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This research is motivated by the increased output of Queer documentary film in France and Italy from 2000 onwards, an increase which is seen to form part of a wider committed cinema. The impetus comes from a need to recognise the contribution of this output in marking a shift away from the categorisation of representations within set frameworks and identities to the deployment of the intricacies of documentary performance in creating an alternative and more complex sense of place and identity. In considering this shift I develop the notion of the lieu factice, which I offer as an original way of approaching the complexities of both the process of documentary representation and the context in which this takes place in France and Italy where ‘difference’ is generally subsumed in universal principles. The lieu factice is a temporary site of agency and resistance which allows identity and place to be explored in different ways, reflecting the position of Queer lives in contexts where the universal predominates and the interplay between visibility and invisibility is a complex phenomenon. As I progress through each chapter, providing detailed analysis of the selected films, I appropriate a range of Queer theoretical concepts to support my notion, which draws on the work of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Leo Bersani and Nicholas de Villiers. The lieu factice is shaped by a range of representational and spatial dynamics in the foregrounding of ‘difference’ and is marked by shifts between local, national, and global spaces, both physical and imagined. The notion of ‘Queer documentary’ in France and Italy is seen to defy definition and centres on a notable challenge to the hegemony of the family as a heteronormative space within national narratives.

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This thesis is located at the intersection of three dynamic fields: African screen media, documentary studies, and women’s filmmaking. It analyses a corpus of fifteen films by Francophone sub-Saharan African women filmmakers, ranging from 1975 to 2009, within the framework of documentary theory. This study departs from the contextual approach to African women’s documentary, which has been predominant among scholarship and criticism thus far, in favour of a focus on the films as texts. The popular models developed for the study of documentary film by Western scholars are applied to African women’s documentaries in order to explore their innovative and stimulating practices; to determine the degree to which such models are fully adequate or, instead, are challenged, subverted, or exceeded by this new context of application; and to address the films’ wider implications regarding the documentary medium. Chapter One outlines the theoretical framework underpinning the thesis and engages with existing methodologies and conventions in documentary theory. Chapter Two considers women-centred committed documentary, analyses the ways in which these films uncover overlooked spaces and individuals, provide and promote new spaces for the enunciation of women’s subjectivity and ‘herstories’, and counter hegemonic stereotypical perceptions of African women. Chapter Three addresses recent works of autobiography, considers the filmmaking impulses and practices involved in filming the self, and points to the emergence of a filmmaking form situated on the boundary between ethnography and autobiography. Chapter Four explores the filmmakers’ ethnographic practices, considering their specificities in the light of pre-existing conventions within ethnographic filmmaking to emphasise the films’ formal and political reflexivity. The fifth and final chapter analyses a selection of works of docufiction, demonstrating their striking singularities and arguing for the significance of films that blur the boundaries between fiction and fact and thus push the borders of the real. The overall aim of the thesis is, therefore, to show the overlooked diversity of documentary voices and to demonstrate that the practice of documentary by women from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa is both formally innovative and reflexive, and politically challenging.

This thesis is a critical reflection on Vision Machine's North Sumatran film project, articulating a cinema practice that seeks to address a genocide that has barely been investigated. The primary footage comprises extensive interviews, re-enactments and dramatisations of the various practices and procedures that constituted the core of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide in Sumatra's plantation belt. The participants in these dramatisations and enactments are, for the most part, death squad leaders and members who participated in the killing. This data, comprising over 100 hours of video, constitute revelatory primary research into the history and operation of the Indonesian genocide. This research forms the historical context for the project, and is therefore summarised in the thesis. The reflection on the epistemological, cultural and historical status of these re-enactments constitutes the basis for the core argument of this thesis. To this day, in North Sumatra, the genocidaires remain largely in power. This fact transforms our film project into a unique laboratory for exploring the cultural politics of film, media and history within a context of victory and impunity. Specifically, the project examines the ways in which historical narrative - inevitably told by victors - becomes an instrument of terror within a spectral economy of terror. This project is both an intervention into this economy, as well as an analysis of its mechanisms and protocols. As such, the thesis comprises both completed films, extracts from works-in-progress and this writing, and lies at the intersection of the disparate fields of cinema studies, Indonesian area studies, trauma studies and film practice. This thesis proposes a theory of performativity, spectrality and genres of historical performance; specifically, it is argues that spectres are performatively conjured as the obscene to any symbolic performance - including both historical acts as well as their rehearsal and restaging in re-enactment, testimony, or dramatisation; such spectres constitute a power that may be claimed by the performer. This power interacts with actual structures of power, as well as processes that seek to record, circulate or excavate such historical performances, including our filmmaking process. In the case of this film project, perpetrators are lured by the apparatus of filmmaking into naming names and revealing routines of mass murder hitherto obscene to official histories, and they do so through dramatisations and re-enactments manifestly conditioned by the codes of film and television genres. This latter point reveals the complex ways in which remembrance is always already well-rehearsed, scripted and generic. Thus does the research excavate (by catalysing) perpetrators' performative use of film genres to conjure as a spectral force that which must remain obscene to the codes of genre. And thus does the research excavate (by miming) the way genre fashions historical narratives into instruments of terror. As perpetrators of the genocide name names and reveal secrets, the process by which they seek to claim and manifest their spectral power is short-circuited by the filmmaking process, which condenses a miasmic spectral into specific ghosts. By shorting one circuit, the filmmaking closes another through which the process of remembrance, working through and redemption may begin for survivors. From this emerges an understanding of both the filmmaking process and its products (i.e., the completed films) as filmic interventions into a spectral economy of terror. This thesis describes a film practice that is necessarily a social practice, at once producing works and doing work. Building on models of collective filmmaking developed by Jean Rouch and George Stoney, we incorporate experimental production techniques including spirit possession, re-narration, infiltration, and genre-based fiction filmmaking in order to define a new model for film production that the author has termed "archaeological performance". Moving beyond the interview-based approaches of Lanzmann and Ophüls, archaeological performance suggests a hybrid and interventionist form of cinema adequate to addressing a history whose very incoherence has served as an instrument of terror.