Transforming Authenticity. Translating and Framing as documentary film practices in medial milieus

Project director: Prof. Dr. Thomas Weber, Universität Hamburg
Research assistance: Eva Knopf
(Media studies with a focus on film and television)

This project considers transformations of documentary films as practices of translating and framing in different medial milieus. Medial milieus are conceptualized as specific, stable and repeatable forms of interplay between heterotypic agents (such as programs, conventions, institutions, individuals, etc.) that interact during the production, distribution and reception of media products and are shaped by medial, cultural as well as situational conditions. Not only due to digitalization documentary films today exist in a number of differentiated medial milieus (these are, for example, cinema documentaries, industry and educational films, YouTube clips, reality TV, etc.). In each of these medial milieus the audiovisual material of the documentary is shaped by different translations (especially validations) and framings. Both translating and framing are used for the production of meaning, for example claims to authenticity, and are understood as transitory acts embedded in continuous processes of medial de/re- and new contextualizations. Therefore, this project aims to praxeologically analyze the concrete interactions of different agents within medial milieus, the transformations of the interplay between representation and perception and, not least, the corporeality and materiality of such processes. 

Newer scientific discourses regard performativity and communication contexts as the constitutive factors of documentary films. As a result, the ‘documentary’ emerges as a historically changing concept that is introduced through a number of paratexts which suggest ‘documentary readings’ of such films. Likewise practices of the documentary itself come into view. Regarding these practices the question at stake is how production, distribution and reception processes are modeled in different media milieus and how the material is aesthetically adapted into different medial framings, especially how truth and authenticity claims are kept stable through these processes or are constituted in meaningfully divergent ways. For example, witness cell phone videos are used differently in YouTube clips and documentaries produced for the big screen. Affected are not only general production processes but especially those criteria that determine authenticity in different media milieus. To analyze these, one needs to consider medial conventions, cultural habits and therefore divergent continuously changing situational framings.