Norman Klein is een cultuurtheoreticus en -criticus uit Los Angeles en auteur van The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory 1997 en The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects 2004. Het eerste boek neemt de afbraak van de wijk Bunker Hill in Los Angeles in de periode van 1960 tot 1980 als uitgangspunt. Met een breed arsenaal aan bronnen, variërend van de filmgeschiedenis van Hollywood tot aan romans en ‘docufabels’, beschrijft hij hoe het kan dat een ooit levendige wijk met 250.000 bewoners, die langzaam maar zeker ten prooi viel aan infrastructuur en vastgoedontwikkeling, vrijwel uit het collectieve geheugen is verdwenen. Het tweede boek gaat over special effects en scripted spaces, ruimtes die de kijker in het centrum plaatsen, hem vermaken, richting geven en zo als het ware deel maken van een vertelling scripted space betekent zoveel als ‘versleutelde ruimte’ of ‘draaiboekruimte’.[1]
Tag: real
The documentary real
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 constant renewal and the idea of ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ may be encoded into ambiguous but no less potent forms.