Kim Nelson

Kim Nelson is the Director of the Humanities Research Group, and an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor. Her feature-length documentaries have screened at film festivals and on university campuses in Canada, the US, and Europe and she has received funding from SSHRC and the OAC, among others. She has held fellowships at the University of Windsor, NYU, and a DAAD at the University of Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. Her most recent documentary aired nationally on CBC last January and is streaming on CBC’s GEM website. Her recent film, 130 Year Road Trip Live, merges documentary, history and live performance. It premiered at the Windsor International Film Festival and was the keynote presentation at the Film & History Conference in Milwaukee, and the Pluralities Conference at San Francisco State University. Her latest project Live Interactive Documentary as Social Cinema: Expanding Transmedia models through immersive Performance Dissemination was awarded a 3-year SSHRC grant in April 2019. She defended her doctoral dissertation “‘Something Happened’ Telling the Truth in Historical Film,” at the University of Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, in Potsdam, Germany, in August 2019.

LIVE DOCUMENTARY, THE CINEPOETICS OF DOUBT, AND SOCIAL CINEMA

Frank Ankersmit’s Meaning, Truth, and Reference In Historical Representation opens with the stated goal to translate the historicism of Ranke and Humboldt to contemporary times. Although his concern is traditional academic history, with some reference to the historical novel, this work is useful in the all-important task of transcoding historiography to historiophoty, the project Hayden White advised in 1988, for those concerned with moving image histories. Ankersmit states to historians of their mission: “You can approximate objectivity only as long as you sincerely despair of approximating it.” It follows that it is incumbent upon anyone who represents the past to enter that ‘struggle.’ Historians, whether by keyboard or camera, who do not probe and question their own suppositions may be seeking to represent the past, but they are not doing history. A prime question for historiophoty is to ask what this ‘struggle’ looks and sounds like as it is manifested off the page. This paper will consider the cinepoetics of historical objectivity as manifested in the documentary methods of narration and reenactment in Sam Green’s Live Documentary practice to analyze the methods by which filmmakers become historians through articulating the historians’ dilemma by cinematic means.