Documenting the Internet. Essays on the Re-use of Online Media in Contemporary Non-fiction Cinema

PhD dissertation

This PhD project was defended on October 29, 2021, in front of a jury composed of Antonio Somaini (president), Catherine Bizern, Christa Blümlinger, Catherine Grant, Alexandra Schneider, as well as Antoine de Baecque and Dork Zabunyan (supervisors).

Abstract:

This thesis focuses on the reuse of online media in contemporary non-fiction cinema. It is composed of two videographic essays and a written essay. These three essays explore the respective affordances of written and videographic scholarship. Rather than aiming at illustrating or elucidating the conclusions of one another, they present parallel reflections around the same research question.

The two videographic essays take as their starting point the spectatorial experience of the author in front of two films made entirely out of online media : The Pain of Others by Penny Lane (2018) and Watching the Detectives by Chris Kennedy (2017). These two essays, respectively entitled Watching the Pain of Others and Forensickness, were conceived as fictionalized research diaries and feature a researcher trying to understand why these two films particularly affected her. Staged on the screen of her computer, the films follow an investigation that moves serendipitously through detours and free associations, and traces Lane's and Kennedy's films back to the sources of the media they reuse.

The written essay also starts from a spectatorial experience. It starts from the discomfort felt by the author as well as many critics, about the way in which certain films made ouf ot online media negotiate the different forms of otherness that these media represent: the aesthetic, technological and economic otherness of the Internet vis-à-vis the cinematographic medium; the social, racial or generational otherness of the Internet users vis-à-vis the filmmakers. In an attempt to understand what this discomfort covers, the essay formulates the hypothesis that these films, because of their appropriational nature, run the risk of participating in a form of exoticization of the media they reuse, and of the people who produced them. The research question of the essay can therefore be formulated as follows: what formal strategies have filmmakers working with online media invented to negotiate, within their films, the different forms of otherness that these media represent?

The first chapter exposes the theoretical framework of the essay. It justifies in particular the frequent recourse to the history of literature on ethnographic cinema, identified as a part of the history of non-fiction cinema where the question of exoticization has been posed in a particularly insistent and productive manner. Chapters two and three continue the reflection by analyzing a corpus of ten non-fiction films made between 2011 and 2019. Chapter two focuses on five films employing an observational approach to internet media, relying on the relative invisibilization of filmmakers within their films. Chapter three, on the other hand, analyzes five films adopting a "first person" approach: the filmmakers represent themselves, in more or less fictionalized ways, in front of the Internet. Chapter four extends and concludes this reflection by looking back at the production of the two videographic essays that are part of the thesis, presented as two "first person" responses to essentially observational films. Synthesizing these different analyses, the thesis finally identifies several common points between the formal strategies identified along the way as allowing, if not to avoid entirely the implementation of the exoticizing mechanisms, at least to expose explicitly their workings, and to invite the spectators to become critical of them.

An early interview about this project can be found here.

This PhD project has been developed at the Ecole normale supérieure de Paris (PSL) within the interdisciplinary art-research doctoral program SACRe. It was funded via the ENS de Paris as well as a the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.