This thesis explores the Theatre of the Oppressed's practices at the point of interaction with peasants of Brazil's Landless Movement. It uses the interactive docufragmentary entitled Rehearsing Reality to explore the social and political role of art, and to ask whether particular applications of theatre and film can be used to understand and possibly transform points of view and raise consciousness about contemporary issues in the world. The Theatre of the Oppressed created by Augusto Boal comprises a series of interactive games, exercises and other theatrical methods developed with the purpose of using these drama techniques as a subjective medium contributing both to question and search alternatives for personal and social problems. Amongst its theatrical methods is Forum Theatre, the main practice adopted by Brazil's Landless Movement. This technique breaks with the conventions of the traditional language of theatre. Its main aim is to transform passive audiences into active participants of a theatrical scene. This thesis argues that Forum Theatre is an open medium that offers people the chance to participate democratically in the theatrical space in order to suggest and rehearse new ideas to be applied into their lives. In order to explore how these theatrical experiences work in practice this thesis includes a central element entitled Rehearsing Reality, which is specifically designed to adapt some of the main features from Forum Theatre to film language. Its aim is to activate viewers to interact with the film process. This thesis also explores the historical developments of the Theatre of the Oppressed with major emphasis on Forum Theatre and its practices amongst members of Brazil's Landless Movement living in camps and settlements in the hinterland of Sergipe State, North-East of Brazil. The structure of the thesis is divided into five parts: Chapter One analyses the relevant literature on the subject; Chapter Two provides a reflective account of the filming period; Chapter Three offers an overview of Boal' s life and the development of the Theatre of the Oppressed methods; Chapter Four briefly looks at the history and development of the Brazilian Landless Movement and provides a practical analysis of the experiences of Theatre of the Oppressed amongst the Landless Movement and Chapter Five analyses the creative process of making the docufragmentary Rehearsing Reality. The Conclusion suggests that the social and political aspect of art can significantly contribute to the process of comprehension and transformation of the world.

This practice-based thesis offers a new approach to editing processes that take place during the recording and subsequent editing of an individual speaking directly to a camera. Rosalind Krauss identified all performance to camera as narcissistic (1976), which includes the subset of artists’ direct address to camera, and since then the area has been widely understood within a psychoanalytical framework. This new approach provides a non-psychoanalytical perspective on direct address to camera, taking into account linguistic self-editing during the generation of speech (Skinner, 1957, p. 370) and technological editing processes once the speech has been recorded. While ‘artists’ film and video is a distinct form of cultural practice with its own autonomy’ in relation to mainstream film (Rees, 1999, p. vii), editing practices within the field of artists’ direct address to camera show no such independence and widely adopt techniques and terminology from the mainstream canon. I consider ways that the language and practice of editing can be expanded beyond the mainstream, and I introduce a transdisciplinary approach to the editing of speech, which is between, across and ‘beyond all disciplines’ (Nicolescu, 2008, p. 2). My practice plays a major role in developing a context for this enquiry. I use the video process, artist’s books, transcription, drawing and text to add to the existing vocabulary of mainstream editing. I create a new technique called blindediting, which involves cutting out video material without looking at it. Finally, I discuss my publication A Relational [Video] Grammar: Extrapolation (2013) which illustrates my transdisciplinary approach and explores the new language that I have developed for editing speech. My research provides a new perspective on the editing of speech in artists’ direct address to camera and suggests that a transdisciplinary understanding of editing practices can shed light on existing works within artists’ film and video.

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between sound and image, their manipulation in real time. The main topic of this work is the permeation of these two elements into a single composition. I work with documentary footage witch I try compose according to the principles of VJing.

Going against phalloculocentrism’s situation in a hom(m)o-sexual paradigm and structuration of the male gaze and moving towards a gyneacentric perspective, the thesis explores how a feminised process of reception and interaction with artworks might arise. My installation and moving-image practice-led research is driven by a central question: How might a feminised form of spatiality, based on a gyneacentric model, deform an audience’s phalloculocentric reading of an artwork? The purpose of this thesis is to find a practice-led feminist method of producing an artwork that actively represents the feminine and de-centres an audience’s (male) gaze. By dislocating the eye from the lens of a camera, I propose to alter an audience’s usual cinematic experience of an image of the feminine through my artwork. This is developed through my proposition for composing an experience of her image through inter-relational exchanges in order to shift the register of reception from gazing to “touching”. I claim this could provide a potential for an embodied feminised process of spatiality and perception. A method of cartographically mapping the feminine through diagrams, photographs, drawings and video is developed in the preparation and installation of the central artwork that structures the thesis, (f)low visibility, in a nightclub. Feminist (installation and video) practitioners’, Martha Rosler, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum and Pipilotti Rist, approaches to representing the feminine are also investigated. The preparatory designs attempt to subvert the potential for a voyeuristic reception and/or exhibitionistic composition of the installation. This forms an investigation into how the reception and interaction with a feminised image might arise through a tactile process of exploration. I propose that although (f)low visibility produced ungraspable feminised on-screen images it afforded embodied partially locatable inter-relational exchanges in its reception of her. Luce Irigaray’s and Donna Haraway’s theories of embodiment are developed and intertwined in my conclusion. I claim that interaction with and reception of monstrous cyborg images on-screen occurred through the navigation of a fantasy of intrauterine “touching” in (f)low visibility’s installation as a feminised process of spatiality.

The following thesis examines how documentary texts, in particular those that are associated with the tradition of political documentary, negotiate their way into being. For this purpose, I use a series of documentary case studies, each one structured around a work of my own. The five documentaries I examine were made through the decade 1990-2000 and, although these works address a range of specific cultural and political issues, they were produced either out of the US or New Zealand, the two countries within which I have lived while a documentary maker. My methodological approach is two-fold. First, I place each documentary within a framework designed by Bill Nichols as a way of defining documentary. Nichols, a major presence in the field of documentary studies, looks at documentary as constructed through a matrix of factors: the interplay of possible documentary modes and styles, pressures brought to bear through the institutional context surrounding documentary production, such as funding and distribution, the expectations of the genres' audiences, and the dialogue and influences generated by a community of documentary practitioners and their films and videos. In following Nichols' model, I offer up a modal and textual analysis for each of my own works cited, and examine, through a mixture of anecdote and theory, how funders, distributors, audiences and my fellow makers shaped my documentaries. In carrying out this examination, I also highlight certain debates that raged through the decade, particularly around documentary realism and identity politics, that were to have considerable impact on my work. My second methodological approach is to situate each work within a history of "political documentary". In Chapter One of this thesis I have attempted to categorize the various formulations of the sub-genre, which have developed since the inception of film over a century ago. In the ensuing chapters I examine how each of my documentaries draws on that history. My own body of works of course was produced in a relatively short period, but even within this time the historical changes the world has undergone are immense. Documentary is ever sensitive to its context and I chart the impact of political change on the texts being scrutinized. Although the focus, my own work, may appear narrow, the thesis draws on the tradition of participant observation and seeks, by analyzing the complexities of production within a series of case Studies, to cast light on contemporary documentary practice generally. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

The following thesis examines how documentary texts, in particular those that are associated with the tradition of political documentary, negotiate their way into being. For this purpose, I use a series of documentary case studies, each one structured around a work of my own. The five documentaries I examine were made through the decade 1990-2000 and, although these works address a range of specific cultural and political issues, they were produced either out of the US or New Zealand, the two countries within which I have lived while a documentary maker. My methodological approach is two-fold. First, I place each documentary within a framework designed by Bill Nichols as a way of defining documentary. Nichols, a major presence in the field of documentary studies, looks at documentary as constructed through a matrix of factors: the interplay of possible documentary modes and styles, pressures brought to bear through the institutional context surrounding documentary production, such as funding and distribution, the expectations of the genres' audiences, and the dialogue and influences generated by a community of documentary practitioners and their films and videos. In following Nichols' model, I offer up a modal and textual analysis for each of my own works cited, and examine, through a mixture of anecdote and theory, how funders, distributors, audiences and my fellow makers shaped my documentaries. In carrying out this examination, I also highlight certain debates that raged through the decade, particularly around documentary realism and identity politics, that were to have considerable impact on my work. My second methodological approach is to situate each work within a history of "political documentary". In Chapter One of this thesis I have attempted to categorize the various formulations of the sub-genre, which have developed since the inception of film over a century ago. In the ensuing chapters I examine how each of my documentaries draws on that history. My own body of works of course was produced in a relatively short period, but even within this time the historical changes the world has undergone are immense. Documentary is ever sensitive to its context and I chart the impact of political change on the texts being scrutinized. Although the focus, my own work, may appear narrow, the thesis draws on the tradition of participant observation and seeks, by analyzing the complexities of production within a series of case Studies, to cast light on contemporary documentary practice generally. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

The following thesis examines how documentary texts, in particular those that are associated with the tradition of political documentary, negotiate their way into being. For this purpose, I use a series of documentary case studies, each one structured around a work of my own. The five documentaries I examine were made through the decade 1990-2000 and, although these works address a range of specific cultural and political issues, they were produced either out of the US or New Zealand, the two countries within which I have lived while a documentary maker. My methodological approach is two-fold. First, I place each documentary within a framework designed by Bill Nichols as a way of defining documentary. Nichols, a major presence in the field of documentary studies, looks at documentary as constructed through a matrix of factors: the interplay of possible documentary modes and styles, pressures brought to bear through the institutional context surrounding documentary production, such as funding and distribution, the expectations of the genres' audiences, and the dialogue and influences generated by a community of documentary practitioners and their films and videos. In following Nichols' model, I offer up a modal and textual analysis for each of my own works cited, and examine, through a mixture of anecdote and theory, how funders, distributors, audiences and my fellow makers shaped my documentaries. In carrying out this examination, I also highlight certain debates that raged through the decade, particularly around documentary realism and identity politics, that were to have considerable impact on my work. My second methodological approach is to situate each work within a history of "political documentary". In Chapter One of this thesis I have attempted to categorize the various formulations of the sub-genre, which have developed since the inception of film over a century ago. In the ensuing chapters I examine how each of my documentaries draws on that history. My own body of works of course was produced in a relatively short period, but even within this time the historical changes the world has undergone are immense. Documentary is ever sensitive to its context and I chart the impact of political change on the texts being scrutinized. Although the focus, my own work, may appear narrow, the thesis draws on the tradition of participant observation and seeks, by analyzing the complexities of production within a series of case Studies, to cast light on contemporary documentary practice generally. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

The following thesis examines how documentary texts, in particular those that are associated with the tradition of political documentary, negotiate their way into being. For this purpose, I use a series of documentary case studies, each one structured around a work of my own. The five documentaries I examine were made through the decade 1990-2000 and, although these works address a range of specific cultural and political issues, they were produced either out of the US or New Zealand, the two countries within which I have lived while a documentary maker. My methodological approach is two-fold. First, I place each documentary within a framework designed by Bill Nichols as a way of defining documentary. Nichols, a major presence in the field of documentary studies, looks at documentary as constructed through a matrix of factors: the interplay of possible documentary modes and styles, pressures brought to bear through the institutional context surrounding documentary production, such as funding and distribution, the expectations of the genres' audiences, and the dialogue and influences generated by a community of documentary practitioners and their films and videos. In following Nichols' model, I offer up a modal and textual analysis for each of my own works cited, and examine, through a mixture of anecdote and theory, how funders, distributors, audiences and my fellow makers shaped my documentaries. In carrying out this examination, I also highlight certain debates that raged through the decade, particularly around documentary realism and identity politics, that were to have considerable impact on my work. My second methodological approach is to situate each work within a history of "political documentary". In Chapter One of this thesis I have attempted to categorize the various formulations of the sub-genre, which have developed since the inception of film over a century ago. In the ensuing chapters I examine how each of my documentaries draws on that history. My own body of works of course was produced in a relatively short period, but even within this time the historical changes the world has undergone are immense. Documentary is ever sensitive to its context and I chart the impact of political change on the texts being scrutinized. Although the focus, my own work, may appear narrow, the thesis draws on the tradition of participant observation and seeks, by analyzing the complexities of production within a series of case Studies, to cast light on contemporary documentary practice generally. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

The following thesis examines how documentary texts, in particular those that are associated with the tradition of political documentary, negotiate their way into being. For this purpose, I use a series of documentary case studies, each one structured around a work of my own. The five documentaries I examine were made through the decade 1990-2000 and, although these works address a range of specific cultural and political issues, they were produced either out of the US or New Zealand, the two countries within which I have lived while a documentary maker. My methodological approach is two-fold. First, I place each documentary within a framework designed by Bill Nichols as a way of defining documentary. Nichols, a major presence in the field of documentary studies, looks at documentary as constructed through a matrix of factors: the interplay of possible documentary modes and styles, pressures brought to bear through the institutional context surrounding documentary production, such as funding and distribution, the expectations of the genres' audiences, and the dialogue and influences generated by a community of documentary practitioners and their films and videos. In following Nichols' model, I offer up a modal and textual analysis for each of my own works cited, and examine, through a mixture of anecdote and theory, how funders, distributors, audiences and my fellow makers shaped my documentaries. In carrying out this examination, I also highlight certain debates that raged through the decade, particularly around documentary realism and identity politics, that were to have considerable impact on my work. My second methodological approach is to situate each work within a history of "political documentary". In Chapter One of this thesis I have attempted to categorize the various formulations of the sub-genre, which have developed since the inception of film over a century ago. In the ensuing chapters I examine how each of my documentaries draws on that history. My own body of works of course was produced in a relatively short period, but even within this time the historical changes the world has undergone are immense. Documentary is ever sensitive to its context and I chart the impact of political change on the texts being scrutinized. Although the focus, my own work, may appear narrow, the thesis draws on the tradition of participant observation and seeks, by analyzing the complexities of production within a series of case Studies, to cast light on contemporary documentary practice generally. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

Zugl.: Hannover, Univ., Diss., 2008.