Search results for ""author roger hallas""

Through a new look at how political, historical, and art documentaries engage with photographic images, objects, and archives, A Medium Seen Otherwise argues that film allows us to better understand what people do with analog and digital photographs as material objects that enable social and political relations through multisensory experience. Moreover, as a time-based medium with sound, film can bring the event of photography into fuller view, demonstrating how no single participant in it (photographer, subject, camera, photograph, or viewer) has sovereignty over its affect, meaning, or value. The book thus explores the ways in which the innovative incorporation of photography into documentary film permits us to see both of these media otherwise. Photographs, whether professional or vernacular, are conventionally understood to furnish documentaries with indexical evidence and visual illustration of history, yet the spatio-temporal and aural dimensions of film permit documentaries to illuminate photography's wider capacities beyond the merely representational. Combining new critical perspectives on well-known documentary filmmakers and photographers (Agnès Varda, Rithy Panh, Edward Burtynsky, Malick Sidibé, Vivian Maier, JR, Ken Burns, Errol Morris, and Akram Zaatari) with analyses of lesser known, but important, documentaries, author Roger Hallas investigates a global range of documentary and vernacular photographic contexts, including Lebanon, Palestine, Mali, Congo, Cambodia, Ireland, Spain, Mexico, Chile, Canada, and the US. While authorship and representation remain common rhetorical frameworks for documentaries about photography, A Medium Seen Otherwise offers a compelling account of how the intermediality between documentary film and photography can posit far more expansive conceptions of both media. A companion website shows clips of films discussed in the book.

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In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS.Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

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