The MIT OpenDocLab is excited to welcome Guillaume Soulez of the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris3 for an online guest talk moderated by Lab founder William Uricchio.

Challenging documentary: choice & deliberation in webdocs

This talk will focus on two issues that are both acute and traditional in documentary theory as the web documentary questions them by soliciting the participation of the viewer. What are the exact relationships between point of view and documentation (cf. Vigo's "documented point of view") and what specific relationship can be found between the discussion of points of view and the choices proposed by the interface? Coming in part from Pierre Schaeffer's theory of the "dispositif" (as an organization of uses by a media – as opposed to the later “apparatus theory”) but also from the very pragmatic materialization of choices that web documentaries offer. Soulez will reflect on what "the deliberation of images" (as he calls it) teaches us about the web documentary and vice versa.

Guillaume Soulez is a full professor in Film & Audiovisual Studies and Communication Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris3. His research focuses on the interpretative activity of cinema and audiovisual spectators through the construction of a model: the “deliberation of images”. He co-directed the project Platform 14 (research, pedagogy and creation) about historical web documentary, with Laurent Véray and (co-)edited several books and journal issues on these topics.

Register here.