Documentarian-Invisibility (DI)

Abstract

This chapter completes the construction of the documentarian-as-extended-sign (DES). Only now, after the documentarian has been debated and reasoned out vis-à-vis its signified, signifier, and the dialectically extended plane of documentarian-práxis, can the documentarian-as-extended-sign become meaningful—albeit still only partially. This fourth examination presents itself in the form of two sections, each conceptualizing and cataloguing a different angle of the ontological, epistemic, and semiotic aspects of the a priori state of Documentarian-Invisibility (DI) entailed in the (in)visible mode of address of the documentary/ian moving image. In this light, Documentarian-Invisibility—the fourth facet of the documentarian-as-extended-sign—serves as an acid test, a sort of obligatory, and essential criterion for the entire DES configuration.

Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen

—Anaxagoras [in William Seager (1985, 315)]

Cinematic vision has, from the beginning, been charged with a deep yet fugitive desire .

—Michael Renov (2004, 103)

...The juridical model of the camera loses its preeminent authority. Vision is no longer subordinated to an exterior image of the true or the right. The eye is no longer what predicates a “real world”.

—Jonathan Crary (1992, 138)