Raed Andoni and Rithy Panh’s Performative Documentaries as an Exercise in Critical Historiography
Natasza Korczarowska
natasza.korczarowska@uni.lodz.plUniversity of Lodz (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3130-128X
Abstract
The article demonstrates the critical potential of documentaries based on the practice of reconstruction. The author analyses works by the Raed Andoni, Ghost Hunting (primary text), and Rithy Panh, S21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (secondary text), as examples of critical historiography. She focuses on two issues fundamental from a historiographic perspective: the positioning of social actors as credible witnesses to traumatic historical events and the function of the places where these events took place. The author draws on Vanessa Agnew’s theory and positions the documentaries within the affective history, which focuses not on events, processes, or structures, but on physical and psychological experience. Andoni’s film is also situated within Hayden White’s historiographic paradigm, which focuses on the concepts of historical narrative as construction, fictionalisation, and self-referentiality understood as a strategy of resistance against the ideology of objectivity. The author assumes that post-modern versions of history are like films about filmmaking, or novels about writing, or (Brechtian) performances that draw our attention to their own fictionality.
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Keywords:
re-enactment, affective history, trauma, post-history, traumascapesReferences
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Authors
Natasza Korczarowskanatasza.korczarowska@uni.lodz.pl
University of Lodz Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3130-128X
Professor at the Department of Film and Audiovisual Media, Institute of Contemporary Culture, University of Lodz. She specialises in the history of Polish film, contemporary European cinema, and the problems of historiophoty. She published the books Ojczyzny prywatne [Private Homelands] (2007) and Inne spojrzenie [Another Way] (2013) – the latter devoted to the images of history in the Polish feature film after 1965. Since 2008 she has cooperated with the Polish Film Institute and the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute on the educational project Academy of Polish Film.
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