In light of the current transition from celluloid to digital cinema, this paper will explore the relation between old and new technologies as a means for understanding medium specificity as an activity of mediation. Keywords experimental documentary, Leviathan, Sensory Ethnography Lab, sensorial, experiential knowledge, social subjectivity, GoPro camera, sonic ethnography Through the theoretical underpinnings of Michael Renov’s formulation of documentary poetics and Bill Nichols’ concept of social subjectivity among other writings, this paper presents a close analysis of how Leviathan and experimental documentaries offer a viable approach to visual and sonic ethnography. The emphasis on the sensorial in the Sensory Ethnography Lab’s (SEL) experimental documentary Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel, 2012), gives priority to the affective dimensions struck up between viewer and text through its innovative use of the aesthetics of GoPro cameras and a sound design that is both realistic and expressive. Experimental documentary utilizes experiential knowledge as knowledge-in-the-making through evocation, activating an open dialogue between the filmmaker, the viewer and the non-fiction world with formal experimentation. The hybrid term “experimental documentary” illuminates the formative tensions between experimentation and cultural representation in documentary filmmaking, accepting expression as an essential element of the documentary form. Instead, cinema’s medial power-its automatism, as Stanley Cavell would describe it in _The World Viewed_-is to enable a foregrounding of the interrelational codependence and disjuncture of the son/iconic, presenting the charged interactivity between the two entangled elements.3 Interested in the disjunction that this entanglement enables, I will explore the particular dynamic potential of the son/iconic discord with reference to documentary cinema and with specifi c attention to Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 performative documentary _The Act of Killing_. That is, cinematic mediation does not merely create a narrative of unity in accordance with the logic of much mainstream work that tends to be invested in a desire to naturalize, as much as possible, the constructedness of the world represented onscreen. Seen this way, cinema can be understood to not simply erase the distinction between the sonic and the iconic in its creation of the cinematic world. Rather, in mediating, cinema in fact mediates the continually renewed and renewable interactive relationship within which the sonic and the iconic are placed every time, where voice and body, sound and image, and technology and reality are interrelated in the creation of the world screened: mediation as a son/iconic construct. Nevertheless, the argument that I will develop in this essay is that cinema does not simply mediate a representation of sound and image-that is, it is not simply an audiovisual medium, as if voice as sound (the sonic) and body as image (the iconic) were immediately concurrent effects of a directly communicated stimulus. This voice-body synchronicity-cinema’s audiovisual unity- points to the medium’s act of narrating reality by way of anchoring the body within the world, creating a mediated body-image as a representational icon of reality, as a reality effect of which the sounds of the voice are but an expansion.
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