Feminist Documentary

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A FEMINIST DOCUMENTARY?

An illustrated talk by filmmaker and media theorist Bernadette Wegenstein, Johns Hopkins University, US, followed by a discussion about documentary film-making with members of the Screen and Audiovisual Research Unit in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, and a Q&A with the audience

Friday 3rd February 2017, 6pm-8pm
Goldsmiths, University of London, Professor Stuart Hall building LG01

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL; no need to register

Documentary film has traditionally been understood as non-interventionist. The camera lens documents a reality as close as possible to the one lived by its characters. This talk troubles that narrative by delving into the method of directing Cinema Verite characters and the contract that develops between a director and his or her real characters on a Verite set. Drawing from her own experience directing the recent documentaries The Good Breast (2016) and Devoti tutti (in progress), Bernadette Wegenstein argues that feminist documentary practice, far from documenting the world in a passive sense, requires a fully interactive and embodied approach to the world of the characters. This means that through this interaction the world of the character reveals itself and speaks — even when it is silenced in the “real world.” But is this world really the world of the character, or is it a world that the documentary film has actually created? And what does this mean for a “feminist point of view”?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bernadette Wegenstein is an Austrian-born media theorist and a documentary filmmaker. She is Professor of Media Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in the US, where she is also the founder and director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies. Her numerous publications include two MIT Press books, The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty (2012) and Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory (2006).

Website: http://bernadettewegenstein.com/

How to get to Goldsmiths: http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/