Reality Bytes: Reclaiming the Real in Digital Documentary

Аннотация

This dissertation offers a preliminary survey of different documentary practices in the digital age. I recognize and discuss several recent modes of filmmaking where documentary and fictional spaces collide and coalesce, modes which existed long before the arrival of the digital, but have been rejuvenated and made more prominent in the digital age. I point to how such a collapse of boundaries is celebrated rhetorically via digital technology to produce a contingent documentary argument made of ontological, epistemological and aesthetic contradictions. The impact of digital technology on the development of such current documentary rhetoric is explored by placing it within the historical context of earlier technological assimilations in documentary (particularly 16mm film and video cameras)