Det kritiska mellanrummet - En analys av essäfilm som reflekterande kunskapsform

Abstract

We live in an audiovisual culture where film and moving images plays a central part of our daily lives. The film as a medium is approximately 130 years old, yet we are still discussing the same questions today as they did back in the beginning - questions about film and moving images' relationship to truth and reality. Against the background that we need more knowledge in how film and moving images construct, expresses and mediates notions about truth and reality, this thesis investigates what the three french essay films, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, Alain Resnais 1956), Letter From Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie, Chris Marker, 1958) and Here and Elsewhere (Ici et ailleurs, Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Mièville, 1956) contributes as aesthetic forms of knowledge through perspectives of mediaand information literacy (MIL) and democracy. Through a framework based on theories from culture and filmstudies together with my own experience as a situated spectator, I investigate how the filmmakers experiments with filmic forms, parameters and narrative conventions, how the filmmakers treats and review their subject at play, and how the spectator becomes a part of the filmic structure and review. This study shows that filmic representation and the act of “speaking for others” is a conflicted and political process. The filmmakers place themselves and the spectator in “critical interstices” where notions of truth and reality can be negotiated which in turn makes the spectator aware of its own knowledge gaps and limited field of view. The essay films stimulates reflective film competencies which functions as a way to make the hidden parts of the filmic representation and truthmaking process, such as ethics, responsibilities and “silences” visible and reflected upon from the critical inbetweenness position.