Lecture: We can’t get no satisfaction: unease over the documentary form

The festival’s opening lecture will examine the many layers inherent in making, seeing, and preserving what we think of as documentary film – the ethical, political, aesthetic, and technical aspects. Characteristic of the documentary form is the impossibility of definitively disentangling those different layers. The unease manifests, for instance, in the long-standing discourse on concepts such as truth, reality, and document. Nomenclature drawing on the term “non-fiction” – originating as a negation and thus a mere counterpart – testifies to the challenges for academia as well as for archival cataloguing. Instead of despairing at irresolvable documentary issues, this paper recommends emphasizing the nexus – the perpetual ambiguity and complexity – when engaging with documentary material in cinematic, academic, and archival practice.