Apropos Codes & Modes: The Character of Documentary Culture, Lynne Sachs writes in a Facebook post,
[Sunday, November 9th, Television Studio, Room HN436, Hunter College] Jeanne C. Finley and I will present our “The Non-Fiction Imagination” at Hunter this weekend on a panel with Dan Geva. Join us. It’s FREE and open to the public. “The act of witnessing has always been at the core of our documentary practice. When photographic methods of representation are used to articulate these observations, traces of imaginative thinking become imprinted into the cinematic document. Non-fiction film strategies such as interviews, research, or verité observation then become pathways for creative engagement, rather than merely a representation of a thing, a person, a place or event. In this presentation, we will present a selection of film projects that explore the intricate relationship between technology, aesthetics and thought. From direct cinema to the essay film to performance art, the moving image artists who insist on inventing their own visual language must move fluidly between empirical analysis and doubt, between examination and introspection.
We will begin with pioneering Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic Sweet Violence At Moma who produced a video dialogue between her experience as a mother at home with her child and her observations on the Yugoslavian state in the late 1970s. Never particularly noted for his filmmaking practice, legendary American painter Keith Haring created rigorous and perceptive film documentations of his own solitary art practice. German artist Christoph Schlingensief moved from underground filmmaking to theater to talk shows to public uprisings over three remarkable decades before his early death in 2010. And finally, we will talk to Finley herself about her recent hybrid documentary piece Manhole 452.
