Subjectivity, (self-)reflexivity and repetition in documentary

This thesis advances a deterritorialised reading of documentary on several levels: firstly, with respect to the difference between non-fiction and fiction, allowing for a fluctuation between both. As this thesis examines the movements of subjective documentary between self-reflexivity and reflexivity, it argues against an understanding of reflexivity as something that is emotionally distanced from its object and thus relies on a strict separation from both the subject and what it documents, such as for instance the stable irony in many found footage or mock-documentaries. In Werner Herzog’s documentaries by contrast, irony manifests referential instability. This ‘deterritorialised reading’ concerns their oscillation between different levels of fiction and non-fiction as well as between authorship and agency. As his documentaries frequently do not assert a final interpretation and keep the decision about their truth value suspended infinitely, they assure a fluctuation, which concurs with what the early Romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel says about the oscillation in Romantic irony between self-reflection and its object. However, the belief in the documentary status of a film is necessary to experience this fluctuation in referentiality. Another suggestion this thesis makes concerns the division between filmmaker and protagonist. It argues for a protagonist based reading of documentary that takes account of the diverse stages the protagonists operate on – instead of a purely author-filmmaker or reader-viewer based interpretation. One can then account for, the directions and performances the protagonists have already submitted to before the film team enters their stage. In contrast to a protagonist observed as an isolatable ‘being’ in a documentary conventionally taking place in front of the lens, and a voice reflecting in the commentary about a closed ‘reality’, this study examines documentary works where the filmmakers are not separated from what they comment upon. It is also the re-enactments that the protagonists undergo that deterritorialises the authorial status of the film. Against a conventional notion of documentary, that excludes unacknowledged repetitions instigated by the filmmaker, I argue that the repetitions discussed in this thesis’ documentaries manifest a forward movement. A documentary re-enactment of a concrete and finished event can be the start of a new process, a ‘forward recollection.’ Re-enactments by the very protagonists who have experienced the events in the first place challenge representation in documentary.