I came across these videos via WMMNA. These talks were taped during the symposium The Documentary Real which occurred on October 21, 2010 at Domzaal, Art Centre Vooruit. The event invited artists and theorists to "interrogate the ambiguous relation between documentary film and reality." I've only had a chance to review the two Gregos and Bruzzi clips posted below, which both emphasize the changing notion of the "real" within a heterogeneous media landscape, especially with the advent of the internet. All the talks are available on the site, here.
It has been a number of years that the so-called ‘documentary turn’ has become a frequent phenomenon in many artists’ films. The talk will be a comparative look into recent documentary practices that diverge from the orthodoxy of documentary as ‘factual’ film’, a notion which contemporary artists have repeatedly challenged of late. These artists working from a documentary point of departure use multiple strategies to reveal known or hidden ‘truths’, sometimes weaving fictional elements into their stories. Many of them demonstrate that ‘truth value’ does not lie in mere representation but may emerge even more forceful through artistic abstraction, translation, filtering and interpretation and that nowadays the borderline between documentary and fiction, or reality and fantasy is often becoming hard to distinguish. The talk aims to illustrate that the notion of the ‘documentary real’ is continuously evolving and cannot now be pinned down to a single definition or delineated through specific boundaries. Indeed it aims to show that some of the most interesting documentary practices are those which I call documentary ‘with a twist’, i.e. films that interweave the political with the poetic, and navigate between different filmic categories to arrive at highly individualistic hybrid documentary forms where the notion of realism is in ...
marc garrett