UC San Diego

This dissertation considers unresolved questions of the indexical real in documentary studies, drawing from media phenomenology on cinematic embodiment, feminist performance theory on liveness, and affect theory as critical angles on the observational tradition and sensory ethnographic film. The rise of digital imagery provoked a crisis in documentary cinema theory starting in the 1990s. The easy pliability of images constituted of digital code seemed to counter the analog photograph's supposedly mechanical, indexical imperative to represent actual-world objects, exposing shortcomings in neo-Marxist positions arguing for the documentary's clout to stand as material evidence of historical events. Starting from the premise that documentary production and reception are subjective experiences rather than artifacts of a recording technology, this dissertation theorizes the documentary real as an affective charge in the body elicited through the subject's contingent, ephemeral perception of contact with history in objects, films, gestures, and performances. Case studies consider this phenomenon in the production and reception of time in sensory ethnographic films (or sensory cinema), documentary films and journalistic reporting on "cultural awareness" embodied simulation training in the post-2004 US military, and race and media use in the early 2000s historical reenactment of a lynching that originally occurred in Georgia in 1946. I conclude that the impetus toward mobility and immersion in digital culture reflects the internalization of the cinema apparatus into everyday perception and consciousness, and I suggest that the logic of reenactment informs both the production and reception of observational and ethnographic films in this context