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This dissertation investigates the social world of contemporary filmmakers in the Middle East and the way they use visual media to re-imagine existent forms of identity, envision new modes of social agency, and transform public culture in the face of dramatic instability. In the wake of the Lebanese civil war and through the tenuous postwar period, video art and experimental documentary have critiqued the politics of representation and negotiated the theoretical and structural difficulties in representing the war. These artists have activated intersections where experimental media has generated a vibrant visual culture by both building on local notions of cosmopolitanism and by participating in transnational sites of postcolonial representation. Methodologically, I employ ethnography to grapple with the public culture of Beirut as a site of avant-garde experimentation, but also to examine the city as a contested site affected by periods of rapid growth, intense violence, and urban reconstruction. To explain this cultural phenomenon, I advance the idea of 'post-orientalist aesthetic' to describe a mode of intellectual critique and artistic style that goes beyond Edward Said's critique to give greater attention to self-representation in the post-911 period. This aesthetic interrogates western representational practices and also develops a localized critical analysis of Middle Eastern visual culture. This aesthetic informs a better understanding of postwar subjectivity, particularly in the way memory and lived experience becomes mediated through the materiality of objects, images, and architecture affectively inscribed with destruction and violence. The notion of the archive or the personal collection becomes of particular interest here; especially in the way these artifacts embody personalized narratives and testimonials that push back from abstracted notions of a monolithic historical narrative. Drawing on visual anthropology, media ethnography, and nonwestern film theory, this text examines the way these artists challenge realist modes of representation by utilizing both ethnographic and artistic approaches to grapple with the experience of everyday violence. In order to explore methodologies for conducting visual research in conflict zones, I conclude with an experimental auto-ethnography that appropriates these aesthetics in an effort to interrogate my positionality as an American researcher in the Middle East. / text

Postmodernism, with its interrogation of reality and the im/possibility of representation, presented a legitimation crisis for the documentary which would potentially signal the end. Gauging by the renewed interest in the documentary tradition (in theory and practice) it is obvious that postmodernism had the reverse effect on documentary, freeing a filmmaking practice that had become hopelessly trapped within its own representational contradictions. In response to the challenge postmodernism presented, documentary theorists and filmmakers cleared a new space for documentary, and in the process reconsidered the limitations of Western epistemology and the ideal of 'representing reality'. This new space is reflected in the renewed interest in a new and more self-reflexive documentary theory and practice from the early 1980's onward. This essay will examine the transition which the documentary tradition has undergone in light of the shift from modernity to postmodernity: the shift from Grierson's heavily didactic social documentary to cinema verite and direct cinema and, finally, to the self-reflexive postmodern documentary. A textual analysis of Patricia Gruben's Leylines (1993), a recent postmodern documentary, will allow me to demonstrate how the contemporary documentary deals with the postmodern questions of history, representation, authority, knowledge, and subjectivity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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This dissertation researches some of the implications of the integration of documentary with the Internet, examining the effects on the genre as such products become new media objects. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2008.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 81 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (DDes) - National Institute of Design Research, Swinburne University of Technology, 2006. / A doctoral research project presented to the National Institute of Design Research, Swinburne University of Technology in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Design, 2006. Typescript. Bibliography: p. 109-120.

Thesis (MFA)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2008. / Typescript. Sweetness and Light is a DVD accompanying the thesis. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Walter Metz. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-50).