Guest Editor: Jeffrey Skoller, University of California, Berkeley

Traditionally, documentary and animation have been the two genres placed at opposite poles of the cinematic spectrum for representing reality and the imagination. The aura of high purpose surrounding the social documentary with its indexically inscribed worlds, and the frivolity of the phantasmagorical ones of hand-made cartoons, were seen as philosophical and political antinomies. Each defined the difference between the intellectually driven serious art of the Cinema and the anarchic lowbrow art of mass entertainment. Within film studies, documentary film has long been the at the center of theoretical debate about the problems and (im)possibilities of representing objective reality in cinematic image making, while until recently, little attention has  been given to animation as a serious mode of representation. 

The blurring of lines between live-action and animated filmmaking creating hybridized forms that mix the indexical authority of documentary forms with impressionisms of animation has long been the province of avant-garde & experimental media artists. While it has only been in the last decade, with the emergence of digitally made motion pictures gradually replacing the photographic with electronically constructed images, that such hybrid forms have begun to be acceptable within mainstream practices. Recent “animated/documentaries” such as Waltz with Bashir, The Chicago 10and Persepolis can be seen as such hybrid works and have garnered wide attention. Other more traditional social and historical Documentary films are integrating animated elements and digital graphics into films, such as Standard Operating Procedure, Secrecy & WEB Dubois: A Biography in Four Voices, that have visually called into question the lines between document and representation. Beyond the feature film, other media practices combining documentary and animation have begun to emerge in activist media, advertising, gallery-based film installation, personal/autobiographical film and web-based art and social media. Such hybrids have created fertile grounds for new kinds of experimentation with forms, modes of production, and exhibition that are changing our ideas of non-fiction film.

This Special Issue of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal calls for artists and scholars to respond to the current transformation in the thinking about documentary and animation and the hybrid forms that are emerging from this. We are looking for essays that address either in philosophical, theoretical terms or through critical analysis of practice, the implications and possibilities that such new forms present for contemporary media practices.

Themes or questions that might be addressed:

  • The historical notion that Documentary and Animation are in fact genre antinomies;

  • Temporal representations, e.g., real-time versus constructed time, relationships between   past, present and future;

  • Interplay between the actual and virtual, fact and fiction: what is seen and heard and what can be thought or sensed;

  • Place: imagined and constructed spaces;

  • Movement as form;

  • Sound, sync, constructed, interviews and narration;

  • Abstraction/color/tactility;

  • The Limits of representation-What can be visualized through animation/what can be left out.

  • Histories for which there is no image;

  • Blurred and hybrid practices of avant-garde film/video;

  • The animated essay film;

  • Seriousness vs play/and their signifiers;

  • Historiography and canonization

  • Hybrid practices within the media avant-garde;

  • The influence of comix and the graphic novel on documentary;

  • New relationships among practices of fine art film and social documentary and journalism;

  • Uses of animation in political organizing, activist media contexts, and the web;

  • Data-base art and the questions of the aesthetics of scientific, legal and economic imaging.

 

In addition to scholarly essays we would like to invite artists/filmmakers to address this topic in ways that might extend the form of the traditional academic journal. This might include documentation of their own work, creative pieces that address these issues in both image and text.

Abstract Submissions and Deadline

A brief abstract of 500 words with references (for final submissions of 5000-7000 words or less) should be sent by September 15, 2010 to both Prof Jeffrey Skoller (jasko@berkeley.edu ) and Dr Mark Bartlett, Associate Editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal (mark@globalpostmark.net ), who are also happy to respond to initial queries. All submissions will be peer reviewed and must follow the journal’s submission guidelines – see (http://anm.sagepub.com/)