The organisation of complexity – Frankham reading

  • poetic approach to documentary characterised by an openness of form that facilitates moments of pause and contemplation
  • poetic work as an experience in itself –> this links back to the wedding photographer ‘experience’ example from last semester
  • conversation becomes the model
  • openness of form to generate critical interaction and enlist the audience as co-creators of meaning
  • relational aesthetic
  • Frankham considers works that utilise fragmented and list-like structures as a way to activate webs of connection between a diversity of material and subjects –> for example Adrian’s bike example
  • Frankham quotes Kate Nash regarding webdocs: the temporal ordering of elements is less important than the comparisons and associations the user is invited to make between the documentaries elements –> this idea links back to my old favourite adage that books belong to their readers, which John Green mentions in a Looking For Alaska forum:

Q. What happened the night Alaska died? Did she kill herself or was it an accident?
A. This is going to be the answer to a lot of the questions y’all ask about Looking for Alaska: I don’t know.
The questions I didn’t answer in the book are questions I either didn’t want to answer or didn’t feel like I should answer.
I know I say this all the time, but I really believe it: Books belong to their readers. And if I were to speculate about something outside of the novel, my voice would inevitably be privileged over the voices of other readers, and I really don’t want that.
We have to live with ambiguity, and that’s a lot of what I was thinking about when I wrote the book. Sometimes, there are questions that NEED answering—did my friend kill herself or was it an accident, for instance—but that never get answered.
I wrote the book because I wanted to explore whether it is possible to reconcile yourself to that ambiguity, to live with it and not let your anger and sadness over the lack of resolution take over your life. Is it possible to live a hopeful life in a world riddled with ambiguity? How can we go on in a world where suffering is distributed so unequally and so capriciously?
So I knew from the moment I started the book that we would never be inside Blue Citrus with Alaska on that night. And I can’t know the answer to your question, because I can’t get inside that car with her, either.

  • A poetic application of associational form creates relationships between elements that are more often felt than thought
  • Mosaic structure – a configuration that indicates the limits of representation –> the tyranny of representation, as discussed in our previous lecture: representation can only say a little bit and in doing that represents the whole, and as such is a tyranny.
  • Fragmentary nature = incompleteness. They are glimpses rather than ideal chronicles. –> But we create regardless? Do we have to find our peace with that?
  • Yet we have an infinite set of elements, so perhaps this wealth of incompleteness is/can be appealing? –> can we embrace fragmentation, provisionality and complexity?
  • Webdocs allow for the possibility of a structure founded on user contributions. An emergent structure, revealed s users work their way through a site and add contributions
  • Montage as a complex system of linking discrete objects: organising complexity, sifting through infinite possibilities and making sense of the patterns that emerge
  • Montage is simultaneously the practice of collecting, creating and understanding
  • Different outcomes: material can be organised for the sake of clarity, to obfuscate, to emphasise, to challenge etc –> we’ve all seen data manipulated to back up a particular argument
  • Vernacular nonfiction: an iterative process of noticing, recording and tagging –> this idea lends well to hashtagging on Instagram, Twitter, etc
  • These associative, poetic approaches to documentary are necessarily selective in the kind of material that is chosen and the way it is used.
  • Potential for new connections to be implied and invented between previously dissociated signs.
  • For Philip Rosen, it is in the synthesizing and sequencing of documents that acts of documentary can occur –> I think this is especially relevant in our K films, as it was only upon putting all of my films together that the highly autobiographical nature of the task became apparent to me. I clearly do have a filming style and different patterns emerged that spoke more about me than about the subjects.
  • How the pared back form of the list can be poetic –> reading this line I was reminded of a clip from Skins in which Cassie lists her likes and dislikes:

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