Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

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    Re-imagining the Nonfiction Criminal Narrative
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Kristen Fuhs
    Taking a close look at Emile de Antonio’s In the King of Prussia (1982) and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture (2007), this article explores how a defendant’s participation in a documentary reenactment of his or her alleged crime or criminal trial can complicate our reading of a case’s social and cultural history. As both a literary and performative technique, reenactment is especially well suited to documentary investigations of true crime and legal subjects. The legal trial is already, in a sense, a conjectural reenactment of a historical event, and the true crime genre is itself about fostering a return to the scene of the crime through its recreation and representation. This article focuses on documentaries in which subjects who have been accused of crimes against the state collaboratively reenact elements of their cases outside of (and notably separate from) the institutions that traditionally officiate legal speech. In the King of Prussia and Strange Culture use reenactments to help their subjects recover justice in situations where the law has failed to produce it. Both films highlight ways in which subjects who are caught up in the disciplinary power of the law must use alternative means in order to reassert their own subjectivity and reclaim a sense of agency over their own representations. Documentary becomes a space for these men and women, criminalized for their political beliefs and activist behavior, to challenge law’s power and reconstitute themselves as social subjects.
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    Re-imagining the Nonfiction Criminal Narrative
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Kristen Fuhs
    Taking a close look at Emile de Antonio’s In the King of Prussia (1982) and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture (2007), this article explores how a defendant’s participation in a documentary reenactment of his or her alleged crime or criminal trial can complicate our reading of a case’s social and cultural history. As both a literary and performative technique, reenactment is especially well suited to documentary investigations of true crime and legal subjects. The legal trial is already, in a sense, a conjectural reenactment of a historical event, and the true crime genre is itself about fostering a return to the scene of the crime through its recreation and representation. This article focuses on documentaries in which subjects who have been accused of crimes against the state collaboratively reenact elements of their cases outside of (and notably separate from) the institutions that traditionally officiate legal speech. In the King of Prussia and Strange Culture use reenactments to help their subjects recover justice in situations where the law has failed to produce it. Both films highlight ways in which subjects who are caught up in the disciplinary power of the law must use alternative means in order to reassert their own subjectivity and reclaim a sense of agency over their own representations. Documentary becomes a space for these men and women, criminalized for their political beliefs and activist behavior, to challenge law’s power and reconstitute themselves as social subjects.
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    Confronting the Real, Construing Reality: Artistic Vision and Gaze in Jia Zhangke's "24 City"
    (英語學系, 2013-03-??) Chialan Sharon Wang
    This study thinks through the relationship between documentary and truth in Jia Zhangke's "24 City". Taking into consideration Jia's body of work, it examines the dichotomy between the documentarian and the filmed subjects. The essay argues that, different from Jia's previous works, "24 City" orchestrates a national narrative that remembers, glorifies, and closes off the past. However, there are also moments in the film that reveal a contesting power dynamic between the documentarian and the interviewees in the film. What is revealed in "24 City", therefore, is the inseparability of truth and lies collaborated among the filmmaker, the filmed subjects, and very possibly the target audiences.
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    Witness and Recuperation: Cambodia's New Documentary Cinema
    (英語學系, 2013-03-??) Annette Hamilton
    The documentary cinema of Rithy Panh has played a significant role in the effort to overcome the traumatic heritage of the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia (1975-79). His cinema of witness advances claims for the restoration of memory as an ethical imperative, and his films have provided encouragement for the claims of justice for survivors. Witness and reenactment are central to his mode of address. A new movement has emerged in recent years from a younger generation whose work continues to explore the value of documentary in challenging the prevailing cultural amnesia and seeks to recuperate the connection between the present and the past. This paper discusses the work of some of the emerging documentary makers, highlighting their distinctive voices and visions, their debt to the style and framework of Rithy Panh's cinema, as well as new perspectives which seek to build on the past through the exploration of the value of the artists and intellectuals who preceded them.