Temporality and Documentary

Abstract

The temporalities of the image have long been a focus for theoretical and analytical discussion, both in photographic studies, where the paradoxes of ‘stillness’ have been at the centre of debate about the distinctive aesthetics of the medium,¹ and in film studies, where the narrative and symbolic organisation of shots which move spectators through the flows and disruptions of seemingly co-present eventuality have required attention in any address as to how cinema works.² My concern here is with the character of time in documentary film and television, a topic which has received far less direct attention than time in fiction and one which raises distinctive questions not only about audio-visual production but about the broader contours of contemporary processes of knowing in mediated modernity.