Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 17

Media archaeology is an approach to studying media history that aims to challenge what many see as teleological narratives of progress and technological development. Applying Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to media and technology, scholars sought to identify forgotten examples in media history and to do so explicitly across media. It aims to radically destabilize narratives about media history, hierarchical relations across media, and the epistemological stability of cinema, radio, television, new media, and other forms. As Malte Hagener argues, the application of such an approach to documentary is generative. Documentary’s reliance on the dynamic between the fragment or “the document” and its insertion into a new context, “the documentary,” is ripe for media archaeology’s interest in the “materialities and medialities” of ruptures and originary contexts. It also aligns with the efforts of documentary scholars to continually question documentary’s definitional center and borders. The essays in this section take up this challenge, applying rigorous historical research to an array of nonfiction film material, looking “not only for the breaks and fissures, but rather for the contact zones and adhesive joints at which new formations emerge and new concepts are born.”