VocUM Conference

On November 17, 2022, at 1:30 p.m. (EST), Yann Audin gives a talk titled "Documentaire : remédiation de l'archive en fiction" (Documentaries: Remediation of Archives Through Fiction).

According to Jacques Rancière, documentary is a particular fictional form; while maintaining an illusion of representation of reality, it uses the non-fictional archive to weave a narrative (Rancière 2001). The truth claims of documentary contribute to the invisibility of the artifices of intermediation between the "direct" capture of archival images (or other data) and fiction, the latter serving as a tool for rewriting reality. The bridge produced between several forms of information representation recalls Galloway's imperative that "data have no necessary visual form" (Galloway 2011), as narrative by its nature forms arbitrary links between its elements (Rancière 2001). At the same time, documentary produces a collapse of the distance between the viewer and the narrator: an overlay that facilitates a shift from the viewer's regime of truth to that of the audience assumed by the documentary filmmakers. The information-sharing purpose of documentary is supplanted by the deployment of political orientations and the normalization of a relationship to reality. Functionally, the documentary produces displacements, first in its material (from archive to fiction, from filmic methods to political tools), then in the spectators (displacement of the regime of truth, emotional reorientation).

This presentation offers a theoretical framework for addressing the remediation of archival images in fictional form by mobilizing filmic principles (Hitchcock and Markle 2011), reception theory (Gibson 1950), and Foucault's concept of truth regime (Lorenzini 2013). The proposed approach highlights the epistemic dangers of propaganda and the importance of critical reading, whether negotiated or oppositional (Hall 1993). A fragment of a newscast is used as a case study to exemplify the use of this theoretical framework.