because these constructs, be they objective or subjective, only are known and
felt as a contextualization of actuality, their meanings, and the knowledge that follows, are in a
constant state of reformulation. As a viewer assesses the meaning of this content, variable
results are possible, given the moment in time content is being evaluated, suggesting an
ambiguous determination of a work’s documentary status. A “Reimagining of Documentary”
embraces the possibility that knowledge can be both true and false, lying and not lying at any
given moment. This duality is by its nature disruptive as viewers like myself are in search of an
identity that is definitive and determinable, and a truth that undeniable.

195

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Whereas a viewer does not come to a fictional narrative wondering if the material is veridical or whether it might be making a false representation, non-fiction media sets an expectation of veracity before the first frame. When it comes to determining its documentary value, the disciple offers multiple methodologies to formulate this assessment. Two dominant modes remain fundamentally at odds in terms of their respective approaches. Jerry Kuehl, Tom Gunning, Bill Nichols and others base their discussions upon the content’s indexical relationship to the pro-filmic: if an image records an actuality, it is considered veridical or possessing veracity. Alternatively, theorists, such as Vivian Sobchack, take a phenomenological view of documentary experience: if observing media evokes cognitive and visceral associations linked to nonfiction, then that representation of actuality has documentary value. Rooting documentary in the profilmic often privileges the visual and can exclude experiences absent from dominant archives. While determining veridicality based upon phenomenological experience often invites the debate as to what is the truth of what has been witnessed. I pose a theory that bridges these two approaches and provides significant insight regarding a spectator’s relationship to documentary media and the truth it purports to represent.

Accounting for both the experience and the assessment of veridicality and veridical, at the moment of viewing, I expand upon the scholarship of Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology and Tavia Nyong’o conception of the world already false, to analyze how content is reinterpreted and reimagined via the context of a given observer. This determination is performed anew at each instance of viewing for each spectator and suggests that the actuality being represented may be experienced and assessed as both true and false, documentary and not documentary. Such a dynamic is exemplified in projects ranging from videographic essay to video games. By applying my theory via close readings to a spectrum of media types and styles of representation, I argue that when content is experienced, it forms the basis upon which memory and imagination reappropriate the representation of actual people, places and events. Content, once engaged, objectively cannot be experienced again for the first time. It is forever transformed and only can be received and perceived in the context of the media’s narrative and from the unique perspective of an observer of this media. This reappropriation becomes discrete points of references upon which present and future observations are contextualized and assessed. “A Poke in the Gnosis: Reimagining Documentary” is a call to action that manifests in the questioning of so much of what society assumes to be truthful representations of actuality in media conveyed through the medium of the documentary form.

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Six walks in digital worlds: walking simulators, neuroaesthetics, video games, and virtual reality

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Creator Ross, Allison Renée Greer (author)

Core Title A poke in the gnosis — reimagining documentary: a phenomenological analysis of the reappropriation of meaning and the politics of disruption

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema and Media Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 09/16/2024

Defense Date 08/02/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag documentary studies,feminist theory,film studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,phenomenological film studies,phenomenology,queer theory

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Renov, Michael (committee chair), Jones, Amelia (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Willis, Holly (committee member)

Creator Email allison.r.ross@usc.edu,allison.ross@lmu.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112002235

Unique identifier UC112002235

Legacy Identifier etd-RossAlliso-11219

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Ross, Allison Renée Greer

Type texts

Source 20220919-usctheses-batch-982 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu