다큐멘터리와 아방가르드의 접점에서

In the Conjunction of Documentary and the Avant-Garde: Some Performative Reflections on the Performative Documentary

The starting point of this study is the recognition of drastic paradigmatic shifts in recent documentaries concerning the treatment of reality. Rather than observing, recording, mediating, or re-enacting reality, such films as Cech Dream and Eternal Frame prompt a specific situation for the very purpose of filming. This paper deals with such practices and interrogates their rhetoric and aesthetic implications by appropriating the concept of “performativity.”Since the concept of “performativity” has come to use in various fields, this study acknowledges the necessity for interdisciplinary approaches. In particular, it illuminates the “performative” documentary as an organic trajectory in which documentary and the avant-garde share the common motivation, namely to question the law behind the construction of reality. In order to fully explicate the rhetoric mechanism of “performativity,” I incorporate J. L. Austin's landmark study on the performative utterance and Judith Butler's political expansion of the term. By exercising in deceptively simple ways “détournement,” a common strategy developed in the avant-garde art since the 1970's, named performative documentaries tend to suspend a conclusive understanding of the world and produce hermeneutic rifts that unsettle the very working mechanisms of language within the capitalist system, which are precisely the functions of performativity. The importance of the performative documentary lies in its questioning of the very foundation and function upon which the concept of documentary has been fabricated.