This thesis investigates performance, identity, representation and shame in documentary filmmaking. Identities that are performed and mediated through a relationship between filmmaker and participant are examined with detailed reference to two decades of my own practice. A reflexive, feminist approach engages my own films - and the relationships that produced them - in analysis of the ethical potholes and emotional challenges in representing others on TV. The trigger for this research was the furiously angry reaction of the One Direction fandom to my representation of them in Crazy About One Direction (Channel 4, 2013). This offered an opportunity to investigate the potential for shame in documentary; a loud and clear case study of filmed participants using social media to contest their image on screen. In the space between documentary confession and the reception of a story by the audience, a dangerous moment comes, in which shame can be received, perceived, projected, internalised or imagined. The point of this research is to offer to existing documentary theory a practitioner's understanding of the processes which produce shame and to establish for documentary filmmakers some practical ways to resist and prepare against the rupture in identity that representation can cause those they film. Engaging both theory and practice in pursuit of the same research questions, I make a self-reflexive investigation into the ethics, affect and impact of representing others, employing the mediums and methods of fans to answer their complaints. All the films, artwork, documentation of the installation, sources, written work, appendices and past documentaries referred to in this thesis can be best experienced online at https://daisy-asquith-xdrf.squarespace.com, the website hosting this PhD, but are also provided on the accompanying USB drive.

My research is a practice-based project involving documentary production and theoretical analysis of emerging forms of documentary and online co-collaboration, exploring paradigm shifts in digital technology particularly in the web-based feminist activism and feminist social praxis. The practice-led research explores new forms of production practices outside traditional methodologies and dissemination. Specifically, by utilizing cheap digital technology tools and working within online social networking platforms the research theoretically analyses what means were available towards online participatory media practices to create new documentary forms. My research aims are therefore to investigate how the new paradigm shifts in digital technology and the democratization of the filmmaking process, through online, collaborative practice, can allow women documentary filmmakers to connect to a global marketplace outside the traditional filmmaking channels. Further, looking at the history of the documentary form, as well as the feminist movement, I am interested in which of the key themes and debates that have characterized their intersection are still important at this moment of changing and emerging technologies. Can new technologies, access to cheap digital tools and collaborative modes of practice help or hinder the creative process of making a digital documentary? In examining the history of feminist filmmaking and the emerging documentary shifts in production offered the opportunity to position my own practice within these traditions and experiment further with online forms of modality. This experiment allowed me to gather empirical data using new media practices (i.e. creation and curation of online and repurposed content, use of new production tools within online spaces) to create a first person, auto-ethnographic narrative on the subject of feminism and online activism. Additionally, my research looks at the theoretical and historical underpinnings surrounding feminist filmmaking, new documentary practices and its implications within new technologies, and the emerging forms of collaborative online modes of practice. Each of these areas will intersect within the three key areas of debate surrounding documentary filmmaking; those of 1) narrativity, 2) witness and 3) ethics. My practice investigates these interactive, participatory modes created with emerging technologies and online audiences and how this is shifting narratives, audience reception and producing new ethical debates around ‘truth' and ‘authenticity' as these lines are continually blurred. Rethinking documentary in the virtual space brings about new challenges to the old debates around evidence, witness and ethics, as it is the product of a more democratic attitude towards practice, distribution and dissemination of its stories. New participatory audiences are now also helping to create the very product they are witnessing. Therefore, creating media within the public sphere can bring about a wealth of new tools, wider contributions to media making and a more global awareness of its dissemination. But it is not without its controversy and challenges. Further, my research looks at how working within this co-collaborative mode, the position of filmmaker as the ‘sole' creator or ‘auteur' comes into question. It discuses the advantages and/or the disadvantages to this approach and in doing so looks at what contributions and challenges an online audience can provide to support the filmmaker that cannot be gained through historical and traditional production and exhibition forms. What once was a higher barrier to entry into the film business is now a more open and online accessibility where anyone can wield a cheap camera or mobile phone device, make a movie and share it on the internet. These newfound democratic practices could potentially disrupt an already complex system of communication practices. However, it could also supply it with a much-needed collective idea bank for tackling global issues and finding sustainable solutions. Within the scope of participatory practices, a first person filmmaker can experience the greatest of democratic freedom within the confines of this process and delivery. The research is supported and conducted through a practice-led film project, web support platform (including blog and social media sites) and published case study. The final output film project around which these questions are posed is entitled: “Single Girl in a Virtual World: What does a 21st Century Feminist Look Like?”. The film's purpose is therefore to engage an online global audience of participants and contributors to the film's narrative thread by asking for contributions within the production, creation and financing of the documentary film. The practice utilizes social networks, crowd funding initiatives, web blogs, viral video, virtual chat interaction and traditional modes of documentary practice in its methodology in an effort to collect data surrounding activity and attempt to answer my research questions at large. The overall objective is to create an online documentary film that exemplifies feminist activism in a new frame through application of documentary modes and new emerging digital media practices.

My research explores the documentary encounter between the filmmaker and a familial subject who is also politically opposite to me, or what I term an 'extreme other'. The Thesis consists of a one-hour film and a forty thousand word critical and reflective work analyzing the ethical, aesthetic and political implications of this documentary encounter. The subject of my film is my cousin from the USA who used to work as a high school principal, but who over the past decade has adopted ethno-religious nationalist views—including the view that only white males should be allowed to vote in the USA. My aim was to create a representation of my politically 'far right' subject which would be, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's term, unfinalizable. My film and my writing both focus on navigating the possible obstacles to unfinalization, such as the fact that my views may be considered oppositional to my cousin's, my marginal authorial status as a national other, and the implications of theorist Michael Renov's designation of family film as domestic ethnography—a type of film which he writes is so highly intersubjective due to blood relations that the familial subject “refracts” (2004: xiii) the filmmaker and the film becomes an “autobiographical” self-portrait (ibid). I responded to my quandary of representing radical intersubjectivity between myself and a familial 'extreme other' by experimenting with narrative, thematic, and montage strategies deeply influenced by concepts from life-writing, documentary theory, literature, psychoanalysis and ethnography. Through the process of integrating critical exploration with filmmaking practice, I invented a form and style for the film to approach my goal of unfinalizing, while leaving traces of my ethical and aesthetic choices, and of my grappling with the problematic nature of representing opposing political views. Meanwhile I reflected on the ways in which intersubjectivity has been represented between filmmakers and 'extreme others' in existing documentaries, featuring both familial and non-familial subjects. Furthermore I reflected on the autobiographical and performative techniques of marginal authors. I began the film as a way of defending my cousin's liberty to criticize the US Government, in 2004 when the 'War on Terror' was rapidly shaping the zeitgeist. However, I soon found myself in opposition to his ethno-religious nationalist views (to use Manuel Castells' term). Given the radical intersubjectivity indicated by Renov's domestic ethnography, I brought critical concepts to bear on filmmaking practice in order to negotiate my goal of unfinalizing my cousin whilst maintaining my own political views which are radically different from his—and I did this while testing the degree to which this film about him was also about me. Furthermore, I carried out this research to find out how such a conceptual exploration could make an integral and visible impact on the film. I found that part of my motivation for articulating my cousin's criticisms against the US Government was indeed autobiographical—especially regarding my personal desire to escape what I perceived as the American stereotype in England. Meanwhile my reflections on existing documentary work showed me that other documentary makers were also personally invested in their encounters with 'extreme others'—even non-familial ones. Furthermore I developed the view that designating family films as 'domestic ethnography' can serve to obscure the political messages in such films by overemphasizing the importance of the domestic milieu. However, as the director and editor of U Know Them By Their Fruit, my persistent experimentation with autobiographicality eventually led me to further emphasize the public and political aspects of my film. I have contributed an original film built in the unfinalizing tradition of critical reflexivity, while problematising the power of authors to construct subjects. Moreover, I have based much of my filmmaking practice on an approach which considers what is unsaid, the potential we have for radical intersubjectivity. For lack of a better name I have termed this approach my 'spiritual' conceptual framework, and it is tailored for exploring and representing radical intersubjectivity in the documentary encounter. This conceptual framework includes Jean Rouch's ciné-trance, Levinas's I-Thou relation, and psychoanalytic theory of the doppelgänger device. Furthermore, I have tested Renov's designation of family film as domestic ethnography, and provided a critique based on the specific filmmaking circumstances of featuring a familial 'extreme other' subject, in a cross-national US/UK context, where the author is marginal. I have also provided an analysis of radical intersubectivity in non-familial film, based largely on my 'spiritual' conceptual framework. Finally, I took inspiration from performative techniques deployed by other marginalised authors, as well as non- or less marginal authors.

This project concerns a Jewish community in the city of Kobe, Japan and its condition of memory/history. It attempts to create a film of this condition. The project consists of a written thesis and a 40min film. The written thesis describes the process of developing a creative strategy for the film. There are already many films which choose migration as a subject. And because of the loose meaning of migration, different kind of topics are and can be labeled under migration. In this project, I attempt to make a film which is intrinsic to this case. My research process starts with fieldwork to understand this Jewish community. Through a 10 month period of fieldwork mainly in Kobe, Japan, I discovered the incompleteness of history or memory in this Jewish community. In other words, the fragility of their history and collective memory in this place. I set the research question for this project as: ‘what kind of filmic form can respond to this incomplete memory/history condition?' To address this research question, I first examine this fragility of memory and history through an interdisciplinary set of references, such as migration studies, memory studies, and urban studies. I argue that ‘trace' is a useful concept in accessing a past, in spite of the incompleteness of history/memory in this place. I also conceptualize the idea of a geographical trace seeking to understand the nature of migrational traces. I then move on to discussing how the idea of a material trace is not sufficient to adequately attend to this memory/history condition of the Jewish community in Kobe. I first paid attention to existing material traces such as the synagogue, but there is a limit to this approach since much has disappeared. These traces of the community that still exist and the invisible traces that don't anymore form a temporal layer of the city. Also, some of the traces were dispersed and located in other places, such as New York City and Washington, D.C. in the USA. These traces were also invisible in a sense that they are out of the purview from Kobe. The traces located in Kobe and found in New York City and Washington, D.C. form a geographical layer mediated by the experience of migration. Based on this field examination, and also engaging with a corpus of films, documentary theory, and discussions in visual anthropology, I propose what I call a poetics of delay. This poetics of delay seeks to employ cinematic means to translate the condition of history/memory of the Jewish community in Kobe with its gaps and forms of invisibility. I argue that this poetics of delay can communicate the partiality and invisibility of the past through sustaining a literal delay in seeing and knowing within the viewer's experience. The aim of the film is not to provide an undisputed historical narrative of the Jewish community, though it does reflect on that history. Rather, it attempts to represent the difficulty of retrieving history and recovering memory through the medium of documentary film.