Digital Post Production and the Historical Photograph in Documentary Film

Documentary filmmakers are increasingly using  digital post production techniques. For instance the visual effect known as 2.5D reverse-engineers static two-dimensional archival photographs with the illusion of depth, animation and camera movement. This can create the effect that the viewer is entering a past ‘brought back to life’, but at what cost? When one kind of ‘reality effect’ is increased through digital enhancement, what other senses of the past are eroded, for instance the sense of the photograph as an artefactual document, simultaneously belonging to the past, but persisting into the present.
- Martyn Jolly

Getting Up and Moving Around’: Affective Viewing in the Documentary Art of Kutlağ Ataman and William Kentridge

In his introduction to New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansen reconsiders Henri Bergson’s theory of perception as being a way into understanding viewing images as an embodied act of reception. This paper introduces two case studies of documentary visual art to watch how such embodied acts of perception can happen. One presents the affective act of erasure which William Kentridge uses in his speculative ‘steam age’ animations that document aspects of life under South African apartheid.
-  Catherine Summerhayes