If you have not seen Terranova's doc on Haraway, you must. It's delightful. Before the pandemic I had all sorts of ideas for a really amazing paper on this film. Those plans got thrown into the toilet. What should have been a months worth of research and drafting I had to produce in two days. Despite this, I kind of like some parts of this essay. I am putting it here because I would like to keep thinking about this film. Here it is, standing on its own rickety legs, as a mildly bad review of the film.
Film historians have long noted the
synchronous emergence of—and blurry boundaries between—"nonfictional" documentary and "fictional" feature films. Despite acknowledgements of shared
ancestry, documentary film is still widely conceived as a record of the
historical “real,” inherently less mediated and artfully constructed than its
fictional counterpart. Documentary film scholar Michael Renov describes this
hegemonic view of the documentary to capture the historical at the expense of
the formal or aesthetic as the genre’s “presumed debt to the signified” which
functions to keep documentary trapped behind a semiotic paywall, perpetually
eclipsed by the outside referent (13). If taken in all of its oxymoronic
potential, documentary film pioneer John Grierson’s ad hoc definition of the
genre as “the creative treatment of reality” is an early starting point for
deconstructing this view (qtd in Renov 33). In this essay’s title, the phrase
“documenting theory” is a direct engagement with Renov’s landmark edited volume
Theorizing Documentary. While this
project is inspired by Renov’s work, it also wishes to extend it by asking how
documentary film itself can be understood as doing the labor of theorizing.
What novel aesthetic, formal, or epistemological configurations occur when the
roles of subject/object are shifted, if, instead of applying theory to
documentary, documentary film itself stages theoretical events? In other words, how are documentary films reworking,
reconfiguring, or remapping theoretical knowledge (much of which exists and is
transmitted textually) visually and formally? The following paper will turn to
Fabrizio Terranova’s 2016 documentary Donna
Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival in order to address these
questions. I argue that Terranova’s documentary is a privileged site to witness
documentary theorizing and that the
film’s epistemological shift enacts a critical feminist intervention in “the
scientific inscription” of documentary film (Winston, qtd in Renov 37).
Documentary film’s troubling tendency to restage the performance of what feminist visionary Donna Haraway famously coined “the god trick” of masculinist-imperialist claims to scientific objectivity is perhaps why experimental filmmaker Terranova chose Haraway and her work as the “subject” of Storytelling (Haraway 580). To briefly return to Renov, it is troubling that Haraway’s extensive work on the critique of scientific objectivity is not cited anywhere amidst the sheer amount of historical, theoretical, and aesthetic ground that Renov covers in his introduction. Haraway’s work is crucial to understanding Renov’s investment in a poetics of documentary film, which can be summed up in the following questions he sets forth: On what basis does the spectator
invest belief in the representation, what are the codes that ensure that
belief, what material processes are involved in the production of this
“spectacle of the real,” and to what extent are these processes to be rendered
visible or knowable to the spectator? (31). By the time Theorizing
Documentary was published in 1993, these questions had been thoroughly
taken up by Haraway in her essay “Situated Knowledges: The
Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Like Renov, Haraway is similarly
concerned with historicizing the construction of Western modes of objectivity,
and traces this construction back to Enlightenment conceptions of rational,
scientific knowledge as the “god trick.” In “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway
takes up the trouble with objective inquiry in an extended response to Sandra
Harding’s essay “The Science Question in Feminism,” expanding upon feminist
standpoint theory and Harding’s concept of feminist “successor science” to
argue for a feminist theory and practice which recognizes and embraces the
situatedness—that is, the limitations, partial view, reliance on mediating
apparatuses—of any mode of knowledge
production, including the oppositional epistemologies of feminism itself.
However, Terranova’s documentary is hardly the first to take up “theory,” be it literary or cultural. Along with several documentary film pieces on Marx (The Spectre of Marxism, Dir. Stuart Hall, 1983 and Genius of the Modern World: Karl Marx, BBC, 2016), Freud (Century of the Self, Dir. Adam Curtis, 2002), Nietzsche (Human, All too Human, BBC, 1999), and other bastions of Western philosophy, recent documentary filmmakers have also explored more contemporary theoretical subjects. Sophia Fienne’s Zizek! A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), while billed as a documentary, is not so much an exploration of the Slovenian film and cultural critic as it is a tour, led by Zizek, of psychoanalytic readings of various films. While there are several other documentary projects that take up critical theory, cultural studies, or a specific critical theorist or philosopher, they are often concerned with a recording a formative moment in the theorist’s personal life (such as Felix Guattari’s failed Sci-Fi movie script) or, most commonly, concern the individual’s controversial political activism and/or imprisonment.
For these reasons, Storytelling for Earthly Survival is somewhat of an anomaly. Eschewing the normative modes of documentary digging, uncovering, or exposing truth, Terranova’s film seems to do nothing more than simply visit with Donna Haraway. Visitation, while falling more into Renov’s documentary modes of preservation or expression than revealing or exposing, is also part of a signature critical comportment, on the part of Terranova, that seeks to practice a “minimal critical agency.” Rather than plumb the depths of Haraway to reveal a previously unknown truth (i.e. practice a normative documentary rhetoric, style, or form), I wager that Terranova does not propose to tell the viewer anything new about Donna Haraway’s feminist theoretical work, evident in the film’s complete lack of narratorial voice-over. One-part unreliable narrator, one-part minimal critical agent reading the “surfaces” of Haraway’s thinking and being, Terranova’s production of Storytelling for Earthly Survival detaches from his authorial intention, thus destabilizing notions of documentary film’s role as mere signifier. The film’s various unsettling formal features not only contests the notion of authorial vision, it allows a configuration in which the film, via moments of combative mise en scene, non-expository digital effects, and an effect I call “voiding,” is able to mediate itself[1] and ultimately do its own theorizing. Nathan K. Hensley’s expansion on surface reading in the literal terms of mise en scene gestures toward film as a privileged site for theorizing surface reading methods that recognizes film’s ability, via mise en scene, to “mediate itself” (Hensley 75). In describing the film’s default on its presumed “debt to the signified,” the idea that the film’s theorizing can be understood separately from Terranova’s and Haraway’s theories remains is central concern throughout this essay.
Turning to the film, it’s clear that the destabilization of the normative documentary grammar is immediate. The first sequence I will take up is during the film’s nearly ten-minute cold open. It begins at the six-minute mark and ends four minutes later, with the title sequence immediately following. While it is not the first scene in which Haraway speaks (the film opens in media res with a close-up of Haraway, standing in her screened-in porch, in the middle of an anecdote about orthodontia), it is the first time that Haraway is seated at a table directly facing the camera, engaged in what viewers would recognize as a normatively structured interview performance: speaking about one’s childhood. However, this normativity is disrupted cinematically by Terranova even before we even get to Haraway seated at the table. The scene begins with an establishing shot of a portion of the interior walls of Haraway’s home office. The banal and fragmented subject of this shot—an office wall rather than an exterior shot of the office itself—is unconventional. The misalignment with the subject (wall, partial vision) and shot’s normative grammar (exposition, total vision) creates a dynamism or combativeness that is compounded at the level of mise en scene. The “landscape” of the cluttered home office wall offers a rich, cacophonous mise en scene. The viewer’s attention and focus are directed onto a practically uplit room with a shelving unit with storage cubbies that takes up almost the entirety of the wall. Crisp sunlight pours in through the upper window leaving visible geometries of light on the adjacent wall. Some of the cubbies are occupied by colorful storage bins which contribute a sense of cheery neatness among chaos, an affective register that matches Haraway’s lively conversational warmth, sudden explosive laughter, and piercing logic. Juxtaposed against this sense of tidiness is the landscape of the rest of the shelving unit which is visibly cluttered with stacked books, tchotchkes, and random papers. While some items seem to belong to the space and have a recognizably filmable aesthetic value (shelved books and cultural artifacts/decor), others seem to be more out of place or awaiting relocation (stacked books and a dishtowel), while yet others are jarringly quotidian or seem to take away from the sense of aesthetic curation (a box of Glad trash bags, a spray bottle of pet stain cleaner, an awkwardly visible electrical cord). The physical separation of the cubbies and the practical separation of use-value of all the items come together as networked assemblage to form a combative mise en scene. As the camera slowly pans forward on the Z axis and we begin to hear Haraway’s voice, the gravity of the slow pan combined with the grammar of the establishing shot of the quirky, cluttered shelving unit works to solidify that the notion of assemblage itself is the formal anchor for Haraway’s thinking and Terranova’s documentary.
Assemblages, like networks, evoke the idea of simultaneity over sequence, of connected separateness, or what Haraway describes somewhat cartographically as “nodes in a field” (Haraway 588). It is an expansive and relational structure, but one that retains the integrity of the local site. As mentioned above, the scene’s establishing shot can be read as performing this aspect of Haraway’s theory as it works to disrupt this sense of totalizing vision. The establishing shot, and indeed the entire film, denies the viewer a full view of the exterior of Haraway’s home, instead offering an interior, quotidian landscape of jumbled objects. However, just as the focus on the storage unit disrupts the normative grammar of the establishing shot, the rest of the scene goes on to be increasingly disruptive of the tendency to perceive documentaries as windows onto the “real.”As the above would suggest, Haraway’s argument for a politics/cartographics of “mobile positioning” based on recognizing all actors as “nodes in a field” has significant implications for the nature of subjectivity and objectivity in documentary film. A theory of situated knowledges plays with notions of fixity and movement, seen clearly in the oxymoronic “mobile position,” of the subjective site as both fixed, situated, and dynamically mobile, inherently multiplicitous and plugged into a nodal field of other equally heterogenous subjectivities. Haraway is insistent that this mobile/fixed subjective vision “in which the tones of extreme localization…vibrate in the same field as global high-tension emissions” is not relativistic (not all visions are “equal” in their claim to truth, nor are they discrete objects) but committed to “a map of tensions and resonances between the fixed ends of a charged dichotomy” (Haraway 588). In turning now to this idea of play as a “fiddling” or tampering with power, Haraway’s play with cartographic vision and scale is vital to her conception of a “coyote discourse,” trickster methodologies that rely on the warping and repurposing of the tools of oppression rather than building new tools “from scratch” (Haraway 586).
In the next sequence, and the “keystone” sequence that follows it, Storytelling formalizes and spatializes of Haraway’s “play” or “trickster” discourse itself and her notions of partial knowledge and subjective splitting in ways that fundamentally rework these concepts.Directly following the establishing shot of the storage shelf, we see Haraway sitting at her table in her office (with the storage-cubby assemblage acting as a literal and figurative backdrop) the normative grammar of the documentary seems to be reestablished, with the medium-close shot of Haraway at a table (the table also has a collection of objects but these seem more obvious props or visuals that Haraway herself has chosen for the occasion) discussing her childhood experiences. One of the objects on the table is Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations, a collection of essays that argue for an understanding of the body as fluid, “less a fixed entity...than a product of technical, medical, and artistic invention.” This idea of mediation is obviously prescient to Terranova’s project itself, in which Haraway herself, and her theories of technological mediation, are in turn mediated by the documentary. The documentary is self-reflexive about its mediating presence by including visual effects that are undeniably computer generated. At one point in the scene, while Haraway is speaking, the background suddenly changes, perceptible only because the patterns of sunlight on the wall alter instantaneously. There is no accompanying cut or change in Haraway’s dialogue or with any other aspect of the set. Because everything else seems to remain stable, the effect is that the space behind Haraway is not connected to her organically in the way the viewer might have assumed. This cascades into a sense that the very foundations of the documentary film—the idea that a subject is being filmed in a set that holds weight as a material reality—are unsettled through the visualization/materialization of alterity itself. Accompanying this closing off of a presumed open diegesis is a sense of instability in the viewer because the diegesis never quite moves to completion. The “reality” offered in this documentary is not one that the viewer shares or can reliably piece together.This leads to the most unsettling moment of the scene. All of a sudden, the camera shifts instantaneously and almost imperceptibly to reveal another body in the frame. While Haraway speaks, the background space alters to show a partial view of an adjoining room and a person, emphatically framed in a doorway, typing at a computer with their back to the viewer. This person is also Haraway, yet the “original” Haraway, who continues her narrative unbroken at the table, remains in the center of the frame. The effect is so blatant that it is subtle, almost banal. While the documentary up to this point has been artful (in between the orthodontia anecdote and this moment, there are lots of interestingly-angled shots of nature, time-lapsed, shadowy night shots, disorienting close ups of Haraway’s dog, oddly enhanced diegetic sound of birds and critters) the sudden appearance of not only another person on screen but another Haraway puts the documentary squarely in the realm of the experimental. The viewer is suddenly deeply aware of the fact that what he or she is viewing might not be a documentary at all. Viewers familiar with Haraway’s work might be able to make sense of this splitting as “the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge… [where] Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises…” (586). The 180-degree double, typing away in the background while the centrally framed Haraway speaks to us, is also an homage to simultaneity, suggestive of the interpolated and messy relationships scholars—particularly females—have with their personal histories and professional output.
Terranova’s decision to literally split Haraway is a cinematographic performance of her theory of multidimensional subjectivity. By visualizing a literal double, the shot is also in conversation with shot grammars that seem to call for a doubling, as in a profile shot with empty space. Terranova’s aggressive actualizing and literalizing of Haraway’s theory works to blur the line between the supposed “abstract” realms of the theoretical and the material realm of the “real world” (whose avatar here is the documentary itself). It also suggests ways in which we can think of cinematography and mise en scene as doing the political and ethical work of locatability, that is, making visible and material seemingly immaterial and “abstract” things such as context, mediation, or partiality. While these formal features of film are part and parcel of the film’s participation in ethical projects which understand all epistemologies to be partial visions—and thus do work to disrupt those visions—it is also entirely original piece of theorizing that can be understood as in dynamic relation with yet sovereign from the theories of Haraway and Terranova.To return to the idea of documentary style that would be based on sitting with subjects rather than mapping or exposing them, in choosing to visit and sit with Haraway, the film seems to operate on the level of portraiture and thus connected to one of Renov’s “fundamental tendencies” of documentary: to preserve (21). Yet, following Renov and Grierson, cinematic portraiture is more than mimetic. Viewers are getting something new, namely, we might be witnessing Haraway’s physical self for the first time; seeing her bodily gestures, hearing the cadence of her voice, her explosive laugh, and viewing the interior of her home while getting to know her dog, Cayenne. Terranova’s previous film, Josee Andre: An Insane Portrait (2010) and his most recent project Absolute Beginners (2018), which follows individuals suffering from Huntingdon Disease, are also recognizable as exercises in portraiture. Yet, in every project, there is a strong sense of the documenting camera as a minimally critical agent, visiting with or sitting with subjects in a way that siphons critical agency (with cinematic agency being the ability to see) from what would be the central node of the supposed objective eye of the camera to a formal “elsewhere.” While minimal critical agency, visitation, and portraiture seem entirely at odds with Renov’s idea of documentary producing “explosive effects” when the cinematic collides with the historical referent, it does not mean there is an absence of epistemology or critique. Rather, it is a part of a critical comportment that allows for alternative ways of seeing and thus knowing, ways that are just as “explosive” as the most disruptive deployment of kino-eye.To be sure, the idea that novel epistemological configurations are born out of the “explosive effects” engendered by cinematic technology can be traced back to Vertov (Renov 33).
However, part of my argument here is based on the observation that Storytelling does not destabilize authorial, normative documentary vision via a 180-degree flip from subject to object—where we now see life through the eyes of Haraway herself or Haraway’s theoretical body of work rather than through Terranova’s camera. Rather the cinematography collides with Haraway’s feminist methodology to achieve a truly a diasporic dispersal of vision in relational terms. The singular, unidirectional semiotic geometries of normative documentary filmmaking and historical referent (Renov’s “debt to the signified”) are scattered as the film, by way of undoing itself on screen, also unravels the notion of the singular, imperialist “god-like” cartographic filmic “eye.”I will now turn to the most well-publicized and structurally “central” sequence of the film (what I call the “keystone” sequence), in which we see a speaking Haraway inscribed upon[2] by a hyper-real, digital jellyfish. Two instances of this occur at the 44-minute mark and the 58-minute mark. Unlike the other scenes in the film that use jellyfish footage, the jellyfishes that appear in these moments are not part of any expository or a metaphorical montage. They are not lending any expository function to the film’s project of visualizing Haraway or her theoretical concepts. Like the literal splitting of Haraway and the unnatural shifting of deep space in earlier sequences, this cross-contamination of the film’s digital effects into the “real” space of the film is highly disruptive precisely because of its banal and playful way it registers its own mediated status. It also more explicitly registers the relational interpolation of material scales of “film” and “digital” in a way that echoes Haraway’s troubling of the demarcations between the biological scales of the human and nonhuman. The jellyfish floating, somewhat ridiculously, somewhat impossibly, behind a passionately speaking Haraway is a formalization and materialization of the ways in which the nonhuman is in vibrant relation with the human. It is also significant that the troubling “coyote” jellyfishes come at precise moments in which the film seems to be making its most urgent and self-referential statements: 1.) that the kind of ethical storytelling that is required now, more than ever, is one that enthusiastically embraces its own limitations and 2.) that unless we shift our thinking to account for and honor the more-than-human world, life as we know it will cease to exist. These beautiful and sized-enhanced jellyfishes float awkwardly across the frame at the same moment that Haraway (and via Haraway, Terranova) is making the most urgent rhetorical cases for the film, with the effect that the jellyfishes’ presence inevitably works to decenter this very rhetoric. The jellyfish are more than “combative” in this mise en scene, they undeniably steal the show. I read this sequence as a formal gesture of the film to perform and make material-visible the very processes of destabilizing one’s own vision and critical agency. Additionally, the fact that these moments are both part of a larger “keystone” sequence of the film (structurally and temporally, we are right at the very “core” and center of the film), lends even more weight to the unsettling presence of the jellyfish.
On the other side of this central “keystone” sequence, the film continues to trouble itself, yet does so in ways that are arguably even more destabilizing than what came before. After the “keystone” sequence, the film seems to shift from playful disruption to a formal process I term “voiding.” Voiding attempts to describe the ways that the formal strategies in the latter half of the film perform—or, make material—representational failure itself. There are two final sequences in the film that I take up as examples of voiding: the first starts at the 58-minute mark and goes till the 1 hour and six-minute mark. At that time, the second sequence starts, which also happens to be the final sequence of film. Both of these sequences expand upon the theorizing that is initiated in the earlier parts of the documentary; however, these sequences also stand apart from the rest of film. The two sequences are much deeper fissures in the already cracked surface of documentary “objectivity” that Terranova and Haraway are concerned with and that I frame at the beginning of the paper with my discussion of Renov. The first sequence, which begins at the 58-minute mark, does not immediately follow the “keystone” sequence but is actually formally separated from the rest of the film by a montage of low-angled shots of the natural environment and Haraway’s dog Cayenne. The continued use of the low-angle shot is reminiscent of Haraway’s “view from below” cartographies in “Situated Knowledges” (578). The montage bridge also emphasizes the more-than-human network in which Haraway and her home are embedded, a relational gesture of situated and partial vision in a web of vibrant materiality. After the bridge, the sequence begins with a medium and static shot of Haraway seated at what seems to be a dining room table in a part of the home we have not seen yet. The table is clear except for a single red coffee mug, a notable change from the cluttered and combative mise en scene that characterizes much of the film. At one level, the minimal mise en scene functions as a formal void in the rest of the film, throwing this sequence into further relief for the viewer. From the point of view of the viewer, the sudden ceasing of the combative mise en scene has visual and bodily effects. I felt as though I could take deeper breaths during this moment of formal “pause,” when I wasn’t being visually besieged by bric-a-brac or jellyfishes in Haraway’s paper-strewn office. The unsettling “trickster” discourse seems to be put on hold as Haraway begins to speak about her personal life, her reproductive and nonreproductive family, and her well-known concept of kin. The simplicity of the scene, combined with the emphatic framing of Haraway in the window, also seems to be a moment where the film “pauses” its own self-troubling. This is probably the most “normative” documentary moment in the film. As Haraway talks about her unconventional romantic and hetero-queer relationships, we get a sense that we are seeing “behind the scenes” of Haraway’s academic persona. In this moment, emphatically framed by windows, Storytelling is at its most “window-like” in the sense of it performing the illusion of an unmediated view out onto the “real.”
That sense is quickly shattered, albeit joyfully. At the 1 hour 5-minute mark, right as Haraway wraps up a deeply touching vision of responsible, non-heteronormative family making practices and structures, there is a sudden cut—we then immediately see Haraway, mid-sip on her coffee mug, smiling and looking up at someone off-camera. Suddenly we hear Terranova’s un-microphoned voice for the first time off-camera telling Haraway that they have finished green-screen shooting. At the same time, we see an arm, presumably Terranova’s, reach into the shot to give Haraway some green items to play with. A different kind of combativeness returns in the viewing experience as the viewer can’t help but experience pleasure at watching this highly esteemed theorist and visionary literally play with toys while also simultaneously processing that what we thought was “real” was in fact heavily mediated and illusory. This moment is much like the jellyfish moments in which the digital is inscribing itself upon the real in a way that destabilizes the real and the digital (as a means to verisimilitude) at once. The last item that Terranova gives Haraway is a large green balance ball. She takes it and handles it for a few seconds before placing it in front of the camera, where the ball’s interaction with the green screen effect completely cancels her body out. Where Haraway once was speaking so passionately about her life and life’s work, there is now a visual void (although the aural remains—the fact that we still hear Haraway is significant). This literal and formal cancelling out or “voiding” of the normative features of the documentary is also one that negates the film’s documentary function as the act of recording and preserving a subject. This negation of the human subject lies at the heart of Haraway’s speculative and posthuman conception of kin and compost.Because I wish to foreground the film’s theorizing, I have tried not to include too many direct quotes from Haraway, but when she places the ball in between herself and the camera, she states, “There we go, now we’re really done.” Right after she states this, there is a cut, and her laughing body instantly disappears, leaving only the “space” behind her. This void is troubling, for those who are unfamiliar with green screens, we can’t even be sure this “space” is real or just another one of the film’s digital tricks. There is a (seemingly) diegetic bark from Cayenne, then the screen “voids” again as it cuts to black and the final sequence of the film begins. The film’s cut to black is a permanent one as the rest of the film is composed entirely of nighttime footage of the outdoor environment surrounding Haraway’s home. The viewer’s sense of sight (and, notably, the film’s means of visual representation) has been almost completely negated, so what comes into focus are is a tactile cacophony of sounds, heartbeats, and night critters. Then we hear Haraway’s voice. A story begins, the content of which is a speculative future of reproductive and nonreproductive posthuman kin. However, this entire narrative is told “in the dark.” This negation of the visual—and with it, its problematic masculinist cartographic connotations—combined with the foregrounding of the aural and affective, recalls Eve Sedgwick’s “reparative” modes of reading that, in their denial of universal vision, are well suited to other “important phenomenological and theoretical tasks” (Sedgwick 145). This final sequence is a moment of documentary voiding that brings together Haraway’s storytelling and Terranova’s filmmaking to produce another kind of Storytelling altogether.
To conclude, it is significant to recognize how this cinematic undoing and voiding, in its performance of the filmmaker’s limited and partial vision (as well as more direct obscuring of that vision), does not merely restage these feminist theoretical concepts. Rather, these concepts are reworked in the very act of formalizing and spatializing them. If we return to the idea that Terranova’s formal strategies create a relational space in which the filmed object and the filming subjectivity are interpolated, “hanging together” in dynamic relation to one another, the documentary film comes into view as not a mere signifier but a “site-event” in which various elements of collide together (Marston et al 418). The film registers these collisions formally. This is worlds away from normative documentary film’s illusory traffic in general, universal objectivism. The idea of documentary self-mediation as a formal phenomenon is central to my argument for Terranova’s film having theoretical agency. This agency is not solely Terranova’s but one that results from the “explosive effects” of Terranova’s vision colliding with Haraway’s and all the material and immaterial actors and apparatuses that are involved in bringing this collision together and that also form the “space” in which it unfolds. Storytelling for Earthly Survival undoes itself as documentary film by reworking Haraway’s feminist critique of the epistemologies of Western science, theories that also work to buttress normative documentary film itself. Part of this reworking is enabled because the film enacts a minimally critical visiting with rather than a normative “strong” documentary mode of going out heroically into the field and capturing reality. The notion of a passive “field” that the filmmaker enters into and digs up is one that is restaged across the disciplines, in both the arts and sciences. Feminist geographer Jennifer Hyndman’s article, “The Field is Here and Now, not There and Then” begins with an epigraph which states that if researchers in the field are willing to “leave some stones unturned” and abandon the search for “complete” knowledge, they might then “gain access to those very partial vistas that our informants may desire or think to share with us” (Malkki, qtd in Hyndman 262). The image of stones left unturned is a powerful one because it seems entirely antithetical to the aims of documentary film. If a documentary is not turning over stones via interviews or extended dialogue, what is it doing exactly? What I have tried to suggest with this essay is that Storytelling, in its various destabilizing techniques and forms, is a representation of the limitations and productive failures of documentary fieldwork itself. Ultimately, Storytelling presents a vision of “the field” that is not static or passive but always assembled, combative, and in-process. Storytelling’s fragmented network of relations scatters any sense of “documentary” and “world” as discrete spaces. The film’s theory is one that houses a range of formal and performative strategies that are effective at disrupting “god-trick” notions from within, redeploying their imperial and masculinist structures in the service of a more-than-human “vision.”
References
Best, Stephen and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading” Representations, 108:1, Fall 2009, p. 1-21.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 575-599.
Hensley, Nathan K. “Curatorial Reading and Endless War” Victorian
Studies, 56(1), Autumn 2013, pp. 59-83.
Hyndman, Jennifer. “The Field is Here and Now, not There and Then.” The Geographical Review, 91(1 & 2), 2001, pp. 262-272.
Marston, Sallie, Jones III, John and Woodward, K. “Human Geography without Scale” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30:4, Dec 2005,
Nakamura, Lisa. “Digital Media in Cinema Journal, 1995-2008.” Cinema Journal, 49(1), 2009, pp. 154-160 Renov, Michael,
ed. Theorizing Documentary. Routledge, 1993.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, ed. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.
Terranova, Fabrizio (Dir.). Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival. Icarus Films. 2016
Documentary film’s troubling tendency to restage the performance of what feminist visionary Donna Haraway famously coined “the god trick” of masculinist-imperialist claims to scientific objectivity is perhaps why experimental filmmaker Terranova chose Haraway and her work as the “subject” of Storytelling (Haraway 580). To briefly return to Renov, it is troubling that Haraway’s extensive work on the critique of scientific objectivity is not cited anywhere amidst the sheer amount of historical, theoretical, and aesthetic ground that Renov covers in his introduction. Haraway’s work is crucial to understanding Renov’s investment in a poetics of documentary film, which can be summed up in the following questions he sets forth:
However, Terranova’s documentary is hardly the first to take up “theory,” be it literary or cultural. Along with several documentary film pieces on Marx (The Spectre of Marxism, Dir. Stuart Hall, 1983 and Genius of the Modern World: Karl Marx, BBC, 2016), Freud (Century of the Self, Dir. Adam Curtis, 2002), Nietzsche (Human, All too Human, BBC, 1999), and other bastions of Western philosophy, recent documentary filmmakers have also explored more contemporary theoretical subjects. Sophia Fienne’s Zizek! A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), while billed as a documentary, is not so much an exploration of the Slovenian film and cultural critic as it is a tour, led by Zizek, of psychoanalytic readings of various films. While there are several other documentary projects that take up critical theory, cultural studies, or a specific critical theorist or philosopher, they are often concerned with a recording a formative moment in the theorist’s personal life (such as Felix Guattari’s failed Sci-Fi movie script) or, most commonly, concern the individual’s controversial political activism and/or imprisonment.
For these reasons, Storytelling for Earthly Survival is somewhat of an anomaly. Eschewing the normative modes of documentary digging, uncovering, or exposing truth, Terranova’s film seems to do nothing more than simply visit with Donna Haraway. Visitation, while falling more into Renov’s documentary modes of preservation or expression than revealing or exposing, is also part of a signature critical comportment, on the part of Terranova, that seeks to practice a “minimal critical agency.” Rather than plumb the depths of Haraway to reveal a previously unknown truth (i.e. practice a normative documentary rhetoric, style, or form), I wager that Terranova does not propose to tell the viewer anything new about Donna Haraway’s feminist theoretical work, evident in the film’s complete lack of narratorial voice-over. One-part unreliable narrator, one-part minimal critical agent reading the “surfaces” of Haraway’s thinking and being, Terranova’s production of Storytelling for Earthly Survival detaches from his authorial intention, thus destabilizing notions of documentary film’s role as mere signifier. The film’s various unsettling formal features not only contests the notion of authorial vision, it allows a configuration in which the film, via moments of combative mise en scene, non-expository digital effects, and an effect I call “voiding,” is able to mediate itself[1] and ultimately do its own theorizing. Nathan K. Hensley’s expansion on surface reading in the literal terms of mise en scene gestures toward film as a privileged site for theorizing surface reading methods that recognizes film’s ability, via mise en scene, to “mediate itself” (Hensley 75). In describing the film’s default on its presumed “debt to the signified,” the idea that the film’s theorizing can be understood separately from Terranova’s and Haraway’s theories remains is central concern throughout this essay.
Turning to the film, it’s clear that the destabilization of the normative documentary grammar is immediate. The first sequence I will take up is during the film’s nearly ten-minute cold open. It begins at the six-minute mark and ends four minutes later, with the title sequence immediately following. While it is not the first scene in which Haraway speaks (the film opens in media res with a close-up of Haraway, standing in her screened-in porch, in the middle of an anecdote about orthodontia), it is the first time that Haraway is seated at a table directly facing the camera, engaged in what viewers would recognize as a normatively structured interview performance: speaking about one’s childhood. However, this normativity is disrupted cinematically by Terranova even before we even get to Haraway seated at the table. The scene begins with an establishing shot of a portion of the interior walls of Haraway’s home office. The banal and fragmented subject of this shot—an office wall rather than an exterior shot of the office itself—is unconventional. The misalignment with the subject (wall, partial vision) and shot’s normative grammar (exposition, total vision) creates a dynamism or combativeness that is compounded at the level of mise en scene. The “landscape” of the cluttered home office wall offers a rich, cacophonous mise en scene. The viewer’s attention and focus are directed onto a practically uplit room with a shelving unit with storage cubbies that takes up almost the entirety of the wall. Crisp sunlight pours in through the upper window leaving visible geometries of light on the adjacent wall. Some of the cubbies are occupied by colorful storage bins which contribute a sense of cheery neatness among chaos, an affective register that matches Haraway’s lively conversational warmth, sudden explosive laughter, and piercing logic. Juxtaposed against this sense of tidiness is the landscape of the rest of the shelving unit which is visibly cluttered with stacked books, tchotchkes, and random papers. While some items seem to belong to the space and have a recognizably filmable aesthetic value (shelved books and cultural artifacts/decor), others seem to be more out of place or awaiting relocation (stacked books and a dishtowel), while yet others are jarringly quotidian or seem to take away from the sense of aesthetic curation (a box of Glad trash bags, a spray bottle of pet stain cleaner, an awkwardly visible electrical cord). The physical separation of the cubbies and the practical separation of use-value of all the items come together as networked assemblage to form a combative mise en scene. As the camera slowly pans forward on the Z axis and we begin to hear Haraway’s voice, the gravity of the slow pan combined with the grammar of the establishing shot of the quirky, cluttered shelving unit works to solidify that the notion of assemblage itself is the formal anchor for Haraway’s thinking and Terranova’s documentary.
Assemblages, like networks, evoke the idea of simultaneity over sequence, of connected separateness, or what Haraway describes somewhat cartographically as “nodes in a field” (Haraway 588). It is an expansive and relational structure, but one that retains the integrity of the local site. As mentioned above, the scene’s establishing shot can be read as performing this aspect of Haraway’s theory as it works to disrupt this sense of totalizing vision. The establishing shot, and indeed the entire film, denies the viewer a full view of the exterior of Haraway’s home, instead offering an interior, quotidian landscape of jumbled objects. However, just as the focus on the storage unit disrupts the normative grammar of the establishing shot, the rest of the scene goes on to be increasingly disruptive of the tendency to perceive documentaries as windows onto the “real.”As the above would suggest, Haraway’s argument for a politics/cartographics of “mobile positioning” based on recognizing all actors as “nodes in a field” has significant implications for the nature of subjectivity and objectivity in documentary film. A theory of situated knowledges plays with notions of fixity and movement, seen clearly in the oxymoronic “mobile position,” of the subjective site as both fixed, situated, and dynamically mobile, inherently multiplicitous and plugged into a nodal field of other equally heterogenous subjectivities. Haraway is insistent that this mobile/fixed subjective vision “in which the tones of extreme localization…vibrate in the same field as global high-tension emissions” is not relativistic (not all visions are “equal” in their claim to truth, nor are they discrete objects) but committed to “a map of tensions and resonances between the fixed ends of a charged dichotomy” (Haraway 588). In turning now to this idea of play as a “fiddling” or tampering with power, Haraway’s play with cartographic vision and scale is vital to her conception of a “coyote discourse,” trickster methodologies that rely on the warping and repurposing of the tools of oppression rather than building new tools “from scratch” (Haraway 586).
In the next sequence, and the “keystone” sequence that follows it, Storytelling formalizes and spatializes of Haraway’s “play” or “trickster” discourse itself and her notions of partial knowledge and subjective splitting in ways that fundamentally rework these concepts.Directly following the establishing shot of the storage shelf, we see Haraway sitting at her table in her office (with the storage-cubby assemblage acting as a literal and figurative backdrop) the normative grammar of the documentary seems to be reestablished, with the medium-close shot of Haraway at a table (the table also has a collection of objects but these seem more obvious props or visuals that Haraway herself has chosen for the occasion) discussing her childhood experiences. One of the objects on the table is Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations, a collection of essays that argue for an understanding of the body as fluid, “less a fixed entity...than a product of technical, medical, and artistic invention.” This idea of mediation is obviously prescient to Terranova’s project itself, in which Haraway herself, and her theories of technological mediation, are in turn mediated by the documentary. The documentary is self-reflexive about its mediating presence by including visual effects that are undeniably computer generated. At one point in the scene, while Haraway is speaking, the background suddenly changes, perceptible only because the patterns of sunlight on the wall alter instantaneously. There is no accompanying cut or change in Haraway’s dialogue or with any other aspect of the set. Because everything else seems to remain stable, the effect is that the space behind Haraway is not connected to her organically in the way the viewer might have assumed. This cascades into a sense that the very foundations of the documentary film—the idea that a subject is being filmed in a set that holds weight as a material reality—are unsettled through the visualization/materialization of alterity itself. Accompanying this closing off of a presumed open diegesis is a sense of instability in the viewer because the diegesis never quite moves to completion. The “reality” offered in this documentary is not one that the viewer shares or can reliably piece together.This leads to the most unsettling moment of the scene. All of a sudden, the camera shifts instantaneously and almost imperceptibly to reveal another body in the frame. While Haraway speaks, the background space alters to show a partial view of an adjoining room and a person, emphatically framed in a doorway, typing at a computer with their back to the viewer. This person is also Haraway, yet the “original” Haraway, who continues her narrative unbroken at the table, remains in the center of the frame. The effect is so blatant that it is subtle, almost banal. While the documentary up to this point has been artful (in between the orthodontia anecdote and this moment, there are lots of interestingly-angled shots of nature, time-lapsed, shadowy night shots, disorienting close ups of Haraway’s dog, oddly enhanced diegetic sound of birds and critters) the sudden appearance of not only another person on screen but another Haraway puts the documentary squarely in the realm of the experimental. The viewer is suddenly deeply aware of the fact that what he or she is viewing might not be a documentary at all. Viewers familiar with Haraway’s work might be able to make sense of this splitting as “the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge… [where] Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises…” (586). The 180-degree double, typing away in the background while the centrally framed Haraway speaks to us, is also an homage to simultaneity, suggestive of the interpolated and messy relationships scholars—particularly females—have with their personal histories and professional output.
Terranova’s decision to literally split Haraway is a cinematographic performance of her theory of multidimensional subjectivity. By visualizing a literal double, the shot is also in conversation with shot grammars that seem to call for a doubling, as in a profile shot with empty space. Terranova’s aggressive actualizing and literalizing of Haraway’s theory works to blur the line between the supposed “abstract” realms of the theoretical and the material realm of the “real world” (whose avatar here is the documentary itself). It also suggests ways in which we can think of cinematography and mise en scene as doing the political and ethical work of locatability, that is, making visible and material seemingly immaterial and “abstract” things such as context, mediation, or partiality. While these formal features of film are part and parcel of the film’s participation in ethical projects which understand all epistemologies to be partial visions—and thus do work to disrupt those visions—it is also entirely original piece of theorizing that can be understood as in dynamic relation with yet sovereign from the theories of Haraway and Terranova.To return to the idea of documentary style that would be based on sitting with subjects rather than mapping or exposing them, in choosing to visit and sit with Haraway, the film seems to operate on the level of portraiture and thus connected to one of Renov’s “fundamental tendencies” of documentary: to preserve (21). Yet, following Renov and Grierson, cinematic portraiture is more than mimetic. Viewers are getting something new, namely, we might be witnessing Haraway’s physical self for the first time; seeing her bodily gestures, hearing the cadence of her voice, her explosive laugh, and viewing the interior of her home while getting to know her dog, Cayenne. Terranova’s previous film, Josee Andre: An Insane Portrait (2010) and his most recent project Absolute Beginners (2018), which follows individuals suffering from Huntingdon Disease, are also recognizable as exercises in portraiture. Yet, in every project, there is a strong sense of the documenting camera as a minimally critical agent, visiting with or sitting with subjects in a way that siphons critical agency (with cinematic agency being the ability to see) from what would be the central node of the supposed objective eye of the camera to a formal “elsewhere.” While minimal critical agency, visitation, and portraiture seem entirely at odds with Renov’s idea of documentary producing “explosive effects” when the cinematic collides with the historical referent, it does not mean there is an absence of epistemology or critique. Rather, it is a part of a critical comportment that allows for alternative ways of seeing and thus knowing, ways that are just as “explosive” as the most disruptive deployment of kino-eye.To be sure, the idea that novel epistemological configurations are born out of the “explosive effects” engendered by cinematic technology can be traced back to Vertov (Renov 33).
However, part of my argument here is based on the observation that Storytelling does not destabilize authorial, normative documentary vision via a 180-degree flip from subject to object—where we now see life through the eyes of Haraway herself or Haraway’s theoretical body of work rather than through Terranova’s camera. Rather the cinematography collides with Haraway’s feminist methodology to achieve a truly a diasporic dispersal of vision in relational terms. The singular, unidirectional semiotic geometries of normative documentary filmmaking and historical referent (Renov’s “debt to the signified”) are scattered as the film, by way of undoing itself on screen, also unravels the notion of the singular, imperialist “god-like” cartographic filmic “eye.”I will now turn to the most well-publicized and structurally “central” sequence of the film (what I call the “keystone” sequence), in which we see a speaking Haraway inscribed upon[2] by a hyper-real, digital jellyfish. Two instances of this occur at the 44-minute mark and the 58-minute mark. Unlike the other scenes in the film that use jellyfish footage, the jellyfishes that appear in these moments are not part of any expository or a metaphorical montage. They are not lending any expository function to the film’s project of visualizing Haraway or her theoretical concepts. Like the literal splitting of Haraway and the unnatural shifting of deep space in earlier sequences, this cross-contamination of the film’s digital effects into the “real” space of the film is highly disruptive precisely because of its banal and playful way it registers its own mediated status. It also more explicitly registers the relational interpolation of material scales of “film” and “digital” in a way that echoes Haraway’s troubling of the demarcations between the biological scales of the human and nonhuman. The jellyfish floating, somewhat ridiculously, somewhat impossibly, behind a passionately speaking Haraway is a formalization and materialization of the ways in which the nonhuman is in vibrant relation with the human. It is also significant that the troubling “coyote” jellyfishes come at precise moments in which the film seems to be making its most urgent and self-referential statements: 1.) that the kind of ethical storytelling that is required now, more than ever, is one that enthusiastically embraces its own limitations and 2.) that unless we shift our thinking to account for and honor the more-than-human world, life as we know it will cease to exist. These beautiful and sized-enhanced jellyfishes float awkwardly across the frame at the same moment that Haraway (and via Haraway, Terranova) is making the most urgent rhetorical cases for the film, with the effect that the jellyfishes’ presence inevitably works to decenter this very rhetoric. The jellyfish are more than “combative” in this mise en scene, they undeniably steal the show. I read this sequence as a formal gesture of the film to perform and make material-visible the very processes of destabilizing one’s own vision and critical agency. Additionally, the fact that these moments are both part of a larger “keystone” sequence of the film (structurally and temporally, we are right at the very “core” and center of the film), lends even more weight to the unsettling presence of the jellyfish.
On the other side of this central “keystone” sequence, the film continues to trouble itself, yet does so in ways that are arguably even more destabilizing than what came before. After the “keystone” sequence, the film seems to shift from playful disruption to a formal process I term “voiding.” Voiding attempts to describe the ways that the formal strategies in the latter half of the film perform—or, make material—representational failure itself. There are two final sequences in the film that I take up as examples of voiding: the first starts at the 58-minute mark and goes till the 1 hour and six-minute mark. At that time, the second sequence starts, which also happens to be the final sequence of film. Both of these sequences expand upon the theorizing that is initiated in the earlier parts of the documentary; however, these sequences also stand apart from the rest of film. The two sequences are much deeper fissures in the already cracked surface of documentary “objectivity” that Terranova and Haraway are concerned with and that I frame at the beginning of the paper with my discussion of Renov. The first sequence, which begins at the 58-minute mark, does not immediately follow the “keystone” sequence but is actually formally separated from the rest of the film by a montage of low-angled shots of the natural environment and Haraway’s dog Cayenne. The continued use of the low-angle shot is reminiscent of Haraway’s “view from below” cartographies in “Situated Knowledges” (578). The montage bridge also emphasizes the more-than-human network in which Haraway and her home are embedded, a relational gesture of situated and partial vision in a web of vibrant materiality. After the bridge, the sequence begins with a medium and static shot of Haraway seated at what seems to be a dining room table in a part of the home we have not seen yet. The table is clear except for a single red coffee mug, a notable change from the cluttered and combative mise en scene that characterizes much of the film. At one level, the minimal mise en scene functions as a formal void in the rest of the film, throwing this sequence into further relief for the viewer. From the point of view of the viewer, the sudden ceasing of the combative mise en scene has visual and bodily effects. I felt as though I could take deeper breaths during this moment of formal “pause,” when I wasn’t being visually besieged by bric-a-brac or jellyfishes in Haraway’s paper-strewn office. The unsettling “trickster” discourse seems to be put on hold as Haraway begins to speak about her personal life, her reproductive and nonreproductive family, and her well-known concept of kin. The simplicity of the scene, combined with the emphatic framing of Haraway in the window, also seems to be a moment where the film “pauses” its own self-troubling. This is probably the most “normative” documentary moment in the film. As Haraway talks about her unconventional romantic and hetero-queer relationships, we get a sense that we are seeing “behind the scenes” of Haraway’s academic persona. In this moment, emphatically framed by windows, Storytelling is at its most “window-like” in the sense of it performing the illusion of an unmediated view out onto the “real.”
That sense is quickly shattered, albeit joyfully. At the 1 hour 5-minute mark, right as Haraway wraps up a deeply touching vision of responsible, non-heteronormative family making practices and structures, there is a sudden cut—we then immediately see Haraway, mid-sip on her coffee mug, smiling and looking up at someone off-camera. Suddenly we hear Terranova’s un-microphoned voice for the first time off-camera telling Haraway that they have finished green-screen shooting. At the same time, we see an arm, presumably Terranova’s, reach into the shot to give Haraway some green items to play with. A different kind of combativeness returns in the viewing experience as the viewer can’t help but experience pleasure at watching this highly esteemed theorist and visionary literally play with toys while also simultaneously processing that what we thought was “real” was in fact heavily mediated and illusory. This moment is much like the jellyfish moments in which the digital is inscribing itself upon the real in a way that destabilizes the real and the digital (as a means to verisimilitude) at once. The last item that Terranova gives Haraway is a large green balance ball. She takes it and handles it for a few seconds before placing it in front of the camera, where the ball’s interaction with the green screen effect completely cancels her body out. Where Haraway once was speaking so passionately about her life and life’s work, there is now a visual void (although the aural remains—the fact that we still hear Haraway is significant). This literal and formal cancelling out or “voiding” of the normative features of the documentary is also one that negates the film’s documentary function as the act of recording and preserving a subject. This negation of the human subject lies at the heart of Haraway’s speculative and posthuman conception of kin and compost.Because I wish to foreground the film’s theorizing, I have tried not to include too many direct quotes from Haraway, but when she places the ball in between herself and the camera, she states, “There we go, now we’re really done.” Right after she states this, there is a cut, and her laughing body instantly disappears, leaving only the “space” behind her. This void is troubling, for those who are unfamiliar with green screens, we can’t even be sure this “space” is real or just another one of the film’s digital tricks. There is a (seemingly) diegetic bark from Cayenne, then the screen “voids” again as it cuts to black and the final sequence of the film begins. The film’s cut to black is a permanent one as the rest of the film is composed entirely of nighttime footage of the outdoor environment surrounding Haraway’s home. The viewer’s sense of sight (and, notably, the film’s means of visual representation) has been almost completely negated, so what comes into focus are is a tactile cacophony of sounds, heartbeats, and night critters. Then we hear Haraway’s voice. A story begins, the content of which is a speculative future of reproductive and nonreproductive posthuman kin. However, this entire narrative is told “in the dark.” This negation of the visual—and with it, its problematic masculinist cartographic connotations—combined with the foregrounding of the aural and affective, recalls Eve Sedgwick’s “reparative” modes of reading that, in their denial of universal vision, are well suited to other “important phenomenological and theoretical tasks” (Sedgwick 145). This final sequence is a moment of documentary voiding that brings together Haraway’s storytelling and Terranova’s filmmaking to produce another kind of Storytelling altogether.
To conclude, it is significant to recognize how this cinematic undoing and voiding, in its performance of the filmmaker’s limited and partial vision (as well as more direct obscuring of that vision), does not merely restage these feminist theoretical concepts. Rather, these concepts are reworked in the very act of formalizing and spatializing them. If we return to the idea that Terranova’s formal strategies create a relational space in which the filmed object and the filming subjectivity are interpolated, “hanging together” in dynamic relation to one another, the documentary film comes into view as not a mere signifier but a “site-event” in which various elements of collide together (Marston et al 418). The film registers these collisions formally. This is worlds away from normative documentary film’s illusory traffic in general, universal objectivism. The idea of documentary self-mediation as a formal phenomenon is central to my argument for Terranova’s film having theoretical agency. This agency is not solely Terranova’s but one that results from the “explosive effects” of Terranova’s vision colliding with Haraway’s and all the material and immaterial actors and apparatuses that are involved in bringing this collision together and that also form the “space” in which it unfolds. Storytelling for Earthly Survival undoes itself as documentary film by reworking Haraway’s feminist critique of the epistemologies of Western science, theories that also work to buttress normative documentary film itself. Part of this reworking is enabled because the film enacts a minimally critical visiting with rather than a normative “strong” documentary mode of going out heroically into the field and capturing reality. The notion of a passive “field” that the filmmaker enters into and digs up is one that is restaged across the disciplines, in both the arts and sciences. Feminist geographer Jennifer Hyndman’s article, “The Field is Here and Now, not There and Then” begins with an epigraph which states that if researchers in the field are willing to “leave some stones unturned” and abandon the search for “complete” knowledge, they might then “gain access to those very partial vistas that our informants may desire or think to share with us” (Malkki, qtd in Hyndman 262). The image of stones left unturned is a powerful one because it seems entirely antithetical to the aims of documentary film. If a documentary is not turning over stones via interviews or extended dialogue, what is it doing exactly? What I have tried to suggest with this essay is that Storytelling, in its various destabilizing techniques and forms, is a representation of the limitations and productive failures of documentary fieldwork itself. Ultimately, Storytelling presents a vision of “the field” that is not static or passive but always assembled, combative, and in-process. Storytelling’s fragmented network of relations scatters any sense of “documentary” and “world” as discrete spaces. The film’s theory is one that houses a range of formal and performative strategies that are effective at disrupting “god-trick” notions from within, redeploying their imperial and masculinist structures in the service of a more-than-human “vision.”
Best, Stephen and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading” Representations, 108:1, Fall 2009, p. 1-21.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 575-599.
Hyndman, Jennifer. “The Field is Here and Now, not There and Then.” The Geographical Review, 91(1 & 2), 2001, pp. 262-272.
Marston, Sallie, Jones III, John and Woodward, K. “Human Geography without Scale” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30:4, Dec 2005,
Nakamura, Lisa. “Digital Media in Cinema Journal, 1995-2008.” Cinema Journal, 49(1), 2009, pp. 154-160
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, ed. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.
Terranova, Fabrizio (Dir.). Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival. Icarus Films. 2016
[1] My decision to recognize the film’s expressive subjectivity as distinct from Terranova’s is informed by debates in literary studies which revolve around “surface reading.” Surface reading, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s describe in the now infamous essay in their special issue of Representations, is characterized by a strategic decision to better attend to formal surfaces rather than assume that the underlying structures or systems are either more important or somehow not entangled in surface topographies[2] For a discussion about digital inscription in film, see Nakamura.
