Communal Encounters: Contemporary Documentary Restaging
Date of Award
Spring 1-1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Film Studies
First Advisor
MacKay, John
Abstract
Communal Encounters: Contemporary Documentary Restaging examines the use of restaging as an investigative methodology within contemporary experimental documentary practice, spanning from the 1980s to the present day. Examining work by Trinh T. Minh Ha, Paz Encina, Emily Jacir and the Forensic Architecture Agency, I excavate the way that restaging's multilayered temporality and surrogate embodiment enable these documentaries' political and counter-historical claims, which take shape amidst contexts of ongoing state violence. My readings attend, in particular, to these films' entanglement of intimate experience and collective history and the forms of embodied witnessing they engender. They explore how these performative procedures recast our understanding of documentary's evidentiary value and political force by deprivileging questions of documentary referentiality to instead foreground documentary's capacity to mediate social relation and intimate attachment.
Recommended Citation
Kirkland, Katie, "Communal Encounters: Contemporary Documentary Restaging" (2025). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1636.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1636