My thesis on contemporary animated documentaries links new media aesthetics with the documentary turn in contemporary visual culture. Drawing from the fields of Contemporary Art, Animation, Film Studies and Gaming Theory, my aim has been to explore the development of animated documentaries in the context of animation's intersection with other visual fields in a very specific technological moment of the past two decades in order to broaden the scope within which animation is analysed and understood. The starting point of my research was the widely accepted divide assumed to exist between animation and documentary. I, however, claim that the supposedly contradictory nature of animated documentaries can no longer be considered a given. Despite the potentially challenging reception of animated documentaries, it is important to identify what it is that the animated image contributes to documentary, which is the visualisation of what is otherwise un-representable. My thesis investigates a new area of the intangible, focusing on the virtualisation of culture rather than on subjective or imaginary aspects of documentary works and visual interpretations. This cultural shift consequently requires new aesthetics of documentation that exceed the capacities of the photographic. My main argument is that due to contemporary technological changes, animation has permeated real contexts of daily life to the extent that it has become disassociated from the realm of fiction. Rather, in altering the way viewers are becoming accustomed to observing, learning about and connecting with reality, animation has brought about a constitutive change in ways of seeing one's world. This change can be described as animation’s impact on the relation between visual signification and believability. It is this which necessitates a reconsideration of what shapes a sense of realism in documentaries today. My research therefore culminates with new conceptualisations concerning the cultural role of animation, introducing what I argue is the formation of the "animated document" and "documentary animation". In these contexts, animation is no longer an interpretive visualisation substituting for photography but a direct capturing of animated realities. Animation thus expands what is considered to constitute reality and, as a result, also destabilises assumptions about the perceived conflict between animation and documentary, widening the sphere of documentary aesthetics.

Le théâtre verbatim, une pratique scénique dont le texte repose entièrement sur les mots exacts énoncés par des personnes réelles, est au coeur d’une renaissance remarquable et inattendue du genre en Grande-Bretagne depuis le milieu des années quatre-vingt-dix. Au même moment, les metteurs en scène britanniques contemporains ont déclaré avoir trouvé de nouvelles approches pour une pratique du théâtre politique par son entremise. En dépit de la dominante anti-réaliste qui semble encore à l’heure actuelle caractériser la culture postmoderne, on admet le plus souvent que le réalisme documentaire est resté le mode par excellence de représentation des pièces verbatim sur scène. Il va donc de soi que ce théâtre, ainsi défini, ignore du même coup les récents bouleversements survenus sur la scène théâtrale britannique. À travers une étude comparative de sept spectacles que nous considérons comme représentatifs du théâtre verbatim, il est affirmé qu’il y a bien eu, malgré tout, des spectacles verbatim dont la nature discontinue implique l’éloignement du réalisme comme élément fédérateur de la représentation. Ces spectacles, qui font appel à l’expérimentation esthétique sous de multiples formes, approfondissent et transgressent ce que nous pourrions entendre par « théâtre verbatim ». Le but de cette analyse est donc d’étudier le théâtre verbatim à contre-courant de ses propres affirmations d’authenticité et de véracité et de suggérer la nécessité d'un discours qui articule mieux l’interdépendance entre les impératifs esthétiques et les possibilités d’un engagement social. Enfin, cette thèse rend compte de l’existence d’une diversité de variables esthétiques dans le théâtre verbatim d’aujourd'hui qui vise un public habitué aux nouveaux médias. À cet égard, ces variables sont regroupées selon trois positions théoriques, chacune étant analysée et traitée de manière distincte et illustrée par des exemples concrets. Par le biais de cette étude, nous espérons ainsi mettre en lumière les esthétiques mouvantes du théâtre verbatim, afin d’en établir une histoire critique et de contribuer à la formulation de ce champ de recherche si riche, autant d’un point de vue scientifique que du point de vue de la pratique vivante de l’art théâtral. / Beyond Documentary Realism: Aesthetic Transgressions in Contemporary British Verbatim Theatre Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ‘real people’, has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. Simultaneously, contemporary British theatre-makers claimed to have found a renewed avenue to politics through this particular medium. In spite of recent shifts in the British theatrical landscape as well as the much-vaunted postmodern culture of anti-realism, documentary realism is generally conceded to have remained the normative mode of presentation for verbatim plays on stage. Through a comparative examination of seven representative verbatim productions, this dissertation argues, however, that there has been an equally persistent strand of verbatim works that involves a move away from realism as the key element in performance. These productions make use of a wide variety of aesthetic experiments that broaden and transgress what we might understand as verbatim theatre. The strategy adopted by this study is thus to read verbatim theatre against the grain of its claim to ‘authenticity’ and ‘truthfulness’ and to suggest the need for a discourse which better articulates an interdependence between its aesthetic imperatives and the possibilities of social engagement. Finally, this dissertation accounts for the existence of a range of aesthetic variables in present-day verbatim theatre which is aimed at more media-aware contemporary audiences. These are grouped into three theoretical positions, each of them being analysed and discussed in a separate part and illustrated by case studies. It is hoped that, through this argument, the changing aesthetics of verbatim theatre will be illuminated and that – on however small a scale – this doctoral dissertation will contribute to a critical history and theoretical formulation of the complexity of this rich field as both a scholarly discipline and a lived practice.