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[Commlist] Visible Evidence XXVIII

Mon Dec 20 23:22:43 GMT 2021





The Visible Evidence XXVII took place in Frankfurt last week and much appreciation is due to its organisers Laliv Melamed and Vinzenz Hediger and their team. It was a generative and fascinating event. Thank you so much!

*Visible Evidence XXVIII will take place at the University of Gdansk between 10-14th August 2022.    The conference is conceived as a physical meeting and we invite everybody warmly to make every effort to attend the sessions in person, although there will be a hybrid option too. As this edition of the conference will focus on connections between history and documentary film endeavour, it is particularly important that the VE scholars and practitioners have an embodied encounter with the city. The University is situated in the heart of Gdansk, not far from its historic district and beautiful beaches.*

VE XXVIII steering committee is particularly interested in formats that draw on previous dialogues, such as pre-constituted panels, workshops and conversations (see below) that bring together scholars and practitioners.   We will also be interested in philosophical underpinning of the documentary film studies. The conference will welcome practice research contributions such as video essays, short documentary films,  long screenings and mixed medium presentations as well as formal papers. The submission guidelines below are but the guidelines and we welcome other ideas.  The specially constructed website will be announce in early 2922, meanwhile you are welcome to direct your queries to me on this email address.

We can confirm that *Professor Elizabeth Cowie* and myself will offer one of the keynote plenary sessions, and aim to invite notable Polish scholars and filmmakers too for a number of plenary sessions.

Please note that the registration fee for the Faculty member will be*120 Euros and 40 Euros for the students. However, please note that we be giving fee waivers to anybody who needs it so if your proposal is accepted, we would like to help you attend.*

*VE XXVII, 2022: Images of History*

The theme for the XXVIII Visible Evidence is the notion of /Images of History/.  The conference is taking place in Gdansk which is a city with rich history that spans hundreds of years from its commercial past, connected to the Hanseatic League, going back to 1356. One could argue that the City’s proud traditions of freedom can be traced to its traditions of respecting journeys of any kind as a tool for exchanging goods, but also ideas and practices.  Gdansk is more than a diverse city.  It strives to stand for liberty and open mindedness, the freedoms of thought as well as the freedom to be equal in political and economic settings.  From being a near imperial power in the heart of Europe for some 200 years since the Sixteenth century, Poland disappeared from the maps of Europe for some 130 years only to return as a State after the First World War.  The Second World War started here in Gdansk and the heroic battle of Westerplatte is still remembered and honoured, with monuments and museums - and of course documentary films.  Solidarity, the Free Trade union led by the pivotal figure of Lech Walesa has a crucial role in the overthrowing of the totalitarian Soviet rule.  The Gdansk Shipyard was the birthplace of this crucial resistance. The memory of it has its symbolic home at the European Solidarity Centre. The Centre is both the museum of the movement and the transformations, but is also a home for archival collections, documentaries and testimonies of those who took part in the struggles and are still here to tell their stories. All the participants of the VE will have an opportunity to visit the collections and we aim to hold a joint event there.

The Visible Evidence’s theme this year will therefore aim to reflect on the connections between history, archive and documentaries in the broadest meaning of these categories. We invite scholars from all disciplines too to submit proposals so that our meeting would be truly transdisciplinary.  Our ambition is to make the event a space that will strive to reformulate some of the foundational notions in the documentary films studies and practice, relating to archive and the production of knowledge, or knowledges (as Donna Haraway would say).   In the current post pandemic, post-truth age in which we are invited and expected to live in a continuous state of insecurity and anxiety, what role can a documentary film/factual moving image play in culture and society?

The deadline for submission will be 15^th  February 2022 and we will be in touch soon with the details of the submission site and the website.

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Further Details Visible Evidence XXVII in Gdansk

As part of the Visible Evidence movement of ‘truth seekers,’ do we go back to Bill Nichols’ famous statement of 1991 that the documentary should be akin to ‘the discourse of sobriety’ that is like science and history in its ambitions to focus on facts, and be objective and impartial? Or do we take on board more recent thoughts of Michael Renov, Elizabeth Cowie, Agnieszka Piotrowska (amongst others) and ascribe to the notion that a documentary is a creative and subjective moving image text which is more an expression of our unconscious desires rather than facts?  Whilst Nichols himself has tried repeatedly to distance himself from his highly influential phrase, one could argue provocatively that, in this day and age, we do want documentary film to be objective and rely on facts more than emotions.  But then, in this context, how do we consider autobiographical documentary texts or the works which combine factual footage with fiction and animation?   These are just a few of the questions this conference seeks to explore.

In documentary scholarship and practice, it is hard to imagine a historical documentary without archive. Jacques Derrida in his /Archive Fever/ (1985) points out that the concept of the archive is complicated and contradictory, holding onto memory but also in some ways trying to forget certain aspects of it.  What do we forget and why?  Who tells the story and how can a dominant narrative be subverted and why is it crucial to do so? And finally, is it possible at all to be a documentary filmmaker or a documentary film scholar and remain somehow neutral or is it our /ethical/ obligation to be political in everything we do.   The great Polish literary scholar, the late Professor Maria Janion, demanded that the voices subdued and repressed by the dominant ruling culture be unearthed by the academics so that those silenced for whatever reason can be heard again.

We would like to explore these ideas through a dialogue between theory and practice. We invite scholars, filmmakers, archivists and activists to propose panels and presentations that address any aspect of documentary and non-fiction media.

*Special threads and themes may include (but are in no way limited to):*

*Documentary and Archive: *how is archive being used in documentary and drama or mock documentary? We can explore the role of home movies in creating documentaries and how some filmmakers (for example Sarah Polley), have introduced a combination of areal archive and fake archive without informing the viewer. What are the ethics of using archive as ‘found footage’?

*Documentary, Fiction, Animation : *the methods and concepts from the ethics some of the works which deploy drama next to archival footage and interviews in order to tell stories which are ‘unrepresentable’

*Documentary and Conflict*: we continue the theme from Frankfurt: How should we perceive conflict not just as a historically specific geopolitical crisis, but as an interaction of aesthetic forces that reorders documentary temporalities, geographies and speech-acts? What role is taken by documentary in an age of rising fascism, post- and neo-colonialism, transnational military interventions and global humanitarianism?

*Documentary and social media*: The advent of new media platforms and technologies bears, on the one hand, potential for a radical reorganization of social bodies. On the other hand, they also create fraught contexts through which the social is organized by corporate logic and pseudo-democratic regimes. Framed within these social and medial settings, what forms of deliberation documentary brings to contemporary public and counter-public spheres?

*Race, Gender and Sexuality: *How can documentary serve as a means of transgression, a tool for community building, or a platform for organization/organizing in a political climate marked by exclusionary tribalisms? How can documentary resurrect non-hegemonic pasts and presents and open up spaces outside of a white, heteronormative and patriarchal matrix?

*Documentary and the autobiographical mode*: Why is the essay film mode (drawing from Corrington, Daniels, Elsaesser, Lebow, Marker and Montesquieu) important? How can a personal history contribute to the knowledge of ‘History’?

*Documentary Pedagogy:* How can we think of documentary pedagogy through a vernacular prism? How have documentary studies responded to the shifting labour conditions of teaching at individual, departmental, and disciplinary levels?  How have they been reshaped by videographic practices of criticism and scholarship? How do the evolving methodologies of teaching and writing about documentary speak to the labour it asks of us?

*Documentary and the Politics of Information:* The current crisis evolving from the Coronavirus pandemic brought to the surface many questions related to information, its representation, circulation and use as a means of governance, surveillance or trust. These questions go back to core assumptions of documentary. How does (and whether) the gesture of informing the public contribute to the forming of responsible and responsive citizenry? How do forms of visualization cater to different relations to authority, or different modes of address?

*Guidelines for Submission:*

*Panel proposal:*

Panels will consist of three presentations of no more than 15 minutes for each presentation with a ten-minute response from the panellists’ chosen respondent. Panel proposals require a title, a 300-word description of the panel itself, five keywords that identify the panel’s focus, a 250-word abstract for each paper, or for filmmakers 200 words abstract and 20 minutes worth of  materials (via link), a 100-word biography for each participant and 5 bibliographic entries for the entire panel.

*Workshop proposal:*

The emphasis of the workshop is on an open and unstructured exchange of ideas and techniques between all workshop participants. Workshops will consist of five or six opening statements that amount to 40 minutes in total (5-7 minutes for each statement), with the remaining time dedicated to discussion. Workshop proposals require a title, a 300-word description of the workshop, five keywords that identify the workshop’s focus, 50-word description of each contribution with filmmakers welcome to add 20 minutes materials (via link),* a *100-word biography for each participant and 5 bibliographic entries for the entire workshop.

*Conversation proposal:*

We continue with the format introduced for VEXXVII that consists of a 45-minute conversation between three participants, reliant on cross-disciplinary exchanges between artists and scholars around shared investigations of concepts, sites, sensibilities and histories. The conversation will be based on work (screeners or papers) that were circulated in advance. Presenters will be asked to send a paper of 1,500 words MAX, or for artists, excerpts or a complete work, /at least two weeks before the conference/. The conversation itself will be based on the pre-circulated essays and visual materials. Conversation proposals require a title, 200-word description of the general theme, five keywords that identify the conversation’s focus, 200-word abstract for each paper or film; and for filmmakers 20 minutes materials (via link), and a 100-word biography for each participant.

*Presentation proposal (open call): *

Individual presentation proposals can be submitted through the open call. Individual presentations will be allotted 15 minutes for each presenter. Accepted presentations will be programmed into panels with other individual presentation submissions. Individual presentation proposals require a title, five keywords that identify the presentation’s focus.


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