Although there is a significant tradition of films made by one person, collaboration has long been the dominant practice in documentary film production, and further forms of co-creation are emerging with the advent of new media platforms. This poses the problem of how we should interpret films that combine different skills and different creative visions. What is the place of authorship in such a work? Drawing on a range of examples, including several from the author’s own films, this chapter describes seven types of collaboration in traditional documentary film practice: dispersed collaboration, co-authorship, creative assistance, subject collaboration, sponsorship, complicity, and symbiosis. In addition to these, it notes that the collaboration of the viewer is crucial to the final realisation of a film.
This chapter examines the experience common to many documentary filmmakers of being both outside and inside their subjects. Relationships between filmmakers and subjects vary greatly but they are often close and sometimes all-consuming. In making portrait films, filmmakers frequently feel a strong desire for their work to embody the subject in some total sense, beyond the simple representation of appearance and personality. At the same time they may experience a sense of inadequacy in trying to express the immensity of another person’s life. In this chapter the author uses one of his own experiences of making a portrait film to examine the larger processes and imponderables involved in the attempt.
Noting the shift from didactic films to new documentary forms in the 1960s, the author looks at the various strategies that filmmakers have devised to structure the new material that these forms produce. Although filmmakers generally consider the structure of their films while shooting them, the prospect of editing a large body of material can still seem daunting. Unlike fiction films, the contents of documentaries often emerge only during the filming, and their construction can take many forms, often without a strict chronology. This chapter examines a wide range of structural styles and modes of organisation, and goes on to describe the strategies the author employed in making a series of five films at a boarding school in India.
There are many factors at work in the iconography of human remains. Some of those frequently discussed are aesthetic criteria, iconographic traditions and specific contingencies, whether political (for example in war paintings), symbolic (essential for transi images) or cultural. There is, however, one factor that is rarely mentioned, despite its centrality: the regime of value associated with corpses. Christ’s body is not painted in the same way as that of a departed relative or that used in a human dissection. Artists choose a suitable iconography depending on how the remains are perceived. This criterion became absolutely crucial in contexts such as nineteenth-century France, when attitudes to corpses underwent major changes.
This edited transcript of conversations between an Apache cultural heritage professional, Vernelda Grant, and researcher Bridget Conley explores the knowledge that should guide the repatriation of human remains in the colonial context of repatriating Apache sacred, cultural and patrimonial items – including human remains – from museum collections in the United States. Grant provides a historical overview of the how Apache elders first grappled with this problem, following the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) in the US Congress. She explains how and why community leaders made decisions about what items they would prioritise for repatriation. Central to her discussion is an Apache knowledge ecology grounded in recognition that the meaning of discrete items cannot be divorced from the larger religious and cultural context from which they come.
Both historical and contemporary records of mass contagion provide occasions for visibility to persons who otherwise remain little recognised and even less studied: those who bury the dead. While global reports attest to self-advocacy among cemetery workers in the current COVID-19 pandemic, the psychological complexities of their labour go virtually unseen. Findings on the experiences of those doing such work reveal a striking contrast. While societal disavowal often renders their task as abject and forgettable, those who inter the remains frequently report affective connections to the dead that powerfully, and poignantly, undermine this erasure. Acknowledging such empathic relationality allows us to look at this profession in areas where it has never been considered, such as psychoanalytic work on ‘mentalisation’ or in contemporary ethics. The article concludes with an example from the accounts of those who have buried the dead in the massed graves on New York’s Hart Island.
This article focuses on ongoing contestations around burned human remains originating from the Holocaust, their changing meanings and dynamics, and their presence/absence in Holocaust-related debates, museums and memorial sites. It argues that ashes challenge but also expand the notion of what constitutes human remains, rendering them irreducible to merely bones and fleshed bodies, and proposes that incinerated remains need to be seen not as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of the dead but as a different one, equally important to engage with – analytically, ethically and politically. Challenging the perception of ashes as unable to carry traces of the personhood of the of the dead, and as not capable of yielding evidence, I posit that, regardless of their fragile corporality, incinerated human remains should be considered abjectual and evidential, as testifying to the violence from which they originated and to which they were subjected. Moreover, in this article I consider incinerated human remains through the prism of the notion of vulnerability, meant to convey their susceptibility to violence – violence through misuse, destruction, objectification, instrumentalisation and/or museum display. I argue that the consequences of the constantly negotiated status of ashes as a ‘second rate’ corporeality of human remains include their very presence in museum exhibitions – where they, as human remains, do not necessarily belong.
This article describes some of the techniques museums use to represent the suffering body in exhibitions. Some display human remains, but much more common, especially in Western museums, are stand-ins for the body. Manikins take many forms, including the wax museum’s hyperrealistic representations, the history museum’s neutral grey figures and the expressionistic figures that represent enslaved people in many recent exhibits. Symbolic objects or artefacts from the lives of victims can serve as counterweights to telling the story of their deaths. Photographs can show horror and the machinery of death, focus attention on individual lives or recreate communities. The absence of the body can call attention to its suffering. All of these techniques can be useful for museums trying to display and teach traumatic histories, but must be used with care and caution.
Chapter 1 focuses on the Quinta Normal Park, one of the key sites for the Mapuche diaspora in the Chilean capital since the 1960s: the place where indigenous migrants spent their free time, met each other, fell in love and often started their families. The park, deeply connected with family and personal memories and the relationship with both the land of origin in the south and previous generations, is still the location of cultural and political manifestations for urban Mapuche. However, between 1959 and 1960, it was also the ‘field’ for the first ethnographic account of the ‘urban Mapuche’, by the Chilean anthropologist Carlos Munizaga (1961). This chapter plays with these two levels, defying the detached and impersonal ethnographic gaze on indigenous migrants caught in a supposed process of ‘assimilation’ with a claim for a situated and owned history of displacement, but also creative practices of place and self-making. At the end of the chapter, Scene 1 of the play Santiago Waria is reproduced, in which these concerns are translated into theatrical representation. The Interlude ‘From the Quinta to the Colony’, also part of the play, makes the connection with Chapter 2 through time-travelling that brings the reader back and forth between colonial times, the Pinochet dictatorship, and the neoliberal city in 2018.