UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines a body of formally and aesthetically innovative nonfiction and experimental films, videos, and installation works that have created new modes of cinematic testimony with new possibilities of viewer/listener engagement. I call such films cinematic testimony in order to make a distinction between them and the more common talking head interview film. When cinema is not simply a recording device but an aesthetically engaged practice, it creates a wholly new medium of testimony, something that cannot exist in any other form.

If testimony is typically associated with speech and primarily verbal expression, cinematic testimony has a much broader expressive scope. It includes not just speech but the voices, bodies, and gestures that articulate and give rise to this speech. It also includes a vast array of evocative and epistemologically significant possibilities afforded by mise-en-scène, bodily or cinematographic movements in and across space, the staging of reenacted or imagined events, the cinematic depictions of mental as well as physical landscapes, and various aesthetic strategies through which cinematic testimony can be shaped. The works of cinematic testimony explored here (for the most part made between 1985 and 2006) take conscious creative and ethical responsibility for their use of the medium. In deliberately creating new forms of testimony, they also reflect on, and reveal something about, the very nature of testimony itself.

Testimony is important because it serves as a source of knowledge about a shared world from the perspective of other human beings and signifies the emergence of as yet unheard voices in the public sphere. However, testimony also functions as the representation of a mode of relating (in both senses of the term) and thus as a model of human exchange. As more and more testimonial encounters occur through the medium of moving images, attention to the rhetorical and aesthetic forms of this relating, this saying--verbal, vocal, gestural, and cinematic--and not only the content of the said, seems all the more crucial to the future of ethical relations both within documentary film and beyond. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for the centrality of cinematic form in the production, reception, and analysis of cinematic testimony. Cinema's use of its own language and voices, its own aesthetic forms, is as crucial as the embodied speakers' use of theirs when it comes to articulating testimony through moving images.