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When Winter Comes: The Floating Signifier and The Documentary in The Gallery

Brief Description

Following the Truth Dare or Promise, Art and Documentary Revisited conference (London, 2012), the author was invited to submit a chapter based on his conference proceedings. Responding to the conference theme, he outlined why exhibiting documentary films in the gallery might be questioned, proposing the idea of the document, as opposed to the documentary, as a gallery based aesthetic that takes into account spectator positioning.

Research Rationale

Kossoff challenges the status and aesthetics of the documentary when it is sited in the gallery. Using the writing of Brian Winston (1995) on the narrative development of the documentary, he queries whether the narrative form of the documentary is suited to the spatial context of the gallery, where the spectator is more mobile than in the cinema, arguing that the challenge to the narrative form perhaps leads back to a type of filmmaking that based more on the document and a ‘cinema of attractions’ (Tom Gunning, 1989). One that owes more to Noël Burch’s categorisation of early cinema as the Primitive Mode of Reproduction (1992), as well an aesthetic that is more conceptual than the narrative based documentary film.

Strategies Undertaken

In this chapter, Kossoff engages with his practical and theoretical experience of making and exhibiting experimental documentaries and video installation work. Referencing the documentary historically, mapping the shift from the Primitive Mode of Reproduction to the Institutional Mode (Burch, 1992), as well as highlighting contemporary artists such as Douglas Gordon and Kutluğ Ataman, he reveals how the gallery based moving image is more suited to the idea of the ‘cinema of attractions’ than linear based narratives. It also contrasts Gunning’s view of early film with that of Michael Fried’s recently revived theory of absorption.