The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events
<p>I begin this thesis by exploring the postmodern status of the camera, theory, and audio-visual art in early reactions to 9/11. I outline my theoretical framework: from the concepts of weaponisation and the frame to the responsive eye and reflexive intervention. In Chapters 2 and 3, I offer...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2021
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| _version_ | 1817932429851099136 |
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| author | McKinnie, GL |
| author2 | Due, R |
| author_facet | Due, R McKinnie, GL |
| author_sort | McKinnie, GL |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>I begin this thesis by exploring the postmodern status of the camera, theory, and audio-visual art in early reactions to 9/11. I outline my theoretical framework: from the concepts of weaponisation and the frame to the responsive eye and reflexive intervention. In Chapters 2 and 3, I offer a genealogy of the ‘weaponised camera’ by showing how Jean-Luc Godard has visibly practiced his own frame-work in his explicitly political films. Beginning with a modernist self-obsession with failing to enact a political event in the 1960s, he moved further into strident Maoism after the failure of May ’68, attempting to immerse himself in collectivist filmmaking. By Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), he was using montage and sustained juxtaposition to force a series of postmodern confrontations with the ‘cinematographic form’ of twentieth-century French history and collective memory.</p>
<p>Chapter 4 traces how the concept of ‘the event’ has developed across academic disciplines and the arts. Chapter 5 considers ethnographic docufiction films by Jean Rouch, Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh which, through acts of performance and reconstruction, have made reflexive interventions into significant political events in national histories. Each filmmaker stages confrontations with and through ritual, propaganda, trauma, and culturally enforced silences. These films, I argue, are positioned as performative, Austinian ‘film acts’: they reorganise the enduring narrative and ‘documentary’ forms of past events. In turn, they are intended to provoke ‘film events’, which might reorganise cultural understandings of the past. In Chapter 5, I describe how some protesters of the Arab Spring sought to use the distributed technology of the ‘global village’ as a weapon of revolution: not simply to record the event as it happened, but using this mediatisation as a reflexive frame itself, to bring the event into being as a global event and simultaneously as an act of postmodern filmic autoethnography.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T04:41:46Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:d1e4824f-2962-4368-bc7e-491c1abfd1b5 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-09T03:37:47Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:d1e4824f-2962-4368-bc7e-491c1abfd1b52024-12-02T09:45:04ZThe weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political eventsThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:d1e4824f-2962-4368-bc7e-491c1abfd1b5Motion picture filmCinéma véritéMass mediaNew wave filmsEnglishHyrax Deposit2021McKinnie, GLDue, R<p>I begin this thesis by exploring the postmodern status of the camera, theory, and audio-visual art in early reactions to 9/11. I outline my theoretical framework: from the concepts of weaponisation and the frame to the responsive eye and reflexive intervention. In Chapters 2 and 3, I offer a genealogy of the ‘weaponised camera’ by showing how Jean-Luc Godard has visibly practiced his own frame-work in his explicitly political films. Beginning with a modernist self-obsession with failing to enact a political event in the 1960s, he moved further into strident Maoism after the failure of May ’68, attempting to immerse himself in collectivist filmmaking. By Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), he was using montage and sustained juxtaposition to force a series of postmodern confrontations with the ‘cinematographic form’ of twentieth-century French history and collective memory.</p> <p>Chapter 4 traces how the concept of ‘the event’ has developed across academic disciplines and the arts. Chapter 5 considers ethnographic docufiction films by Jean Rouch, Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh which, through acts of performance and reconstruction, have made reflexive interventions into significant political events in national histories. Each filmmaker stages confrontations with and through ritual, propaganda, trauma, and culturally enforced silences. These films, I argue, are positioned as performative, Austinian ‘film acts’: they reorganise the enduring narrative and ‘documentary’ forms of past events. In turn, they are intended to provoke ‘film events’, which might reorganise cultural understandings of the past. In Chapter 5, I describe how some protesters of the Arab Spring sought to use the distributed technology of the ‘global village’ as a weapon of revolution: not simply to record the event as it happened, but using this mediatisation as a reflexive frame itself, to bring the event into being as a global event and simultaneously as an act of postmodern filmic autoethnography.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Motion picture film Cinéma vérité Mass media New wave films McKinnie, GL The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events |
| title | The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events |
| title_full | The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events |
| title_fullStr | The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events |
| title_full_unstemmed | The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events |
| title_short | The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events |
| title_sort | weaponisation of the camera filmic interventions into and out of extraordinary political events |
| topic | Motion picture film Cinéma vérité Mass media New wave films |
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