Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering

Description

Documentary Testimonies examines documentary films that compel us to bear witness, move us to anger or tears, and possibly mobilize us to action. Comprising ten new essays and a substantive introduction, this interdisciplinary volume examines audiovisual testimonial practices, forms, and institutions. Topics include: technologies of capture, storage and circulation; problems of historical veracity/frail memory; generation of video archives--official, renegade, and ephemeral; limits and potentialities of documentary as public record; architectonics of memory; ethics of witnessing and commemoration; human rights and activist publics. The essays provide in-depth analysis of archives of social suffering tied to particular locales: Cambodia, Chiapas, Darfur, India, Indonesia, Korea, New Orleans, Norway, Rwanda, South Africa, and Washington, DC. The contributors focus on the generation and use of testimony by public administrators and institutions, human rights activists, documentary filmmakers, and others with interest in environmental justice, human rights, social advocacy, and the commemoration/prevention of genocide. Thus, this volume aims to investigate, from a critical and translocal perspective, testimony as social practice. Book Cover Title Copyright contents illustrations acknowledgments introduction: moving testimonies one embodied memory: the institutional mediation of survivor testimony in the united states holocaust memorial museum two “we shall drown, but we shall not move”: the ecologics of testimony in nba documentaries three rights and return: perils and fantasies of situated testimony after katrina four from “super babies” and “nazi bastards” to victims finding a voice: the memory trajectory of the norwegian lebensborn children five reclamation of voice: the joint authorship of testimony in the murmuring trilogy six trauma, memory, documentary: re-enactment in two films by rithy panh (cambodia) and garin nugroho (indonesia) seven on documentary and testimony: the revisionists’ history, the politics of truth, and the remembrance of the massacre at acteal, chiapas eight mediating testimony: broadcasting south africa’s truth and reconciliation commission nine mediating genocide: producing digital survivor testimony in rwanda ten between orbit and the ground: conflict monitoring, google earth and the “crisis in darfur” project contributors index