Research context.
The main research question addressed is: how the creative representation of thresholds gets deeper insights about the complex nature of those marginal realities vs mainstream images?
This paper is part of a project that analyzes the representation of marginalization, suffering, diversity, and transcendence through marginal spaces such as thresholds, frontiers and “off-screen” spaces. We study the ethics and poetics of such images, taking into account the formal-creative dimension as well as the ethical implications of how to show those realities. The goal is to find out how those images are formally constructed and which insights they generate about marginal realities, questioning the hegemonic visions.
Paper thesis.
In this paper I will analyze from this perspective the last movie by Chantal Akerman: No Home Movie. In this experimental documentary, an essay-film, the filmmaker reflects about the thresholds between life and death, about living in the margins of her own space, about exile, about off-screen spaces, and the complex relationship with her mother and her own past.
I start from the following hypothesis: in contemporary culture, some of the more complex and conflictive layers of reality remain out of frame, unrepresented or misrepresented. But there are some works that represent margins and conflicts in a creative way, in order to think about them and develop a process of meaning-making and visibility for those realities.
I also consider a second hypothesis: the ethics of images relies on their poetics, on the symbiosis content-form. In this context, we must think about the ethical and poetic implications that underlie those contemporary images which leave out of frame some aspects of reality. In this issue the “why” and the “how” are closely related.
Paper methodology.
A textual-analysis methodology will be applied. The focus is placed on the ways in which those margins are conveyed through the materialization in images, going from the formal dimension to the ethical implications.
Key words: documentary, essay-film, margins, off-screen, thresholds, pain, death, representation, poetics, ethics, image-thought.
Fields of study: film, documentary.
Perspectives of analysis: textual-audiovisual-analysis, sociological, political, architectonic, visual studies, aesthetical, ethical.