Documentary between cinema and the art context

One major impact on our field has certainly been made by the so-called documentary turn in the art context, which encouraged the emergence of new documentary practices not only in the context of fine arts but ultimately also across neighbouring disciplines such as dance, theatre and cinema. There is a general consent to place this documentary turn at the beginning of the 1990s, in close relation to the year 1989 and the connected changes in the political landscape (for example Lind and Steyerl 2008: 14). The concrete reasons for the documentary turn invoked by scholars and practitioners vary. It is often described as linked to the repoliticisation of art, which in turn cannot be separated from an increasing interest of artists in documentary practices as a form of gaining access to the real world (e.g. Lucchesi 2012: 10).¹

Performances play an important role in this newly developed field of documentary practices; they can draw on autobiographic and biographic experiences, such as Rabih Mroué’s screen-assisted theatre performance Riding on a Cloud (2014), which is based on the life story of his younger brother Yasser, namely his experiences during the Lebanese Civil War. They can also take the form of lecture performances and performances dealing with historical topics in general or personal ways, as in the body of works mostly signed by Filipa César, which takes up films from the time of the war of independence and some years after from the archive of the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual (INCA) in Guinea-Bissau.

As the examples already show, these very diverse productions of documentary practices often work with photographic or filmic images and their related sound, but can nevertheless not easily be addressed with theoretical discourses originating in the traditional cinema context. They have, of course, from the beginning on been included in the discourses that accompanied the documentary turn in the art context, with its first obvious point of culmination at the documenta 11 in 2002, curated by Okwui Enwezor, where more than 40 per cent of the presented works could be described as using documentary practices (Bartl 2012: 10).

It can be said that cinema studies in general were rather slow in embracing this new field of documentary practices, but several conferences and festivals and their resulting publications have supported the exchange between practitioners and scholars from the art and the cinema context. In the “Introduction” to Truth or Dare: Art and Documentary, the editors and initiators of the eponymous conference, Gail Pearce and Cahal McLaughlin, describe the situation that lead them to organise their first conference as follows: “We noticed how increasingly the boundaries between artists using ‘documentary’ themes, and documentary makers experimenting with structure, form and content, as well as exhibition possibilities, had brought some film-makers from both disciplines closer together. We also suspected both groups knew little about each other as the two worlds could be hermetic” (Pearce and McLaughlin 2007: 9). Truth or Dare was followed some years later by another conference and book to deepen the investigation into the topic and to raise some questions anew, as the title, Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited suggests. The Visible Evidence Conference, an international conference on documentary film, also attempts to bring the “two worlds” together and has been investigating the relationship of documentary and the arts for some time now; and the three editions of the Berlin Documentary Forum held at the HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) in Berlin in 2010, 2012 and 2014 were key in opening a space for documentary experimentation and dialogue between the “two worlds” in their programmes and publications. These are just a few major examples, which are complemented by a large number of international events and publications, such as the books Ortsbestimmungen: das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst (Hohenberg and Mundt 2016; Localizations: documentary between cinema and the arts) and Un art documentaire (Caillet and Pouillaude 2017; A Documentary Art).

At the same time, cinema in general has undergone major changes that affect all its components as an institutional framework in which artistic or pop-cultural products are produced, distributed, presented and watched. Since the implementation of digital technologies in all steps of the cinematic value chain, the traditional cinema hall is no longer the privileged venue where films are presented and watched, nor is the living room with its stationary TV. Films can be watched on mobile screens of various sizes (laptops, tablets, mobile phones) at any time and place now. These new forms of presentation and screening situations also encouraged new modes of conceiving films: they can work with transmedia narratives, images and sound can be changed and treated in real time, for example. Subsequently, cinema studies also partly left the cinema hall and became interested in the changing landscape of cinema. The focus was no longer on the film itself, the cinematic experience became also worth investigating, and with it the question of the involvement of the body and the senses in this experience (Elsässer and Hagener 2009).

This is basically the wider field, in which live audiovisual performances with a documentary approach evolve when we place the focus on the documentary and cinematic parameters. Before we proceed to a more detailed discussion and analysis of these audiovisual performances, they should be defined more specifically.

Live audiovisual performance as a documentary practice

There is a wide range of possibilities how sound and image can come together in a performance to develop a documentary perspective. The real has always been a part of performances with moving images and sound, and performers have always been and are still using found footage or their own sound recordings and moving images documenting certain occurrences, motives and moments explicitly for the purpose of being used in a performance. According to the concept behind the performance, this sound and image material is subjected to different approaches. In many cases, a more or less experimental exploration of the formal and aesthetic qualities of the images and the sound becomes the focus. Performances exploring the sounds and movements of the city can be named as one example here; the arrangement of movements of people working or dancing to create a sort of filmic choreography would be another. The moving images and the sound are, however, very rarely arranged in a way that conforms to documentary cinema in its more traditional form, as produced for the cinema or TV context. Accordingly, in academic analyses, these performances have mostly been addressed from other perspectives than documentary cinema studies, namely as belonging to the fields of experimental film, expanded cinema or audiovisual performance.

The performances addressed in this chapter, however, form a comparatively small and rather young body of works and are characterised by certain specific parameters. According to Ana Carvalho’s definition, live audiovisual performances are “contemporary artistic expressions of live manipulated sound and image, defined as time-based, media-based, and performative” (Carvalho 2015: 131). An important element of these expressions is improvisation, which becomes possible “when the technology used allows for production in real time” (ibid.). So, one could say that for Carvalho, the use of real time technology and the resulting aesthetics are even part of the definition of a live audiovisual performance.

Software used for the manipulation of images in real time usually allows to work with rather short film clips, which can be arranged and re-arranged in real time, instead of screening a pre-arranged, usually linear sequence of scenes as in a cinema screening. A lot of the software has originally been used and developed for the VJ or club context, such as Modul8, Vjamm, VDMX or Resolume.² It therefore offers the features needed to accompany club music dominated by a rhythmical set: looping, repeating, layering, playing backwards, inverting, remixing, to name just a few. These features allow for an aesthetic that is very far from the traditional, linear documentary. Metaphorically speaking, the loop as a movement that comes back to where it has started is at the opposite of the linear, progressive movement of a traditional narrative film, just as the turn in a dance resembles poetry, whereas walking resembles prose, according to Paul Valéry (Valéry 1957: 1329ff).

Regarding the sound, the most prominent characteristics probably is that, at least in important parts of each performance, music prevails over speech, or, if speech is used, it blends with the music, becomes part of it and undergoes a musical treatment. Depending on how strong the reference to the club context is, the music is more or less dominated by the bass and drum kit.

Even so, the audiovisual performances we are interested in here do not use documentary film clips simply as a basis for aesthetic experimentation in real time, they convey a documentary argument, the synopsis of which might read very similar to the synopsis of a traditional documentary. Only the way this argument is performed is completely different, which ultimately also influences the documentary experience.

In terms of spatial, social and organisational arrangements, audiovisual documentary performances share parameters mostly with the art, the performance and the club contexts: While a more traditional cinematic setting is not excluded, there is no fixed form for the performances and the elements of the “cinematic space” (Elsässer and Hagener 2009: 4), or respectively the performance space and their organisation can vary considerably. The performances can take place in theatre or art spaces, in clubs, churches, tiny bars or big open-air venues. Depending on the choice of venue and the framework – festival, cinematic, concert-like or party-like event – the performances are organised in the form of a theatrical event with a fixed beginning and end and/or predefined positions of the spectators or they take a looser form where people come and go as they please, walk around, eat and drink.

Many audiovisual documentary performances have an organised structure that defines how they evolve while giving enough room to the improvisational elements of a performative act. They also show a preference for more or less directional spatial settings, but normally they don’t imply the strict discipline of a traditional theatre event where one is supposed to sit still, remain silent and abstain from the consumption of food and drink.

Audiovisual documentary performances – examples

Documentary practices allow for a wide range of topics; basically every element of “reality” can be addressed, and, of course, the real can also be faked.³ For the time being, audiovisual documentary performances, however, seem to show a certain predilection for documentary topics that are typical for a so-called ethnographic approach. The performance SuperEverything* (2011) by the Light Surgeons, for example, was commissioned by the British Council to explore “identity, ritual and place in Malaysia,”⁴ whereas Are We Doing Right? (2013) by the Brazilian collective Embolex is the performative live version of the eponymous documentary film mainly addressing political struggles of minorities in Brazil and elsewhere in the world. Both performances are rooted in the loop-based and drum-oriented aesthetics originally developed for and by the DJ/VJ combinations in the club context, but it is transformed to convey their documentary topic(s) and includes more performative elements, especially regarding the music. In both cases, music is played live on electronic and acoustic instruments. Speech is also present, single sentences may be audible, but, rhythmically looped, the speech oscillates between transporting verbal meaning and a primarily musical value; as it never appears as isolated sound, but is always linked to an image, it becomes an element of the choreography of interrelated images and sounds. This choreography with its multi-layered, looped and remixed elements doesn’t offer one single view on its topic, it rather develops a polyphonic tableau, or, as Chris Allen, the founder of the Light Surgeons puts it, it offers a “multi-threaded documentary story telling” (Keen 2013).

The screen arrangements also contribute to the complexity of the storytelling. While the arrangement is still relatively simple for SuperEverything* – the performers are placed between two semi-transparent screens and thus appear as shadows, which may be read as a reference to pre-cinematic forms or to the Wayang Kulit, the Malaysian shadow theatre (Figure 11.1) – the dispositif for Are We Doing Right? is much more complex. As usual, Embolex work with a multi-screen dispositif where the performers are placed in the middle, in front of the main screen. Their laptops as well as the front of the table they are placed upon also serve as screens, and additional screens are placed in an altar-like arrangement on the left and right. Although the performance is organised in several short movements of some minutes addressing different aspects of the main topic, the abundance of information offered on the multiple screens is not easy to absorb when seeing the performance for the first time – especially if one wishes to read the information conveyed by the subtitles. What happens is, that there is not one defined series of images every spectator follows, but depending on the screens one chooses to focus, the composition shows variations, which emphasise slightly different aspects of the argument. The unifying element here is the sound. It varies a little, of course, depending on the position of the spectator in the space and in relation to the loudspeakers, but the same sound accompanies all images arranged over the multiple screens. The sound does not only, in a sense, envelop all images, they are also structured according to its rhythm in a much more consequent way than we would ever find in traditional documentary cinema. Furthermore, the sound directs the gaze: the latter is, for example, normally attracted by someone, who is speaking. And in the first movement or piece about the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the sound of the electronic drum is in sync with and therefore emphasises the images that show hands playing drums and clapping. In this scene of musical performance, occasional voice sounds made by the female performers complement the rhythmical clapping and drumming. These rather high-pitched diegetic sounds in turn attract the spectator’s gaze each time they set in.

Figure 11.1 Image taken from SuperEverything*, a live cinema performance by The Light Surgeons. Captured at a performance at Hackney Empire in collaboration with The Barbican in 2013 © The Light Surgeons / photo by Glasshopper.

What becomes evident here is, that sound can be used in audiovisual documentary performances not only as a sort of spatial framework for an intricate, multi-layered visual part; when it is as closely intertwined with the images as here, via synchronisation and the use of diegetic sounds, for example, the sound plays a prominent role for and channels the way the performance is perceived.

One could make the argument that film music and sound have the same function. Elsässer and Hagener observe, that in cinema studies “the analysis of sound is often framed in terms of a power struggle with the image over dominance and dependency” (2009: 154). Very often, film scores, as important as they are for the success of a film, are treated as a secondary element, which, at least in classical cinema, is seen as subordinated to the narration (cf. ibid.). If we take up this logic for a moment, one could say that, in live audiovisual documentary performances, it almost seems to be the other way round, music and sound guide through the documentary argument and serve as structuring and binding elements. Especially, if we take into account, that, depending on the volume and intensity of the sound, the rhythmical bass drum can and shall cause a very bodily experience.

The performance 1Hz (2015) by Daniel von Rüdiger and his performance duo 0101 is structured by such an intense and, in this case, very strict underlying beat whose frequency is already indicated by the title of the performance: one beat per second or 60 BPM.⁵ The performance is organised in two parts, the first part shows male inhabitants of the village Kambot in Papua New Guinea constructing a traditional dugout canoe, the second part is dedicated to the production of sago in the same village. The sound of the life music, played by Daniel von Rüdiger (electronics) and Carl Creepy (guitar), and its regular beat is only interrupted in the middle of the first part, when the men start to pull the finished boat towards the water; we see and hear them talking, and they develop their own working rhythm, quite similar to an observational documentary film.

The performance starts with an evolving arrangement of abstract colours and forms; they soon become more and more concrete and materialise as the village to which the actions of the two parts are linked. After this introduction, we see mainly one man who is working a tree, which later on will become the canoe, with an axe. The beat and the rhythm of the axe join in and become part of the beat and the rhythm of the music played by the two performers.

When the music sets in again after the scene where the men pull the boat towards the river, the screen is subsequently split into parts that become smaller and smaller until the images appear almost like an abstract pattern. Clips showing different stages of the construction work are combined on the split screen, while the movements of the men are reworked in relation to the music, by playing the clips forwards and backwards, for example. The non-diegetic music is complemented by the diegetic sounds of speech and sawing, and the whole interplay of music, sound and various clips confers the impression of a fervent working activity (Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Image taken from the performance 1Hz by Daniel von Rüdiger/0101 © Daniel von Rüdiger/0101.

While this part of the performance still tells the story of how the dugout canoe is made and the second part shows the process of sago making, the emphasis is neither on an observational ethnographic attitude nor is there a strong educational commentary. The short clips and the repetitions stress the dance-like rhythm inherent to this kind of bodily working process, thus referring to a long-standing tradition of showing bodily work in film and video as a form of rhythmic choreography. This reference is even reinforced by the part without music where the inherent rhythmical structure of this type of work becomes evident. And through the way the process of constructing a dugout canoe is presented in the performance, for example, how this process is divided into short clips and how they are reworked in sync with the audio part, the attention of the spectators may shift from the mere sequence of actions to details, and they might start to see differently and different things.

In these performances, the chosen ethnographic and/or activist topics undergo an aesthetic treatment, which is far away from the usual ethnographic approaches. The observational documentary material and the recorded interviews are heavily reworked and submitted to a process of rhythmic structuring that ultimately makes it all, to put it simply, danceable. With respect to the people shown in these images and their sometimes precarious conditions, one could ask if this treatment still follows the rules of respect that usually are at the basis of documentary films. One could also ask if it is appropriate to submit the material – regardless of its provenance – to some sort of clubby reworking that ultimately goes back to Western pop music.

While it is absolutely ineluctable to keep this problematic in mind, it is hard to make a general statement. Performances are choreographed very differently and therefore must be judged individually and also according to changing parameters in this field. One argument, which is repeatedly made in the discussion of documentary cinema and documentary practices in the art context is, that “although the aesthetics may be the same, the ethics are very different.” So, depending on the field or context a documentary practice is placed in, it also refers to “different ethical frameworks” (Ellis 2007: 59). Therefore, an aesthetic choice, which might be considered impossible in the context of a TV documentary, might still seem offensive but not impossible in the art context, when it strengthens the artistic argument.⁶

The role of pop music has to be considered very carefully and according to every context, too. Pop music is very often explicitly used to transport political and activist messages, and in many African countries, the youth is so tired of politics that the best way to inform the younger generations about politics or to mobilise them is via pop music. The political protests in Senegal before the elections in 2012, for example, were spurred by rap musicians and their music.⁷ Another, genuinely audio-visual example for the use of pop-cultural forms to transmit political information is the Journal rappé (rapped news) founded by the two Senegalese rappers Xuman et Keyti. This is, of course, not the same as working with material documenting people from different cultures, but it might show that pop-cultural approaches can be used in various ways not only to entertain, but also to inform and present the audience with new perspectives on a subject.

The ethical question seems to cause less uneasiness once we leave the per se not unproblematic complex of a gaze turned towards “other” cultures. But sometimes, exploring one’s own culture can also turn into a difficult task from an ethical point of view:

For her performance project Intruders, the video artist A-li-ce received an invitation to work with the archives of Ciclic–Pôle Patrimoine de la Région Centre-Val de Loire in France.⁸ These archives contain thousands of private films and videos, thus exclusively material, which was never meant to be seen and heard by strangers. A-li-ce teamed up with Swub for the music. They made a very careful selection from the archival material, which is the basis for the video and the audio part, except the drum that is added in the last part of the performance. The argument of the performance is almost completely composed out of the given material, no commentary is added to explain the material or to give information about the purpose of the film.

The selection of the material shows a distinct awareness for the vulnerability of the private moving images by treating them with the utmost respect. Intruders does not expose individuals in their private moments, the chosen scenes are already in most cases clearly enacted for the camera or part of public presentations.

The performance works with short clips showing typical moments that are part of the collective private film memory: birthdays, New Year’s Eve, walks in the garden – and titles (Figure 11.3).

Figure 11.3 Still from Intruders by A-li-ce & Swub © A-li-ce & Swub.

As the Ciclic archives collect films and videos from different periods, the chosen scenes show these typical moments over a long period of time, as we can tell from the clothes, haircuts and also occasional direct indications of a date.

Presented as standing alone, these moments probably wouldn’t catch the attention of the audience, precisely because they fulfil an expectation in that they are typical for this genre. The short clips and repetitions, however, emphasise these moments, and collectively, they gain a relevance that goes beyond the private context they were initially made for. Sound-wise, these typical moments are represented by parts of well-known tunes, for example, that are equally emphasised through repetition.

In this sense, the performance develops a history of private film. The more so, as the typical moments are complemented by images of the technical apparatus – cameras, film, viewing dispositifs, which becomes also audible at the beginning of the performance through the rattling of a film projector. By highlighting these references to the apparatus, the performers even go beyond developing a typological history of private film; they develop a reflection on cinema itself that is mirrored by the voice material.

And, in an ultimate twist, the performers solve the ethical problem posed by the material, so to speak, by turning it into a central topic of the performance: Intruders not only reflects on the history of private film and on cinema as such, at the same time, it also becomes a reflection on memory and the archive: “a conversation with our own ghosts,” it is called, in an allusion to Roland Barthes. The eerie, hauntological sound, that bears the same traces of a former life as the images, adds to that ghost-like atmosphere. By playing the moving images and sounds live, the performers in a sense re-animate the people in the images, give them back their lives. They dance to the same tunes they used to, but their presence and liveliness remains ephemeral, linked to the performance. They move in a world apart, which, at the same time, we share with them or they with us. One could ask who the intruders of the title are: the ghosts of the past who are intruding into our world? Or is it us, intruding into theirs by disturbing their archival peace?

The sensory experience

The specific ways of combining sound and images used in the performances analysed previously are certainly not customary for documentary productions, although in the history of documentary cinema, there are examples that experiment with sound or where music becomes a prominent, structuring element, as in Jazz Dance (1954) by Roger Tilton and Richard Leacock, for example. In more recent years, the question of sound has become central to the research done at the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) formed at Harvard by Lucien Castaing-Taylor in 2006. Sensory ethnography tries to understand cultural contexts not so much through speech and explanations, but through sensory experiences and their representations in different media, one of them being film. The concentration on the visual side that we still find in “Visual Anthropology” is questioned here, other notions such as “smellscapes” or “soundscapes” become important (Pink 2009: 15f). The SEL has developed its own very specific approach and “uses cinema to provide sensory experiences of cultural practices in the process of transformation” (MacDonald 2015: 374); to do so, it experiments with innovative aesthetic approaches based on a combination of ethnographic, documentary and artistic practices. The experimental camera work is certainly a key characteristic here, but so is the emphasis on sound. For Sweet-grass (2009), a documentary about remaining modern-day shepherds in Montana, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisha Barbash used direct recording with separate lavalier microphones (MacDonald 2015: 387ff). In consequence, in the film, we can hear very close recordings in sync with the images filmed from a certain distance, which creates an interesting tension between the external gaze of the camera and the sensation of being part of the scene conveyed by the intimacy of the sound. In regard to Leviathan (2013), their film about deep-sea commercial fishing, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel state that “the sensorial intensity of life on a boat is as acoustic as it is visual,” and that it therefore was clear for them “to afford equal billing to sound and picture” (MacDonald 2015: 409). The very intense sound work and the images taken by the GoPro cameras seeming to sway their way through the trawler according to its movements and those of the humans and fish on and below deck – and even occasionally under water – translate the atmosphere into a cinematic experience that implicates the senses in a way that even provokes a slight seasickness in some spectators.

At a first glance, the films made in the context of the SEL and their approach to an audiovisual aesthetic may seem very different from the approaches we have so far analysed in audiovisual documentary performances. Both documentary practices share, however, the aim to explore innovative combinations of sound and image, which on the one hand rely on addressing and involving the senses in the documentary experience much stronger than traditional documentary cinema does, and on the other hand refrain from clarifying everything, in order to leave room for polyphonic perspectives, as well as uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, as Lucien Castaing-Taylor explains (MacDonald 2015: 404).

The different documentary practices are, in any case, not clearly separated and separable, as there exist various mixed forms. An interesting example is The Gamblers. The Zama Zama Miners of Southern Africa (2019) by Rosalind Morris. The work combines two parts, the first one can be described as an installation-performance – we will come back to this later – and the second one is a 16mm film performance. Like many other works in the field of documentary practices, it is part of a larger project called The Zama Zama Project that explores its topic, in this case the life and work of informal miners, the zama zama (gamblers), in South Africa, in different media, from documentary film to writing and experimental video forms. In a similar way, some cinematic works of the SEL, for example, take the form of installations, Embolex initially set out to make a documentary film, and Daniel von Rüdiger has used his material for installations and documentary films, and it has become part of an artistic research PhD as well. Addressing the same subject in different media and formats allows to concentrate on and to highlight different aspects of it. For an in-depth analysis of the single product, it is therefore extremely important to also consider the larger project context, because the project parts complement each other.

The Gamblers. The Zama Zama Miners of Southern Africa as shown at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in January 2019 was an experiment – for the artists as well as for the institution that is not exactly an art or performance space but has a focus on more academic presentations and research. So, the first part was a presentation described as a three-screen video installation in the accompanying booklet (Magill 2018: n.p.); but except from the very gallery-like set-up of the screens, the presentation contained elements of an expanded cinema event, combining characteristics of a film screening – fixed beginning and end, public assembled as a group – and of a performance – uniqueness and ephemerality of the presentation, audience sitting on the floor in an unconstraint manner. The performative aspects of the presentation as a whole were reinforced by the second part, an actual performance with 16mm film stripes and loops on several projectors by Philippe Léonard.

The first part was dedicated to three informal miners, their work and life down in the mines as well as a stroll to the city, and the work of the women above ground. Down in the mines, it was the miners themselves filming and recording sound, which creates a very intimate situation and a closeness to the action similar to the aesthetics of the SEL (Figure 11.4).⁹

Figure 11.4 Still from The Gamblers. The Zama Zama Miners of Southern Africa © Rosalind Morris.

The material shown on the three screens is related, but not necessarily in sync, and those small delays together with sometimes rapid cuts remind in turn of some audiovisual documentary performances.

The second part shows an interesting analogital or post-digital approach: its topic is the boarder and the ruinous state of the mining landscape. Filmed digitally with a drone, the material is then transferred to analogue film and performed and treated by hand during the performance. The shift to the analogue material was chosen in relation to the hard bodily and very analogue work of the miners.¹⁰ The images of the post-industrial mining landscape are complemented by droney sounds that add to the impression of emptiness and decay.

The Gamblers as a mix of media and approaches to documentary and performance is very specific and rather unique. There is, however, another approach to combining documentary and performance that shares some parameters with audio-visual documentary performances: live documentary as performed by Sam Green or by Kim Nelson and her collaborators. Live documentary takes up the live narrator from the early years of cinema, the moving images are arranged in clips that can be played live but are usually not rhythmically reworked as in audiovisual documentary performances. Music is also played more or less live on stage and can become very prominent in some cases. Sam Green has even teamed up with the Kronos Quartett for A Thousand Thoughts (2019), a live documentary about and accompanied live by the Kronos Quartett. Kim Nelson and her collaborators prefer the expression “interactive documentary” because their performances are always followed by a Q&A during which the performers spontaneously answer either verbally or with clips that are prepared but must be chosen live according to the questions from the audience.

Conclusion

While these neighbouring forms don’t exactly work in the same way as audiovisual documentary performances, they open up fields for a fruitful experimental exchange. Audiovisual documentary performances with their aesthetic characteristics based on an audiovisual aesthetic initially developed in and for the club context are placed at the intersection of various fields and developments, as described previously. Theoretical approaches to audiovisual documentary performances therefore have to take into account these different fields, from cinema with its newly developed interest in the cinematic experience and the role of the senses to documentary practices in the art field and developments in audiovisual performance proper. As the analysis of performances show, the performances draw upon all these different fields to explore experimental audiovisual strategies to produce documentary arguments that offer other perspectives and construct their reference to reality in a different way than traditional documentary cinema. As the field is still a rather young one and therefore in constant flux, the thoughts and analysis presented in this chapter are like a snapshot in time and will have to evolve; if one could express wishes for future directions where the flux could lead, one could maybe wish for even more experiments with sound and for the courage to tackle more unconventional topics.

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• Valéry, P. (1957) Poésie et pensée abstraite. In: J. Hytier (ed.) Œuvres complètes (Vol. 1). Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard. pp. 1314–1339.
• Weber, T. (2013) Documentary Film in Media Transformation. InterDisciplines. 1. pp. 103–126. doi: 10.2390/indi-v4-i1-79.