Documentaries and the Fiction/Nonfiction Divide
Queen Mary University of London, November 15-16, 2019
The project has received funding from the British Society of Aesthetics.
Venue: Graduate Center at Queen Mary University of London
Queen Mary University of London, November 15-16, 2019
The project has received funding from the British Society of Aesthetics.
Venue: Graduate Center at Queen Mary University of London
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
Friday, November 15
9.00 – 9.15 (room GC222)
Opening: Mario Slugan, Enrico Terrone
9.15 – 10.30 (room GC222; chair: Mario Slugan)
Keynote speech
Brian Winston (Lincoln), Fiction/Documentary: The Ethics of a Divide
11.00 – 12.30 (room GC222; chair: Jeremy Hicks)
Patricia Holland (Bournemouth), Peter Watkins’ The War Game: Fact or Fiction?
John Cook (Glasgow Caledonian University), What is the Difference between ‘Documentary’ and ‘Fiction’ ?
12:30 - 13:45 (foyer, second floor)
Lunch
13.45 – 15.15 (room GC222; chair: Benjamim Picado)
Katerina Loukopoulou (UAL), Lives on Screen: On the Aesthetics of Film Portraits
Stuart Mitchell (Gloucestershire), We Can Be Anti-Heroes… But Only if They’re Fictional?
15.45 – 17.15 (room GC222; chair: Enrico Terrone)
Elizabeth Cantalamessa (Miami), Mockumentary as Revisionism: The Case of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review – A Bob Dylan Story
Manuel García-Carpintero (Barcelona), Norms of Fiction-Making: The Fictionality of Films
17.30 – 19.00 (room GC222; chair: Manuel García-Carpintero)
Catalin Brylla (West London) and John Corner (Leeds), Documentary Strategies and Cognitive Dissonance
John Ellis (Royal Holloway, UL), How Documentaries Mark Themselves out from Fiction
Saturday, November 16
9.00 – 11.00 (room GC222; chair: Alisa Lebow)
Preconstituted panel: Chinese Cinema Aesthetics: From Fact to Fiction
Chris Berry (King’s College London), Jia Zhangke’s Memory Project, 24 City: Rewriting History and Historiography
Kiki Tianqi Yu (QMUL), Landscape of Mind in Chinese Moving Image: Ideo-realm, Daoism, Fiction and Truth in Symbiosis
Lin Feng (Leicester), Performativity in Chinese Artistic Documentaries: A Case Study of Xie Jin’s Huang Baomei (1958)
// 9.00 – 11.00 (room GC204; chair: Nina Mickwitz)
Preconstituted panel: Documentary Picturing
Bella Honess Roe (Surrey), First-Person-Once-Removed Animated Documentary and the Facilitation of Knowledge Through Imagination
Nina Mickwitz (UAL), Documentary Comics: Factuality Pictured Differently
Julia Eckel (Ruhr-University Bochum), Let’s Re-Play! Documenting Games, Documenting Animation
11.30 – 13.00 (room GC222; chair: Kiki Tianqi Yu)
Marco Meneghin (Concordia), Archives and Repertoires in Moana with Sound
James Peter Moffatt (Liverpool), A True Story Based on Rumour and Hearsay: Deconstructing the Approaches to Scoring the Music for the 2017 Feature Documentary Mansfield 66/67
// 11.30 – 13.00 (room GC204; chair: Neri Marsili)
Stefan Dux and Christian Iseli (Zurich University of the Arts), The Impact of Camera Innovations on Visual Aesthetics in Documentary Film
Michael Grabowski (Manhattan College), Production Artifacts as Fluid Narrative Codes in the Documentary Genre
13:00 - 14:00 (foyer, second floor)
Lunch
14.00 – 15.30 (room GC222; chair: Marco Meneghin)
Julian Koch (Royal Holloway, UL), Perpetrating Narrative: Metalepsis and the Fiction–Nonfiction Divide in Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing
Neri Marsili (Barcelona), Testimony and Deception in Films
// 14.00 – 15.30 (room GC204; chair: Catalin Brylla)
Gracia Ramirez (UAL), An Elusive Divide? Actual Footage, Staging and Reconstruction in The March of Time
Natascha Drubek (Freie Universität Berlin), How to do Things with Moving Images. On Documentaries, Truth, and the War
15.45 – 17.15 (room GC222; chair: Natascha Drubek)
Elizabeth Watkins (Leeds), Fiction/Nonfiction: the Colourisation, Authenticity and Spectatorship of Documentary Film
Zed Adams (The New School for Social Research), The Archivist’s Point of View
// 15.45 – 17.15 (room GC204; chair: Mario Slugan)
Eric Studt (St. Andrews), Virtual-Reality Documentaries and the Illusion of Presence
Inge Ejbye Sørensen (Glasgow), Reality Checks? The Regulation of VR and Mixed Reality Documentary and Factual Content in the UK
17.45 – 19.00 (room GC222; chair: Enrico Terrone)
Keynote speech
Stacie Friend (Birkbeck, UL), Misrepresentations in Fiction and Non‑Fiction Film
BOOK OF ABSTRACTS
| Book of abstracts |
CONFERENCE TOPIC
The fiction/nonfiction divide is a much discussed topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. According to classic works like Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) and Currie’s The Nature of Fiction (1990), fiction essentially involves imagining whereas nonfiction essentially involves believing. However, more recent works like Friend’s “Fiction as a Genre” (2012) and Matravers’ Fiction and Narrative (2014) have put under pressure this conception of the fiction/nonfiction divide. Surprisingly, documentaries are seldom mentioned in this debate, which has so far mainly focused on literary narratives. Yet, documentaries are paradigmatic cases of nonfiction and arguably an investigation of them might shed some light on the fiction/nonfiction divide, which in turn might improve our understanding of the documentary film. In fact, the main philosophical conceptions of the documentary remain those developed some twenty years ago by Currie (1999), Carroll (1997), Ponech (1997), and Plantinga (2005). Despite their differences, all these accounts rely on the standard conception of the fiction/nonfiction divide in terms of an imagination/belief distinction. Yet, if Friend and Matravers are right in questioning this standard conception, then the philosophy of documentary is to be reconsidered as well.
Film studies have a longer tradition of doubting the neat division of fiction/nonfiction when it comes to documentary. Classic theories and histories of documentary film starting with Barnouw’s Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1974) and Nichol’s Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1992) and extending to more recent contributions such as Winston’s The Documentary Film Book (2013) and Nichol’s Introduction to Documentary: 3rd Edition (2017) have also treated documentary film as essentially assertions about reality. But they were far more willing to concede that documentary oftentimes slips into fiction than their philosopher peers.
That being the case, the conference “Documentaries and the Fiction/Nonfiction Divide” aims to revive the philosophical research on documentaries by encouraging a dialogue on this issue with film critics and theorists, as well as with historians and practitioners. The goal is to explore how film scholars can contribute to philosophical issues such as the fiction/nonfiction divide as much as philosophy can contribute to our appreciation of documentaries.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Topics for papers and pre-constituted panels may include but are not limited to:
- Definitions of documentary.
- Is documentary pure nonfiction or can it be a hybrid form between fiction and nonfiction?
- Does the practice of reenactment in documentaries challenge the fiction/nonfiction divide?
- Analyses of documentaries that question the fiction/nonfiction divide.
- What can the history of film teach us about the nature of the documentary?
- The relationship between early cinema forms such as actualities and documentary.
- The specificity of documentaries with respect to other nonfiction images (CCTV images, TV shows...).
- The relationship between the documentary and the indexicality or transparency of the photographic images.
- Have digital technologies changed the documentary? If yes, in what way?
- The periphery of the documentary (e.g. docudramas, docufiction, mockumentaries).
- Is the documentary specific to the medium of film or can we find it also in other media?
- Is the documentary specific to the film as a form of art, or can we find it also in other forms of art, for instance in theatre or in video art?
- Are there essential differences between the experience of a documentary and that of a fiction film?
- Taxonomies of the documentary: the expository/observational dichotomy and other subcategories.
- Animated documentaries.
- Is the documentary a kind of storytelling? What are the analogies and the difference between storytelling in documentaries and storytelling in fiction films?
- How can a documentary be beautiful? Is there an aesthetic specificity of the documentary?
- The evaluation of documentaries: should we use the same criteria we use for fiction films or are there specific criteria?
- Can documentary be objective?
- The relationship between ethics and documentary.
- The intertwining of aesthetics and ethics in the documentary
- The cognitive value of documentaries: what can we learn from documentaries? Can documentaries actually contribute to history, philosophy, science or do they just illustrate them?
Conference organizers: Dr Mario Slugan (Ghent University) and Dr Enrico Terrone (Universitat de Barcelona)
Please send proposals to: [email protected]. The deadline for receipt is Monday July 29, 2019. Speakers will be notified of decisions by Monday August 19. There will be no conference fees.
The conference is open to both individual papers or pre-constituted panels (with 3 speakers each and a chair).
In the case of individual papers, please submit abstracts between 500 and 1000 words (references included) together with a title and 5 keywords. The abstracts should be prepared for blind review (with name, institutional affiliation, contact details, and the title of the proposal in a separate file).
In the case of pre-constituted panels, the conveners are asked to submit a panel proposal including the title, a 300- to 500-word justification for the panel and 300- to 500-word abstracts (references included) for each of the three presentations making up the panel accompanied by a title and 5 keywords. Also included should be names and institutional affiliation for the three presenters and the name, institutional affiliation, contact details, and institutional affiliation for the chair. Panel conveners will be also requested to conform to the Good Practice Policy making sure that at least two of the panellists (including the convener/chair) are female.
In line with the Good Practice Policy of the British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy, the conference organizers have already ensured gender parity among keynotes and will do their best to do so for the other conference delegates. To offset unconscious biases against accepting female work demonstrated in different fields in recent studies, the papers will be blind-reviewed.
We hope for an edited volume to result from the conference. In case of publication the organizers as editors will also ensure that women are well represented.
The project has received funding from the British Society of Aesthetics.
