Layered Realities and the Narration of History

The paper will present practice research that explores the intersection of collage, found footage film, animation, documentary and critical realism. The practice investigates digital compositing, hybridity and the capacity for spatial layering to generate an intermediate, unstable aesthetic that can’t be assigned to any singular, unitary ontological level. The paper argues that these conditions provoke an elasticity and ambiguity that dissolves binary distinctions between the subjective and objective, reflecting the non-dualist standpoint of critical realism at a medial point between positivist and idealist perspectives. The research deploys the particular plurality of collage as a disruption to ideologically conditioned appearance forms (Leslie, 2015). This posits the practice as a challenge to reductive accounts of the socio-historical world in dominant visual cultures. The paper claims that in contrast to unmediated live action images, collage has the potential to more adequately describe the complexity and contingency of reality. This emphasizes the non-empirical factors that play a role in how we produce and negotiate historical narratives (Skoller, 2005). In response to the invariable presence of narrativization (White, 1987) and the impossibility of objectivity in documentary production (Winston, 1995), the explicit construction of the collage aesthetic is deployed to address the gaps and ambiguities of historical discourse. This aims to work against the suppression of ambiguity present in orthodox documentary, a process that Michael Chanan (2008) has called ‘structuring absences’. From this perspective, the history inscribed in found footage is explored with the intention of uncovering and foregrounding aspects of the past that have been marginalised or forgotten. The paper asks if a deeper understanding of history can be apprehended through the construction and mediation offered by the vocabularies of found footage and collage film.