documentary fabulation

The interesting thing here is the fundamental ambiguity and plurality of meaning of filmic images. Within the aesthetic regime, as we have seen, images and signs are always more and less than simple representations of a pre-existing reality; they are more because they harbour the unfulfilles promise of a deeper meaning and they are less because they forever hide this meaning from us, remaining mute. Like all films - documentary or otherwise - le teem d’alexander derives its aesthetic force from its use of fabulation. The fable, as understood by ranciere, is a specific way of organizing and reorganizing reality, or representing it and presenting it.
Rancher argues that fabulation is common to all film. The fable, however, consists of the creation of a gap within this narrative that ensures that the narratives becomes unhinged, opens up for multiple meaning. ?even the most classical of cenematohraphic forms, the ones most faithful to the representative tradition of carefully arranged accidents, clearly defines characters, and neatly composed images, are affected by this gap, evidence enough that the film fable belongs to the aesthetic regime of art (1006a:15). The fable consists of a series of discrepancies: discrepancies between what is said and what is seen, between what i s seen and what can be seen. Modernism in Film is merely an extreme, purified form of this procedure of fabulation. More precisely, modernism is a radicalized version of what is even more interesting in its more balanced form: the deregulated and deregulating fable of film. It tries to isolate ine aspect of the fable while obfuscating or filtering out the other aspects.
The fable, Ranciere explains, is concerned with the ‚mise-enscène of a mise-en-scène‘ and with a ‚counter-movements that affects the arrangement of incidents and shots, automatism separating the image from movements, voicee hollowing to the visible’ (2006a:15). Still the documentary differs in its use of fabulation in that it is not bound to producing a reality effect by presenting its viewers with recognizable stereotypes and predictable plotlessness: because it does not have convince people that its story is real, the documentary has the unique opportunity not just to male its viewers feel that it is dealing with history, but to question history, rework it, and ask how history becomes what it is for us. This is the value of le tombeau d’alexander for Rancièere. The documentary not only presents the lifee and work of Alexander Medvedkin, it presents the essence of the film fable and its relation to history. in accordance with a modernistic logic, Marker isolates images in order to give them a specific discursive force: the become pure historical referents or pure spectacle. We can see this principle at work in his use of found footage of the stars, the Russian Revolutionand so on. And yet these images are no longer used as immediate historical referents. Instead they are used to question the very idea of images as historical referents. Medvedkin and his time thus become an enigma. The documentary’s function is not simply to represent Mededkin in his time but also to question the enigmatic history of the twentieth century and the role of images in it. This is what the film fable is all about in the case of documentary



Ranciere and Filmvon Paul Bowman

https://surinameafricanheritage.wordpress.com/

critical fabulation

Here it what Saidiya Hartman says about critical fabulation:

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing …a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional temporality of “what could have been,” according to Lisa Lowe, “symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods.” …

By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the

sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object”…

Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non- sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.

(Hartman, 2008, 11-12)

Saidiya Hartman’s use of ‘critical fabulation’

Following on from our seminar discussions, see here for Saidiya Hartman’s use of ‘critical fabulation’ as a reaction to the “violence of the archive” –in which certain lives, histories and memories are systematically excluded from the archive as an operation of power. In brief, critical fabulation is a creative method for re-imagining histories that you cannot find and to re-embody these marginalized accounts (or ‘subjugated knowledge’) through acts of imagination (you can think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as an example of this). In this method there is also an attention to the very mechanisms and textures of memory and its connections to truth and knowledge.
Like Morrison, Hartman considers (trans)atlantic slavery. Here it what Hartman says about critical fabulation:

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing …a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional temporality of “what could have been,” according to Lisa Lowe, “symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods.” …

By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the

sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object”…

Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non- sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.

(Hartman, 2008, 11-12)

I hope you can see the connections to counter-memory here. In terms of the final assessment, if any of you are creative writers you can also consider submitting a creative piece of writing too.

Red

The Netherlands (Holland and Dutch) Slavers

Netherlands--The Netherlands despite being a small country, lacking in natural resources, was able in the 17th Century to become the centre for European overseas trade, including the trade in human beings. This 'Dutch Miracle' was a product of numerous innovations in navigation, manufacturing and finance, which allowed for slaves and slave produce to be transported at greater capacity and at lower cost. The first recorded trader sold 20 Africans to the colony of Virginia in North America in 1619, but the Dutch trade only really took off in response to labour shortage in the newly conquered sugar plantations of Northern Brazil in 1630. Wars with Portugal (1620-1655) left the Dutch in control of many of the slave depots on the West African coast, centred on modern Ghana, which by 1650 had dispatched 30,000 slaves to Brazil alone. After the return of the Brazilian colonies to Portugal in 1654, the Dutch traders were able to draw upon their network of forts to supply other European powers, dominating the supply to Spain until the 1690s. However the near constant warfare the Netherlands were waged in with other European nations, such as Spain, France and Britain, by Imperial Spain, did eventually sap its strength, and Dutch involvement in the trade declined in the 18th Century, and effectively ceased in 1795. When the final abolition of the trade and institution of slavery formally occurred in 1863, Dutch agents had brought 540,000 Africans to the Americas and cast the spectre of slavery east, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Indonesian archipelago.