Performative Feedback Filmmaking: Participatory Documentary and Creative Self-Representation in the Community

Commensal by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing- Taylor was installed in a former bean-curd processing plant in Kassel, Germany for documenta 14 in 2017. There, a video installation depicted ethnographic encounters with Issei Sagawa, who killed and cannibalised a woman in Paris in 1981. In an adjoining room at the inatsllation, a 16mm projector showed home-footage of the man and his brother as children. This work, which consisted of archival footage and factual subject-matter may be read as non-fiction, or documentary, but its presentation in the context of a large-scale exhibition of contemporary art may suggest that as a work of art, its form is fluid and subjective. Using Commensal as a central case study, this conference presentation seeks to examine the politics of engagement and spectatorship of documentary film as contemporary art installation. It will ask how the differing social contract within the site-specific installation space as opposed to the black-box of the cinema space alters audience expectations and experiences of non-fiction film. How does the experience of the art-space contribute to the contamination of boundaries between fictional storytelling and documentary testimony? Finally, if the art installation contributes to a subjective reading of non-fiction film, this paper will consider the ethical questions raised by the presentation of a film work such as Commensal within the context of a site-specific contemporary art installation.