{"id":10158,"date":"2021-03-10T07:45:45","date_gmt":"2021-03-10T06:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/?p=10158"},"modified":"2021-03-11T10:38:11","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T09:38:11","slug":"camcorder-aesthetics-and-the-psychology-of-medium-variations-the-first-years-of-dv-documentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/2021\/camcorder-aesthetics-and-the-psychology-of-medium-variations-the-first-years-of-dv-documentary\/","title":{"rendered":"Camcorder Aesthetics and the Psychology of Medium Variations: The First Years of DV Documentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abstract by Ohad Landesman<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This lecture will show how any discussion of digital technology\u2019s technical potential to the documentary cannot be separated from an assessment of its hands-on practice, contextualized within the history of documentary and compared across different media. The digital camera will be theorized not as a film technology abstracted from the culture in which it is produced and has predictable effects on, but as a technological platform constituted in hybridities and continuities, placed within an ongoing dialectic of old and new, and emerging as an effect of social and cultural determinations.<\/p>\n

I want to suggest that DV in its early days played a role in constructing textual cues for the viewers watching puzzling and hybrid films, and encouraged them to embrace a documentary mode of engagement. DV cameras, technologically refining older lightweight equipment (16mm, Hi-8, Betacam), entered upon their release an already developed and familiar tradition of camcorder aesthetics. In several of the films made upon the first years of the technology\u2019s inception — films made by Abbas Kiarostami, Pedro Costa, or Lars von Trier, to name a few — these cameras were used strategically to achieve a strong degree of intimacy and immediacy with an associated aesthetic of drabness that granted a criterion of credibility to the image.<\/p>\n

I will also show how DV as an emerging technology changed the traditional ways of looking through a film camera. The use of an LCD screen in a DV camera, often in complete substitution to a standard camera viewfinder, not only afforded immediacy in analyzing shooting results, but also generated a new spatial relationship between documentarist and subject, where \u201cthe eye of the lens is replaced by the I of the documentarist\u201d (Michael Chanan). This is an encounter where no strict and clear framing separates the filmmaker from what exists outside of his filmic gaze, a meeting between the on-screen and off-screen spaces, which necessitated filmmakers like Agn\u00e8s Varda or Abbas Kiarostami complete rethinking of documenting strategies. The shift from a viewfinder to an LCD screen was a technical trigger that moved documentary further away from an inherently observational outlook, where the camera functioned as a window to the world, towards a participatory style where a documentarist interacts with the world in which she is located, and responds to the visual and audial fields where her camera is placed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abstract by Ohad Landesman This lecture will show how any discussion of digital technology\u2019s technical potential to the documentary cannot be separated from an assessment of its hands-on practice, contextualized within the history of documentary and compared across different media. The digital camera will be theorized not as a film technology abstracted from the culture …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6337,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[511129,638,593942],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaeste","category-referate","category-zdok-special-21"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10160,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10158\/revisions\/10160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.zhdk.ch\/zdok\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}