Experiments in Documentary Animation: Anxious Borders, Speculative Media (2011)

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal6(3) 1 –15© The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1746847711417934anm.sagepub.com

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417934 ANMXXX10.1177/1746847711417934TakahashiAnimation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(3)

Corresponding author:Tess Takahashi, Department of Film, Room 222, Centre for Film and Television, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: [email protected]

Experiments in Documentary Animation: Anxious Borders, Speculative Media

Tess TakahashiYork University, Toronto, Canada

AbstractAnimated documentaries like Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It: Three Recollected Documents (2003), Jackie Goss’s Stranger Comes To Town (2007), and Stephen Andrews’s The Quick and the Dead (2004) invite us to consider the larger implications of the intensified dislocation and movement of individuals and information over the past decade. Through these exemplary texts, this article examines a trend in experimental animated documentaries in which artists visibly and self-consciously investigate the current status of the ‘documentary guarantee’. How can current documentary establish truth claims in a context in which there is widespread cultural anxiety regarding visible movement in a world assumed to be uncertain, unstable, and precarious?

Keywordsanimation, avant-garde, digital, documentary, experimental, feeling, global, media, reference, war

IntroductionAnimated documentaries like Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It: Three Recollected Documents (2003), Jackie Goss’s Stranger Comes To Town (2007), and Stephen Andrews’s The Quick and the Dead (2004) invite us to consider the larger implications of the intensified dislocation and movement of individuals and information over the past decade.1 Through these exemplary texts, this article examines a trend in experimental animated documenta-ries in which artists visibly and self-consciously investigate the current status of the ‘documentary guarantee’. By documentary guarantee, I mean the ways in which documentaries establish their truth claims. We are familiar with debates over the degree to which the digital undermines the familiar indexicality of the photographic image, once an important guarantee that the image we

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saw before us refers to something once really there in the world. I suggest that a different, though related, thematic may provide a more productive investigation of the documentary guarantee: how can current documentary establish truth claims in a context in which there is widespread cultural anxiety regarding visible movement in a world assumed to be uncertain, unstable, and precarious?

Many documentaries made in the last decade use animation in ways that explicitly address larger anxieties about a politically unstable world, in which people, goods, ideas, and images are disarticulated from place and circulate more freely than ever before, but in ways that are increas-ingly monitored and regimented. This world has been described by thinkers like Arun Appadurai, Ien Ang, and Saskia Sassen as increasingly unstable and disjunctive, but also increasingly consoli-dated and controlled. I suggest that this anxiety is dramatized in the ways that animation problema-tizes the documentary image’s rhetorical and indexical guarantees. Both international movement of images and documentary guarantees are concerned with questions of security and insecurity. I suggest that animation has emerged as an important practice in recent documentary – and particu-larly those that examine life in wartime – in part because animation enables analysis of and control over both the movement of images and movement within images.

I use the term ‘movement’ in both literal and metaphorical ways. These include the increase in the speed and movement of information, the physical movement of mail and goods, and the move-ment of human beings across international borders. Indeed, anywhere that boundaries and borders are present, movement can become either threatening or liberating. The term ‘movement’ also indicates the literal movement of animated images and text on screens, the movement involved in transcoding one medium to another, and the rapid and dislocating movement of images and infor-mation across the web. These kinds of movement suggest the increased dislocation of signifiers from their referents, a context that has significant implications for the ways in which documentary guarantees are established. At times, I also use the term movement in a metaphorical sense, as the movement and unsettling of established forms and ideas, again in ways that can be both anxiety producing and emancipating.

Through their intersection of formal strategies and subject matter, It’s Not My Memory of It, Stranger Comes To Town, and The Quick and the Dead make connections between the formal movement of the digitally animated image and the physical movement of human bodies in an ever more global world. These animated documentaries examine the anxieties that attend the now com-mon experience of crossing borders, invoking the voices of political insiders, unknown informants, automatons, displaced persons, immigrants, and oddballs. Like many contemporary experimental documentaries, they attempt to represent the experience of individuals whose lives have been com-plicated by their attempts to move across various kinds of borders. In this context, passports, health records, and physical bodies are often under scrutiny. The individuals these works examine occupy the uncertain physical and psychic space that lies somewhere between protected and unprotected, legitimate and illegitimate, citizen and detainee. In doing so, the works examined here interrogate anxiety over excessive movement at uncertain boundaries, whether (1) national, (2) intermedial, or (3) generic.

First, widespread cultural anxiety over the international movement of human subjects can be seen in discourses on national security within the US, which often figures the movement of the alien, the immigrant, and the displaced person as challenging the security of the national border. For the US ‘homeland security’, for example, the potential danger of terrorist bombing, alien bor-der crossing, and the infiltration of governmental networks lurks at every turn. At this historical juncture, anxieties about threats to security, personal safety, health, patriotism, and good citizen-ship are imbricated with discourses of visibility, as opposed to visuality, a distinction meant to foreground my concern with anxiety and uncertainty.

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Anxiety at national boundaries intersects with anxiety over intermedial boundaries. National borders, airports, gated communities, and websites through which money changes hands all consti-tute vulnerable borders. At these border sites, guards seek to guarantee physical identity through a variety of legitimated images and signs. They examine visual markers of identification (in the form of photographs, numeric codes, seals, signatures, and holograms), declarations of goods, and asser-tions of allegiance, sometimes accompanied by the literal and symbolic turning out of pockets. New technological versions of old-fashioned acts of matching – number to code, face to photo-graph, finger to finger print, iris to digital scan – attempt to assuage the anxiety that attends this kind of inspection. Here border crossers and border guards alike scrutinize and worry over the site where human bodies come together with official documents. If there exists anxiety over establish-ing the connection between document and human body at international borders, there also exists considerable anxiety about the management of that information. A plethora of material and digi-tized legal documents, which themselves must be organized, managed and accessed, attempt to shore up concern over what determines the privileges and rights of citizenship and freedom of movement. At these supposedly insecure borders, meaning becomes a gamble whose stakes are couched in terms of national ‘security’.

Second, there is considerable anxiety regarding the movement of images and information over intermedial boundaries. The status and stakes of information at international borders point to the always uncertain relation between signifiers and referents. While we sometimes tend to take it for granted, the uncertainty of this relationship has been exacerbated in the past two decades by the qualities associated with digital media. These include digital media’s status as animation, in the words of thinkers like Lev Manovich and Sean Cubitt, and its ability to seamlessly alter and com-posite images, as well as its capacity effortlessly to lift and move information and re-present it in any context. Digitally animated and composited hybrid images, videos, commercials, logos, adver-tisements, alarms, and text populate our field of vision (Manovich, 2006:6). Yet, as Manovich points out, these hybrid animated images remain radically under-analyzed. We take them for granted and thus are blind to the way they produce meaning and exert influence upon us.

The hybridity of animated images in everyday life constitutes another kind of border crossing, the crossing of media borders via digital transcoding. On the one hand, digitally animated images and information are ubiquitous. On the other hand, digital media provoke anxiety about the secu-rity of images, information, and access. Digitally animated images call out to us from an over-whelming field of too-often undifferentiated moving, recycled images and information that must be deciphered, assimilated, and evaluated moment by moment. Pieces of digital information such as these are not only dislocated from their worldly referents, but also often dislocated from reliable, authoritative discourse about their context, origin, and movement. Connected to this increased access to, and movement of, digital information lies anxiety over the security of personal informa-tion via viruses, the failure of our hard drives, and illegal access. We keep endless strings of pass-words in order to protect our personal and financial information from theft and wrongful use. As Wendy Chun (2006) notes, while the internet seems to foster personal and political freedom, digital technologies are always insecure and under constant surveillance. At the same time that digital information appears ever more available, it seems ever more vulnerable and in need of protection. I would argue that it is the increased seamlessness, movement, and speed of digital images and information that currently raise the most anxiety, producing questions about the establishment of documentary guarantees.

Within academic film/media studies, digital media apparently no longer seem to pose any threat to documentary. In the 1970s and 80s, the documentary guarantee that once rested on the long takes and synch sound of cinema verité and direct cinema was rocked by postmodern theory’s critique of


signification. In the mid-1990s, the status of the indexical image’s documentary guarantee was destabilized further by the proliferation of digital media, with its increased dislocation of sign from referent. At that time, numerous documentary theorists including Bill Nichols, Brian Winston, Carl Plantinga, and Michael Renov discussed the threat digital media posed to documentary truth claims associated with cinematic indexicality. However, today digital media no longer cause the same concerns for documentary theory that they once provoked. Rather, documentary theory now tends to focus on the rhetorical strategies of structure and image. Even so, I suggest that there remains continued anxiety about the digital image’s guarantee – and documentary guarantees, in general.

Third, there is anxiety over shifting documentary guarantees as evidenced by the increased expansion of what constitutes the genre of documentary in an ever-expanding field of documentary practices. In the past decade, a range of projects concerned with the status of documentary refer-ence have proliferated across the sometimes disparate worlds of mainstream film, documentary film culture, the cinematic avant-garde, and the art-world nexus of museum and gallery. Artists, documentarians, and feature filmmakers alike have been experimenting not only with animation, but also with re-enactment, installation, web-based databases, and forms of documentary narrative. This ubiquity and variety of techniques, practices, and forms marks a widespread concern with the status of documentary reference in conjunction with rapidly shifting epistemological structures. Within this proliferation of documentary practice, digital animation has become a key tool for interrogating changes in the ways in which we understand the world.

Paul Arthur’s 1993 essay, ‘Jargons of Authenticity’, is instructive for thinking about current uses of digital technologies and shifting rhetoric in documentary. Arthur argues that documentary films regularly re-ground their authority in response to new technologies of sound and image through shifts in their rhetorical style and form.2 For example, in the 1930s, the social problem film relied on voice of God narration and re-enactment for its authority; 1960s verité and observational cinema relied on photographic indexicality, synch sound, and different forms of authorial provoca-tion and witnessing for their documentary guarantee; and late 1980s documentary met the chal-lenges posed by postmodernity’s attenuation of the relation between sign and referent with what Arthur called an ‘aesthetic of failure’, which often featured an unreliable narrator in conjunction with a visibly imperfect command of film and video-making technique. Arthur’s examples include the apparently bumbling Michael Moore in Roger and Me (1989), the emphatically narcissistic Ross McElwee in Sherman’s March (1986), and the radical destabilization of identity and docu-mentary guarantees enacted by Trinh T Minh-ha in Reassemblage (1983). Although, in general, Arthur focuses on more popular work, his focus on three important historical moments in the development of documentary form reveals how documentary practice repeatedly re-establishes truth claims through formal and technological choices. Nearly 20 years have passed since Arthur’s essay. Where then does that leave us?

Speculative documentaryI propose that a wide variety of digitally animated documentary experiments from the last decade establish their documentary guarantees through a rhetoric of ‘speculation’. By this, I mean that many current documentaries explicitly speculate about the value of various ways of producing documentary truth claims. How, they ask, does current documentary film constitute its guarantee? In an attempt to answer this question, they play with a historical toolbox of documentary tech-niques and modes of establishing guarantees from the past century, such as animation, direct cin-ema, voice over, and re-enactment. Of these, they often employ animation to interrogate the rhetorical guarantees we associate with various forms of material documentation in the form of

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letters, indexical photographs, 16mm films, video, and interviews. Speculative documentaries often use animation’s formal malleability to emphasize the uncertainty of much of the information we encounter. If their visual tracks tend to highlight the speculative nature of the animated image, at times the audio track can seem to form a tentative ground of certainty, inverting the dominance of the image in documentary film.

Speculative documentaries often speculate about other documentary guarantees we tend to take for granted, such as the self-reflexive authorship and first-person witnessing associated with Arthur’s ‘aesthetics of failure’. While the stories that speculative documentaries tell may draw on the lives of actual people and historical events, they often fictionalize those stories with the inten-tion of producing larger historical truths. Like speculative fiction, even science fiction, current speculative experiments in documentary operate as sites for allegorical critique, satire, and fan-tasy. As such, they attempt both to present an adequate representation of the world, and to criti-cally re-imagine it. Of course, documentary film usually connotes a claim on – and direct connection to – the so-called real world of material objects and flesh. What then do we make of this important strain of work that claims both documentary guarantees and speculative freedoms? With all this speculation going on, how do speculative documentaries actually establish any guar-antees at all?

Many artist/documentarians describe this highly speculative guarantee as based on ‘feeling’. These contemporary documentaries displace the artist’s visual presence and personal story as an important part of their critique of previous documentary guarantees. Instead, these works impart the ‘feeling’ behind experiences and often attribute them to unidentified, or even invented, others. Those working within this body of contemporary experimental documentary practice appear more interested in constructing cultural psychic and emotional truths of a particular group or culture than in describing the feelings of a particular individual, in explaining factual circumstances, or in marking their own personal investment. David Thorne and Julia Meltzer speak for many working in this mode when they insist that their work is ‘fact-based’, in that it draws on archival research, interviews, and material historically-documented situations. At the same time, their primary goal is to ‘capture the emotional register of the events and circumstances of a bureaucracy, a place, or a way of thinking and speaking’ (Thorne, 2007, personal email). Rather than communicate that feel-ing through direct speech, speculative documentaries capture the emotional register of factual events through specific aesthetic forms. They employ a visual and audio aesthetic, often utilizing animation, which evokes a sense of uncertainty, claustrophobia, displacement, and anxiety that is often dislocated from a specific named or locatable individual.

These documentaries use aesthetic form to analyze and read the current cultural landscape in the historical present. I suggest that we read the aesthetics of recent digital animation in documentary in terms of what Raymond Williams (1977: 128–129) described in the mid-1970s as ‘structures of feeling’. Williams responds to Althusser’s famous essay on Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses in an attempt to carve out space for understanding emerging subjective, not-yet-artic-ulated shifts in hegemonic power. Rather than immediately move into already known, past-tense forms of understanding the world, Williams says we should pay attention to ‘more active, more flexible, less singular terms – consciousness, experience, feeling’. He suggests that these not-yet-articulable shifts can be read through subtle alterations in style and form. These shifting ‘structures of feeling’ can be observed in the methods and intentions present among artists working today as they respond to changes in both their tools and in the way we now encounter images and informa-tion. Following Williams, I suggest that we read current experimental documentary filmmakers’ engagement with animation in an age of proliferating digital media against historical and theoreti-cal shifts in the ways in which we understand images and their global movements. In reading the


structures of feeling present in speculative documentary, we uncover a larger epistemological shift in which ‘feeling’ vies with ‘vision’ for securing the documentary guarantee.

These concerns can be seen in experimental animated documentaries that take up questions of the rhetorical status of digital images in terms of three tropes: (1) the digital movement of text, as in Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It: Three Recollected Documents, (2) machinima and digital compositing, as in Jackie Goss’s Stranger Comes to Town, and (3) transcod-ing, as in Stephen Andrews’s The Quick and the Dead.

It’s Not My Memory of It: Three Recollected DocumentsMeltzer and Thorne, like many artists working in this mode, reject the confessional, personal address of 1980s identity politics in favor of speculative witnessing. It’s Not My Memory of It uses digital animation as a way to dramatize the work that digital media enacts upon earlier image technologies. This piece looks at the apparent ability of digital tools to ‘colonize’ analog image technologies, even as they offer increased ‘freedom’ to access, manipulate, disperse, exhibit, and incorporate images and texts. In terms of both its subject matter and aesthetics, It’s Not My Memory of It explicitly addresses the constraints and freedoms that digital media appear to offer particular kinds of subjects. A speculative documentary based on facts, It’s Not My Memory of It attempts to represent feeling (as shifting, in flux, unstable) as opposed to producing guarantees of knowledge or truth. In this context, the artist functions as a researcher and speculator, as opposed to an authority or guarantor.

Through an historical examination of the ways in which knowledge and power circulate around and through different, historically situated media, Meltzer and Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It suggests the consequences implicit in that circulation for the individuals to whom these documents have been attached. Working under the appellation, ‘The Speculative Archive’, Meltzer and Thorne employ virtuosic digital editing to produce aesthetic juxtapositions that evoke an emotional regis-ter associated with physical and political anxiety, and insecurity in a time past, which has now become historical, and in many ways, forgotten. Here, material objects, bodies, and media, such as16mm film, video, photography, paper documents, and digital newspaper photographs, are pro-duced as never quite adequate to the discourses that surround them and give them meaning. It’s Not My Memory of It invites contemplation of the material effects of historical conditions in three major stories in three distinct periods: 1970s Iran, the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, and present-day Yemen through an aesthetic interrogation of the material bodies of histori-cal documents, including paper, video, and digital photographs. In what follows, I examine their treatment of the story they tell in the first segment of It’s Not My Memory of It, that of SD-urn, an Iranian CIA informant in late 1970s Iran.

The first of three CIA management specialists, whom Meltzer and Thorne interviewed in the summer prior to 9/11 identifies himself on the audio track as ‘Ed Cohen’, but his image is not pre-sented on the visual track. His status is juxtaposed with Meltzer and Thorne’s speculative re-imagining of the fate of CIA informant, SD-urn. The CIA Information Management Officials featured, all faceless and bodiless, identify themselves on the audio track by their names and posi-tions, a move that gestures toward the power and protection that comes with their official status. The agents’ lack of visual presence within the frame, and hence, lack of visual recognizability, protects them in a way that also gestures to the protection they enjoy under the mantle of the Central Intelligence Agency itself. This invisibility also suggests the privilege of the ‘bodiless’ citi-zenship that Lauren Berlant (1993) has associated with privileged white men. By contrast, the visual absence of the informant ‘SD-urn’, as he is identified in CIA documents, and the absence of his given name within this text, gestures to the precariousness of politically invisible status and the

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secrecy such an informant would have needed to maintain in the tumult of 1970s Tehran. In this way, this segment questions the value of the visibility of the human face as a key to knowledge.

Digitally animated text takes the place of images of Cohen and SD-urn. In Cohen’s interview segment, digital animation is figured as capable of providing an oblique and poetic visual critique of his account of what constitutes a ‘state secret’, prefaced by a phrase from ‘Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy’. On the visual track, white titles emerge and recede into a dark screen, a tech-nique that serves to question the status of the spoken audio text by isolating phrases, reversing the order of words, and shifting their meaning. This juxtaposition between sound and image gestures, self-referentially, to the ways that these audio interviews have been rearranged and edited by the artists in an effort to produce a seamless, compact sound bite. Cohen’s invisibility, and our own inability to see the stutters of the camera’s starts and stops on the visual track, masks that manipula-tion, keeping it, like a state secret, both acknowledged and denied. While Cohen’s voice may seem to serve as a concrete ground of knowledge, the truth of his speech is figured in the poetic rear-rangements imaged on the visual track. Here, Melzer and Thorne question the iconic, photographic image as a ground of documentary reference. However, the literal and formal poetry of the image, its structure of feeling, functions as a guarantee of meaning.

The segment following Cohen’s interview consists of an elaborate animated re-construction of the story of Iranian CIA informant SD-urn. His story was assembled from eight of thousands of shredded documents abandoned in the US embassy in Iran after the ousting of the Shah in 1979. The story heard on the audio track, told in a male voice speaking in Farsi (low in volume and interrupted and warped by glitches) and ‘translated’ by a woman’s voice in English in a clear, loud, dominant recording, is a speculative, fictionalized account that refers to actual historical events. The faked first-person narra-tive voiceover guides the spectator’s own reading of often overwhelming fragmented visual informa-tion, even as it asks her to question its legitimacy. The story it tells is based on documents that Islamic students meticulously pieced back together and published in 79 volumes entitled ‘Secrets from the US espionage den’. On the visual track, strips of shredded typed sheets of paper are magically reassem-bled through digital animation, moving up and down the frame, in mimicry of the agonizing work the students once did by hand. This animation dramatizes digital media’s capacity to seamlessly animate, edit, move and integrate analogue media. By rendering visible digital media’s capacity for virtuosic movement of documents and information, this segment also reveals the changing historical and politi-cal conditions under which information is produced, travels, is collected and received.

SD-urn’s story, as extrapolated by Melzter and Thorne, calls into question the relationship between official government records and the human bodies and experiences they purport to record. In their representation, digital animation produces a swarm of intensely layered audio and visual fragments that point to the absurdity and impossibility of SD-urn’s liminal status. The weave of narrative, two audio voice-overs, and complexly animated image evoke the significant disjoint between SD-urn’s physical human body and his discursive, paper identity. At one point, SD-urn uncovers the CIA’s plans for making him over into a Macao businessman complete with health records, an absurd mismatch of his body and the documents that would guarantee it. At another point, SD-urn reveals the English identity given him earlier by the CIA, that of a British man named James Rafferty complete with address in the UK. The strangeness of the choice is clear. ‘Have you ever heard of an Iranian named Rafferty?’ he asks in Farsi, ventriloquized by the confi-dent voice of the female narrator. Meltzer and Thorne’s formal treatment of SD-urn’s story draws a parallel between the material human body and the material document as crucial in their material-ity, and yet always vulnerable to discursive interpretation and misreading. While the CIA’s fiction does not fit SD-urn’s body, somehow Meltzer and Thorne’s speculative fiction in the form of the faked interview rings strangely true. In turn, these formal and narrative choices remind us that the


relation between signs and their referents have always been unstable and inadequate, long before the proliferation of digital media. SD-urn’s seeming loss of ownership over his own embodied identity points to a more generalized anxiety about the suspension of authorial guarantees in a world in which signifiers and referents are multiply displaced.

In both a literal and metaphorical sense, It’s Not My Memory of It attempts to re-animate, to bring to life through the digital animation of recovered, historical documents, a past event that would otherwise have had no official historical record of existence. This process produces a form of memory alluding to an unchronicled past in a way that makes forgotten people, documents, and processes speak to present governmental practices around the management of material information and human informants. Official documents produce governmentally sanctioned memories in the form of history. Digital animation restores metaphorical movement to the potentially static nature of this history. Like the process of reconstructing history, these twice-rescued documents and their meanings are fragmented, partial, and slippery, with important segments literally blacked out or gone missing. This act of reconstructing a past rendered invisible in the political field is an act of reclamation and repossession, which is here reproduced in the present tense of digital animation. Perhaps what is most striking in It’s Not My Memory of It is that digital animation is utilized to keep meaning and information from becoming settled – to revoke its guarantee, and keep it moving. In turn, it also suggests that the act of producing documentary guarantees is also a moving historical process, and as such never secure. Perhaps if the search for meaning, like the aesthetic of this work, is always moving, always in process, then the unearthing or revelation of secret documents does not settle things once and for all, but, rather, begins a search that, like the status of this forgotten informant, remains unreconciled.

Figure 1. Still from It’s Not My Memory of It (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, 2003). Reproduced courtesy of the artists.

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Stranger Comes To TownGoss’s experimental animated documentary Stranger Comes To Town interprets and makes visible the shifting epistemological structures of contemporary life in abstract and poetic ways via familiar video game images.3 It juxtaposes animation from the popular multi-player, internet-based game, World of Warcraft, with audio voiceover taken from anonymous interviews with international visi-tors and people considered ‘resident aliens’ to the US post 9/11, along with voiceover from a US immigration instructional video, and music. As a game, World of Warcraft is particularly apt for use in a video on border crossing and immigration. The game itself presents vast open spaces to be explored by its players. Along the way, individuals approach points where they must negotiate their travel from one space to another at border spaces such as city walls, gates, and the entrances of buildings. Stranger utilizes the game environment’s formal limitations in order to interrogate larger, ideological systems of control and freedom. In particular, it examines the category of citi-zenship as a discursive, juridical construct that evokes both legal, public protection and its flip side: constraint and restriction of freedom. Goss incorporates multiple forms of animation, including not only the high-end graphics from World of Warcraft but also images that look as if they might come from Google maps, an instructional video produced by the Office of Homeland Security (that Goss rotoscopes over using her own purposefully crude 2D animations), and titles. The intersection of these materials paves the way for the ideological intersection of the game world of World of Warcraft and what she reveals as the highly ritualized protocols of national security.

Figure 2. Stranger Comes To Town (Goss, 2007). Reproduced courtesy of the artist.


In Stranger Comes To Town, Goss engages machinima as a form that exemplifies a particular structure of feeling active in contemporary culture, in which our actions are increasingly structured by the choices offered by the technological and ideological interfaces through which we interact. Machinima describes a range of work (homemade narrative films, serials, documentaries, and experimental forms) that use the digital rendering engines of popular video games to tell new sto-ries. In many ways, the push and pull between the limits of the game environment and the artist’s creative negotiation of its offerings is essential to machinima as a form. While the methods of production associated with machinima make certain aspects of animation easier, those parts are limited, like inserting ready-made parts, by the constraints of the gaming toolboxes from which they come. If an artist wants a character to do something that characters don’t often do in games (like sitting), he or she must incorporate other animation methods, a choice that produces gaps between media and animation forms, and which calls aesthetic attention to the hybrid status of most animation today (machinima, nd).

Stranger Comes To Town begins with the voice of a woman asking: ‘This is anonymous, right?’ On the visual track, we see brightly colored, horned, pierced, heavily-muscled, fur-clothed purple and green orcs, trolls, death knights, night-elves, humans, tauren, dwarves, and gnomes. These avatars were created by and intended to serve as surrogate faces and bodies for the immigrants Goss interviewed, in order to protect their identities. In comparison to their visual manifestations, the voices heard on the audio track appear strikingly unmediated at first, seemingly offering a ref-erential ground for its spectacular animated faces. While repeated listening reveals the expected edits to elide the interviewer’s questions and to produce more concise responses, Stranger Comes To Town’s audio track strongly evokes the particularities and authority of individual voice and experience. However, their anonymous status invites us to consider the larger structures of feeling associated with the experience of border crossing in a historical period steeped in anxiety over racial and religious otherness.

Throughout Stranger Comes To Town, this group of voices speaks with humor, anxiety, and imaginative speculation about the post-9/11 technological regime they must observe in order to enter the United States. The stories the speakers tell articulate striking mismatches between the ways in which they have been perceived by border guards, doctors, and security personnel, and the ways in which they see themselves. At various points, speakers recount their stories of submitting to tests that are concerned with indexes of physical bodily evidence such as facial photographs, digital fingerprint machines and iris-scans. While these technologies treat bodily data as if they can be measured and matched in a kind of one-to-one correspondence, their personal stories reveal these technologies to be faulty, often useless, and frequently depersonalizing. As one woman says, human conditions, such as sweaty fingers and trembling, can interfere with a machine’s proper functioning. Another woman, representing herself as a warrior named Mugalka, tells about a surreal 10-minute encounter with an immigration doctor, in which he checks her genitals, perhaps, she wonders, to confirm that she’s actually a woman. While recounted with humor, this interrogation of the very grounds by which identity is guaranteed suggests the anxiety that attends such procedures.

Stranger Comes To Town represents international borders at which these processes occur as discursive legal space, as material geographically locatable space, and as emotional space. It sug-gests that, like a digital video game, the border operates quite literally as an interface. In Stranger Comes to Town, Goss plays the game ‘wrong’ to reveal parallels between the rules of the game world and those of the US border. At one point, two night-elves with lavender skin, long ears, muscular frames, and weapons in hand meet at dusk at the entrance of a building in game space. The elf guarding the entrance says: ‘Who goes there?’ but is met with no reply. ‘State your name!’ he demands, a glowing yellow exclamation point bobbing above his head to indicate alarm. Again,

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the approaching visitor says nothing. The two figures are at a standstill as they sway back and forth, ‘boiling’ in the game’s parlance, neither capable of advancing. On the audio track underlying this image, a female speaker describes the standstill produced by similarly ritual questions asked of her by US Immigration and Naturalization Services. Questions such as ‘Have you ever been a part of the Nazi party?’ and ‘Do you intend to commit espionage?’ render the process of being interviewed for immigration absurd, she says. Such questions suggest that the value of re-enacting rituals of interrogation lies in matching an appropriate answer to the question – not whether or not that answer is ‘true’. This form of interrogation also points to the way residual fears and anxieties of infiltration lie waiting to be re-activated in the cultural imagination and in border protocols alike. In short, Stranger Comes To Town exposes the incommensurability of the process of guaranteeing identification and, by extension, of maintaining absolute control over borders and populations.

Rather than simply treat animation as an illustrative tool, Stranger Comes To Town understands digital animation as the very ground of its investigation. The film’s critique of immigration and border practices is located in a recognition not only of how digital video games guide and constrain the choices made by their players, but also the ways in which forms of animation come together to reflect material and ideological restrictions. At various points, Goss inserts physically expressive two-dimensional animations done by hand of her subjects as their avatars (albeit using digital tools) into the high-end, expensive-looking 3D game animation environment of World of Warcraft, a process that both fits well enough into its host environment and at the same time remains distin-guishable in its difference. These inserted 2D animations bear a humorous resemblance to their

Figure 3. Stranger Comes To Town (Goss, 2007). Reproduced courtesy of the artist.


counterparts in the game world, but have a surprisingly greater realism, in part because they incor-porate the small physical gestures and facial tics of Goss’s human interview subjects. They shrug, raise their eyebrows, and gesticulate with their hands in ways that correspond to their tone of voice and cadence. Toward this end, Goss painstakingly drew their mouth shapes based on lip-reading charts to correspond to the words said on the audio track. At the same time, like the visitors to the US whose stories she tells, Goss’s rough 2D figures always bear the marks of never quite fitting into their host environment. Their lack of assimilation into the game’s 3D landscape points both seriously and humorously to the ways in which material human bodies and analog media alike often exceed or fail to fill the spaces required of them. In this way, Stranger Comes To Town makes visible the interconnected and often transparent fields of digital and analog media, which shape our experience through the now unremarkable hybridity of digitally animated images.

Stranger Comes To Town’s primary metaphor is spatial, offering a journey moving across reso-nating fields, across physical borders, and between forms of representation. It draws parallels between a number of mediated spaces where the movement of animated technology brings indi-viduals together, including those between game players online, between player and computer, between documentary interviewer and subject, between border guard and border crosser. But per-haps the most important border crossing made visible in this piece is the thread that allegorically links these seemingly innocuous formal structures to the larger World – or worlds – of Warcraft that we inhabit and negotiate at various medial registers. Goss’s Stranger Comes To Town opens by addressing its spectator in a way that combines game world and the material world in an uneasy allegory. ‘Warrior’, its opening titles say, ‘There are only two stories in this world. Man goes on a journey. And stranger comes to town.’ With this address –‘Warrior’– the piece seeks to align its spectator with its immigrant subjects. However, the appellation fits awkwardly, and gestures towards the ways in which we are all hailed, answer, and resist particular calls within ideology. At the same time, it gestures to the heavily militarized and fortress-like barriers of ritual that each of us experiences when crossing international borders, rituals we now increasingly take for granted. The appellation ‘Warrior’ also turns our attention out to the world, implicitly pointing to the US soldier as the stranger who comes to many towns around the world bearing a different kind of imperative.

The Quick and the DeadThe ways in which Stephen Andrews’s The Quick and the Dead uses animation gestures towards the decontextualized nature of many of the digital images we encounter in daily life. These images and video clips are often transcoded from one medium to another and have gone through countless iterations in their movements over the web. Like so much of what we see online, The Quick and the Dead provides no narrative, no sound, no context, and no clear point of view. A one-minute silent, hand-animated digital video based on a short online clip, it is presented in three sections ranging from 10 to 30 seconds, initially filmed by an unknown soldier in an unidentified war zone with an unsteady home video camera or camera phone. After viewing this clip, Andrews meticu-lously ‘copied’ each digital ‘frame’ onto white paper by hand, using a three-color dot system, which both mimics the pixilation of the low-quality web posting and suggests the texture of Impressionist painting. Andrews says that The Quick and the Dead is concerned with ‘how mean-ing is constructed … like a study in adaptation’ (Rogerson, 2005). While often looped in gallery and film festival exhibition, even after subsequent viewings, the blurred and shifting image makes it difficult to read and impossible to decipher specific details. Indeed, the constant movement of colored specks that compose the image forces spectators to ask themselves not only what they are

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seeing, but where the image came from, how it got to them, and what its relationship to an ‘origi-nal’ might be.

The Quick and the Dead’s glimpsed images are upsetting as they emerge and slide away. Unlike It’s Not My Memory of It’s barrage of visual stimulus, The Quick and the Dead’s spare and elusive visuals evoke a different kind of spectatorial anxiety. Its first shot opens onto a smoky, unrecogniz-able landscape. A helmeted soldier with rifle in hand emerges in medium shot from the smoke. The screen goes white, fading in again on a male body on the ground, bearded and naked from the waist down. While it is difficult to make out at first, the camera reveals that his legs are on fire. An unsteady handheld track and zoom to a close-up brings the indistinct image of burning tires and metal intertwined with the dead man’s feet. The screen goes white again and the third shot opens on another soldier walking casually amidst the tangle of detritus and human body. As the soldier steps carefully over both human form and burning metal, he aims a fire extinguisher at the heap, releasing a billowing white cloud of particulates that mixes with the tiny animated dots of smoke. Here the mode of representation bleeds into what is represented. The overall effect is defamiliar-izing and unsettling, even more so due to the absence of any potentially orienting sound. The Quick and the Dead also points to the limitations to vision and understanding in the pro-filmic, bringing together the experiences of the soldier in the field with those of the cinematic spectator, both uncer-tain, feeling their way as they go, speculating about what they see before them. Of course, the discourse that surrounds The Quick and the Dead in the form of program notes, art reviews, artist talks, and hearsay means that the artist’s presence tends to be regarded as a crucial key to decipher-ing it. However, notably, Andrews’s comments about the origin of the clip purposefully provide little additional information.

The uncertainty that results from The Quick and the Dead’s lack of sound, captioning, titles, and definitive authorial explanation encourages speculation about the various boundaries crossed in the

Figure 4. The Quick and the Dead (Andrews, 2004). Reproduced courtesy of the artist.


path leading to its viewing – technological, generic, temporal, spatial, and historical. At first, the piece’s historical and geographical setting is unclear, its imagery and unsteady frame readily evok-ing scenes from the Second World War and the Viet Nam War. However, it also belongs to the present historical moment, in the sense that the intimacy of its mobile frame gestures towards the use of a small, mobile digital camera phone, easily manipulated on an inhospitable plane of warfare in the Middle East. In some ways, the piece also gestures to the beginnings of documentary film. Like the Lumière actualities characterized by a single, uncut take, in which no specific aspect of the image is singled out as most important, The Quick and the Dead’s image seems stumbled upon, unplanned, accidental. At the same time, a contemporary viewer would certainly deduce that the artist deliberately selected this particular image from an innumerable range of posted internet clips.

The Quick and the Dead animates the impossible possible conditions that bring usually mutu-ally exclusive fields together. It images the uneasy intersection of here and there, now and then, west and east, living and dead, human and machine. The ‘quick’ mingle with the ‘dead’. Human bodies are at once clothed and naked. Human limbs intertwine with burning machinery and are made equivalent with other wartime detritus. Solid figures become slippery and as difficult to see as the smoke that surrounds them. There are other boundaries Andrews asks us to cross as well, most significantly that between indifferent observation and the complicity of witness. The image seems both intentionally filmed and accidentally encountered. It is a view both casual and horrific. It has been at once painstakingly transformed and at the same time is no more than a copy. In these ways, The Quick and the Dead troubles our everyday encounters with digital video clips and images we often take for granted. Its imagery and representational mode produce conceptual movements between poles of understanding that refuse to come to an easy rest.

ConclusionIt’s Not My Memory of It, Stranger Comes To Town, and The Quick and the Dead operate as emblematic examples of a wider genre of animated documentary. They explicitly address the larger cultural anxiety regarding movement that I argue underlies our taken-for-granted, everyday encounters with digital images in a world assumed to be uncertain, unstable and precarious. I sug-gest that they investigate anxiety about the documentary image’s rhetorical and indexical guaran-tees as they intersect with insecurity about our current status in a politically unstable world, in which people, goods, and ideas are disarticulated from place and circulate more freely than ever before, but in ways that are increasingly monitored and regimented. The ease and apparent seam-lessness with which digital images can be altered, appropriated, and moved has produced new questions for the field of media concerning the discourses of truth in documentary. The matching of fixed images and information – whether indexical, iconic, numerical, chemical, digital, or holo-graphic – accompanies potentially dangerous human movement, as well as potentially unsound interpretation. In practical terms, the movement of signs from their referents and contexts unsettles meaning and produces the conditions for infelicitous conjunctions that can have problematic effects. In this context, it is no surprise that animation, with its capacity to interrogate various forms of movement, has emerged as an important practice within documentary in the last decade.

At the same time, within academic discourse, movement has been valorized as capable of unset-tling ossified patterns of meaning, producing happy accidents, and felicitous misreadings. Our understanding of our place in the world is constantly tested – and revised – at the points at which translations between regimes of knowledge and order occur. These include translations between forms of software, between media (as letters, typed documents, photos or video are transcoded to digital form), between languages and dialects, between their spoken and written forms, between

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legal systems, between the borders of countries, between what can be seen on the body and what can be said about it, between what can be felt and what can be articulated. These documentaries clearly draw on the potential attributed to movement to unfix established forms, patterns, and dis-courses. At stake in these speculative documentaries is not only the figuration of digital media, which are shaped by the discourses that order, contain, and produce the documentary ‘truth’ of images. They also impact the figuration of subjective experience. By focusing on these already unruly aesthetic border spaces, as they are challenged by the speculative, animated documentary works I examine here, I suggest we can read attempts to both aesthetically and conceptually unset-tle and re-articulate the relationships between known and unsettled terms, relationships, institu-tions, formations and positions.

Notes

1. Other recent works that examine borders via a mixture of experimental, documentary, and narrative struc-tures include Laura Waddington’s Border (2004) and Cargo (2001); Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea Files (2004–2005), Contained Mobility (2004), and Sahara Chronicle (2006–2007); Deborah Stratman’s In order not to be here (2002), Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s Grossraum (2004–2005) and Monu-ment of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (2007); Lee Wang’s The Backyard Border (2008); Allan Sekula’s Lottery of the Sea (2006 ); Natalia Almada’s Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side) (2005); Aleksandr Rastorguev’s Clean Thursday (2003); Kamal Aljafari’s The Roof (2006); Kasim Abid’s Surda Checkpoint (2005); Bahman Ghobadi’s A Time For Drunken Horses (2000); Chantal Ackerman’s From The Other Side (2003); Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99 (1991) and Specters of the Spectrum (1999).

2. A number of books on documentary have described a connection between historically new technologies of the image and rhetorical style in documentary film, including those by Eric Barnouw, Bill Nichols, and Brian Winston.

3. Stranger Comes To Town is part of a group of works that Elijah Horwatt (2008) describes as ‘documenta-ries of the imaginary’, a term taken from artist Mike Hoolboom’s description of his own work.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References

Berlant L (1993) National brands/national body: Imitation of Life. In: The Phantom Public Sphere. Minneapo-lis: Minnesota University Press.

Chun W (2006) Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Horwatt E (2008) New media resistance: machinima and the avant-garde. Cineaction 73/74.Machinima (nd) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima (accessed 2 November 2007).Manovich L (nd) Understanding Hybrid Media. Available at: www.manovich.net/DOCS/hybrid_media_

pictures.doc (accessed 1 December 2010)Rogerson S (2005) So much info, so little truth. Toronto/Thursday 27 October. Available at: http://www.xtra.

ca/public/printStory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=3&STORY_ID=1059

Tess Takahashi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film at York University in Toronto, where she teaches classes on technologies of the image, experimental film, and documentary cinema. She is currently revising her award-winning dissertation, ‘Impure Film: Medium Specificity and Intermediality in the North American Avant-Garde (1968–2008)’ for publication as a book.

Experiments in Documentary Animation: Anxious Borders, Speculative Media (2011)

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Transcript of Experiments in Documentary Animation: Anxious Borders, Speculative Media (2011)