Ways of Organizing
Ways of Organizing explores the politics of documentary through the ways that its circulation condenses a variety of economic, political, and social flows. We want to suggest a fundamentally logistical approach to documentary, one that invites readers to think of documentary as an organizational tool in order to place documentary’s subjects and settings, its images and viewers, and its texts and the spaces in which they circulate on the same plane. How does documentary organize social, political and institutional worlds?
The contributors consider an expanded field of documentary — from social media, to film festivals, galleries, activism, funding structures, and more, paying close attention to both the practical process involved in creating and circulating media forms and to the demands and expectations that may be generated as a result of their content.
Other contributors place in dialectical relationship formal and rhetorical conventions of documentary such as “narrative” and storytelling” and the social and material conditions that produce and circulate these forms. We are interested in the routes and means through which images circulate and in the discursive and logistical infrastructures that enable documentary culture.
Table of Contents
Jason Fox and Laliv Melamed, “Introduction: Ways of Organizing”
Lynne Sachs, “English is Spoken Here: An Artists’ Roundtable with Jeanne Finley, Christopher Harris, Sky Hopinka, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Lynne Sachs”
Charles Musser interviewed by Joshua Glick, “Documentary’s Longue Durée: Reimagining the Documentary Tradition”
John Greyson, “Other Peoples Words: Karaoke, Stereoscopy and the (ir)resistable rise of the Shot-for-Shot Remake”
Leo Goldsmith, “Theories of Earth: Surface and Extraction in the Landscape Documentary”
Daniel Mann, “Spectacle as Camouflage: How the IDF Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Visible Evidence”
Roya Rastegar, “Conversations on Documentary Funding with Tabitha Jackson, Don Young, and Hussain Currimbhoy”
Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, “Beyond Story: A Community-Based Manifesto”
Ways of Organizing: A Programmer’s Questionnaire
Responses from: Paulina Suarez, Marie Murriacole, Cintia Gil, Rasha Salti, Aily Nash, Ilona Jurkonyte, Ayed Fadel, and Greg de Cuir Jr.