Abstract
This chapter offers a new look into the intersection between testimony and film. It further explores the productive tension between documentary’s constant flirtation with fiction and its drive to offer a truthful access to the historical world. The questions at the core of this fruitful tension and its manifestation through documentary’s own evolution in its multiple modes (expository, observational, interactive, self-reflexive and performative) rest, firstly, upon what has been named in this chapter the “documentary pact” and its promise of truth in its interaction with testimonial practices and, secondly, on how this pact has been challenged in recent testimonial films ascribed to the performative mode: the suspension of a realist representation, the dismantling of the authorial voice of testimony and the undoing of authenticity now work towards offering a new way of producing meaning in the absence of the truth.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture |
Editors | Sara Jones, Roger Woods |
Place of Publication | Cham |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Pages | 209-235 |
Number of pages | 27 |
Edition | 1 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9783031137945 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783031137938, 9783031137969 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 20 Apr 2023 |
Keywords
- Testimony
- memory
- documentary film