A Deeper Picture: A Realist Semiotics of Non-Fiction Film

This paper will present a new approach to visual research and non-fictional archive film as a practical form of critical realism. The process described aims to reveal the non-empirical structures and causal mechanisms that have generated recorded events at the empirical level.
An underpinning principle of this work is that the complexity of reality can be better understood through the dialectic between facts and creative mediation. Photographic archive film is the factual material used, the intervention of film collage and montage is the site of mediation. Through this, an imagined sense of a non-empirical, complex whole is inferred through the temporal and spatial composition of image parts. In non-fictional contexts, the inferences produced address the real causes of events that can only be known theoretically and conceptually.
The visual research aligns film collage processes with the operation of abduction, abstraction and retroduction in the visual field. The system developed has adapted the critical realist approach to semiotics (Bhaskar, 1993; Nellhaus, 1998; Cashell; 2009), establishing a realist form of thematic analysis, visual metonym and metaphor (Lewis, 1996; Schilbrack, 2014) that further extends a semiotics of ontological depth.