Daniels-Yeomans, F. (2017) Trauma, affect and the documentary image: towards a nonrepresentational approach. Studies in Documentary Film, 11(2), pp. 85-103. (doi: 10.1080/17503280.2017.1281719)
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Abstract
This article reconsiders relationships between trauma and documentary film, and does so by drawing on recent affect-driven interventions in fields of documentary studies and trauma theory. I situate these developments against existing examinations of documentary’s capacity for traumatic engagement, which I show have relied on two assumptions regarding representation: the first pertains to the fundamentally representational status of documentary film, and the second to trauma as inaccessible to representational strategies. In response to such approaches, I point towards emerging theorisations of documentary that highlight its ‘nonrepresentational’ dimensions, and, with recourse to Deleuzean thinking, foreground the ways these facilitate direct, affective encounters between image and spectator. Drawing on on-going conversations in the field of trauma studies that identify such encounters as routes into unrepresentable experience, I offer a nonrepresentational account of trauma documentary that extends current studies into documentary’s affective potentials, and sheds new light, in particular, on its handlings of trauma. The final section of the article demonstrates a nonrepresentational critical methodology, which might be taken forward in wider fields of documentary criticism, and which I develop in respect of Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously: this film, I suggest, mobilises images in themselves in order to open traumatisation through spectatorial encounter.
| Item Type: | Articles |
|---|---|
| Status: | Published |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: | Daniels-Yeomans, Finn |
| Authors: | Daniels-Yeomans, F. |
| College/School: | College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies |
| Journal Name: | Studies in Documentary Film |
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| ISSN: | 1750-3280 |
| ISSN (Online): | 1750-3299 |
| Published Online: | 30 January 2017 |
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