Special Guest: Kim Nelson

LIVE DOCUMENTARY AS SOCIAL CINEMA

A talk by Kim Nelson (University of Windsor) 

 Monday Sep 19, 10am @ Isabel Bader Centre, Room 222 

 Live Documentaries re-expand cinema into the previously explored territory of the origins of film exhibition, reengaging the components of an entertainment designed to introduce the invention of screen technology to an audience. Now that the technology is all too familiar, live documentaries provide a reflexive platform for estrangement from our perpetual and isolating experiences with screen technologies and a site for a “social cinema.” 

 A variation of live cinema, the practice seizes emerging digital tools to reorient and reinvigorate this hybrid form, creating a “neo-cinema of attractions” in a distinctive documentary mode. This talk explores Live Documentaries as a crucial intervention in the embodied reception of moving images. It interrogates the work of one of its twenty-first-century pioneers, Sam Green, and considers how it fits into the fold of cinema. Finally, it will describe the unique character of Live Documentary’s practices of spectatorship and its increased resonance in an age ruled by binary codes fostering binary points of view. The Live Documentary offers specific benefits to the reflexive exploration of our shared reality via the moving image, modelling a metamodern sensibility that reenergizes communal spectatorship while reclaiming and renegotiating our access to truth in a supposedly “post-truth” world. 

Kim Nelson is an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor in Canada, where she directs the Live Doc Project and the Humanities Research Group. Her traditional and live documentaries have appeared at international film festivals and university campuses across Canada, the US, and Europe, and she has shown work on the CBC (Canada) and KCET (USA). She directs two ongoing federally-funded research projects. Her forthcoming publications include essays on Live Interactive Documentary in Rethinking History and the live cinema of Sam Green in the Routledge Companion to History in Moving Images and a monograph with Rutgers University Press.