| REF portfolio description | The documentary applies methods developed during the author's PhD in retaliation to narrative filmmaking and role of affective tonality in producing a cinematic narrative. These methods are applied and tested in a documentary format for the first time. The methodological approach derives from Lucy Bolton’s mobilisation of Luce Irigaray’s work on female interiority, taken from fiction film and applied to
documentary practice.
The work applies a novel approach to the creation of a filmic, affectual interiority. Concepts drawn from the area of film-philosophy, and feminist film studies, traditionally used in the analysis of fiction films,
were used in the production process of documentary practice, thus creating new forms of knowledge in relation to both the production and analysis of documentary forms. The film applies a structure derived from Sophocles’ play Antigone, order to draw out the allegorical nature of the protagonist’s journey, process of grieving, dealing with bureaucracy, government and patriarchal structures; two women and
two stories; Antigone, a mythical Theban woman, battles the verdict of the king, Creon, to secure a decent burial for her brother, Polyneices. Beata, a widowed woman from a small Polish city, battles bureaucracy to secure a decent burial for her husband.
Through the production, the directors developed the concept of filmiation, as detailed in the paper, ‘Antigone in the London Office: documentary film, creativity and female agency’ (Cultural Studies, forthcoming). Filmiation is the creative act of the filmmaking process, which creates a space where the life of the characters and the life of the
camera merge. This creative, feminist space is what the directors term, filmiation, and we regard it as a space of mutual influence between themselves, the protagonist and the documentary film.
The work is one of few documentary films to explicitly address affective interiority, whilst mobilising an Irigarayan/Boltonian theoretical framework. |
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