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This PhD by practice is an attempt to understand personal archives through filmmaking, and the kind of knowledge we can extract from them as well as how we can connect them to a wider social and political context. These questions are the core of my research and are explored in their different ways through both the film/practice and dissertation. I have chosen to make a film about my absent grandfather and his lost relationship with my mother during Fascist Portugal between the 1940s and the 1960s. Family archives have been largely used in films as a way of documenting realities, in the same way as any other public archival footage. In this instance, I tried to explore family and official archives acknowledging their contradictions and omissions with a view to finding a new “way of knowing” that is more closely connected to our emotions. I believe we all own a family archive regardless of its form. I named this archive “the subjective archive” and in it, I include physical archives such as paper documents, photographs and films, as well as a more intangible archive, which includes our memories, the stories we tell and listen to (oral history) and our dreams. The progression of the film is closely related to my journey as I become immersed in the story and learn things through many layers of archive documents. As a conclusion, I argue that these invisible elements of the subjective archive contain truth independent of their indexical nature, whereas physical documents can mislead us.

This paper presents an extended analysis of my two recent feature documentaries, RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy (2008) and Children of the Revolution (2010), which seek to challenge state narratives and demystify the lives and actions of three central characters – Robert Kennedy’s convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan, the German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof and Japanese Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu. I explore key issues that arose during the production of these films, and the strategies a documentary filmmaker can use to re-investigate and re-present the lives of political subversives, using Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘field theory’ and Frederic Jameson’s ‘three levels of narrative’ as my theoretical framework. With RFK Must Die, I stress the primacy of the research and writing of documentaries in their power to challenge conventional wisdom and examine the interplay between historian, filmmaker and investigator in finding an alternative history. I explore the historiography of both Kennedy assassinations and the historical reliance on independent filmmakers to re-examine the state’s evidence and present the case for the defence. I also explore what issues affect credible witness testimony and what audiovisual evidence can tell us about a crime scene. I explore two key elements of Children of the Revolution: the decision to tell the stories of Meinhof and Shigenobu ‘through the eyes of their daughters’ and the use of archive concerning their revolutionary movements. I present a case study of my working relationship with Meinhof’s daughter, Bettina Röhl, analysing the complex issues of trust, identity and authorship that arose in telling Meinhof’s story from another person’s perspective. I also discuss the critical misalignment between the cost of archive and the budgets and prices paid for documentaries, and analyse the hypothesis of the recent Hargreaves Report (2011) that the audiovisual archive sector ‘is not fit for purpose for the digital age’.

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This book chapter indicates a further application of theories of multimodal communication applied to naturally occurring text, in this instance to documentary film making. Instead of producing a model of genre the intention here was to perform a descriptive analysis of composition in the documentary form as a whole and applied to a specific film, Godfrey Reggio¿s Koyanisquatsi. The analysis here was intended to establish further low-level spatial attributes that could be applied to visual and multimodal texts. Framing is a particularly powerful yet often transparent feature of multimodal texts and this chapter was an attempt to develop a rigorous application of many aspects of composition to the critical analysis of film. This is another natural progression from the previous publication as the intention here was to embed the use of framing as a technique in the construction of multimodal texts, such as film, within the critical discourse of representation in film. In doing so the chapter draws from many different `flavours¿ of semiotic theory, from theories of visual design, linguistics, and theories of `spectacle¿. This book chapter is one of the first extended applications of framing from the perspective of multimodality to the documentary film genre. It also brings together important critical approaches to film into a unified theory of representation in the documentary form.

By contrasting the uses of image-as-evidence and documentary-as-witness, this report challenges some of the maxims of documentary film studies and exposes the ways in which different forms of audiovisual media construct distant conflict. More specifically, the report analyzes a purposive case selection of videos/films related to the Syrian uprising: the first set of visual data includes a montage of 13 YouTube videos claiming to show the aftereffects of the 21 August 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria; the visual analysis in section two centers upon a selection of 15 short documentary films produced by the Syrian Abounaddara Collective. Theoretically, the study advances the value of witnessing in the re-envisioning of documentary film. My research demonstrates the relative weakness of both legalistic and journalistic approaches to depicting war that treat visual material primarily as recorded fact or evidence. In its place, the report advances a new form of documentary with a higher degree of interpretive acumen based on the "emergency cinema" model developed in Syria -- what I term "documentary-as-witness." / text

Documentary filmmakers have been considered artists, authors, or intellectuals, but rarely as labor. This study investigates how the nature of work as well as life is changing for those who work in the expanding area of TV documentary in China, in the midst of China’s shift towards a market-based economy. How do documentary makers reconcile their passion for documentary making with the increasingly precarious conditions of work? And, how do they cope with and resist the pressures of neoliberalism to survive in increasingly competitive local and global markets? Based on data gathered through the interviews with 40 practitioners from January 2014 to August 2017 and my own experience as a director and worker in the Chinese documentary for a decade, I outline the particularity and complexity of the creative work in China. My research indicates that short-time contracts, moonlighting, low payments and long working hours, freelancing, internship, and obligatory networking have become normal working conditions for cultural workers. Without copyright over their intellectual creations, cultural workers are constrained to make a living as waged labor, compelled to sell their physical and mental labor in hours or in pieces. Self-responsibility and entrepreneurism have become the symbols of the neoliberal individual. Following the career trajectories of my interviewees, I elaborate on the mechanisms by which cultural workers are selected, socialized and eliminated. When they decide to escape from the production line, they use four types of strategies: going international, surviving in the market, switching to new media career, and sticking to journalistic ideals. This dissertation also reveals that global production has intensified exploitation by increasing working hours through a 24/7 production line that works across national borders and time zones, amplifies competition by introducing global talent, and alienates local workers by imposing the so-called “universal” aesthetics of global production. The crisis of cultural work is the outcome of the incapacity of the neoliberal imagination to imagine plausible and feasible futures for sustained creative work. It is through my research into the history of documentary production in China and conversations with cultural workers that I found explanations for the increasing precarity of work and possible forms of resistance to it in post-socialist China.

<p>The purpose of this study was to analyze the reconstruction in two short-documentaries by Arne Sucksdorff. The films are analyzed both in a stylistic and symbolical way.</p>

The Culinary Browns is an experimental documentary that traces four generations of the Brown family beginning with Bob Brown, my great-grandfather, a writer of pulp fiction, modern poetry, cookbooks and social commentary. This documentary is not a linear history or purely factual document, but instead, uses personal experience as a means to generate more universal connections to the inherently dysfunctional dynamics of family, the fragmentary quality of memory, and to ultimately remind the viewer that history is relative.