Project

The Polyphonic Documentary Project is a collaborative practice-based research endeavour. Its focus is on interactive authoring tools and their potential for developing expanded and open-space ways of thinking with and through documentary. We believe that these tools have their part to play in helping to negotiate the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change and ideological polarization.

Key to this is their potential for working with documentary in ways that are co-creative, non-hierarchical, polyphonic and unresolved.  We seek to offer alternative systems and structures to the more cinematic and linear forms of distribution and presentation which are traditionally associated with documentary film. This is not to replace these forms but to sit alongside them, in a metamodernist spirit of  ‘and and’ or indeed ‘with with’.

Our central concern is to foreground collaboration and dialogue as part of an ongoing process which acknowledges complexity and uncertainty. This leans into ‘staying with the trouble’ as opposed to seeking resolution and closure based on dramatic narrative and causal chains of reasoning. We seek to learn from other documentary practices that have similar motivations and not to become entrenched in our ways.

Starting with Bakhtin’s ideas about the polyphonic novel, we have been focusing on exploring possibilities within an ever-growing collective of documentary makers and theorists, which spans several continents. We have been sharing ideas through online meetings and through a channel on the social media site Discord. We have a reading group and we have been trying out ideas through small-scale collective projects.

We are currently working on documenting what we have been up to. Though still inspired by Bakhtin’s work on carnival, dialogue and heteroglossia, our approach has taken us well beyond this, bringing in contemporary feminist thought as well Eastern philosophy. Non-binary thinking and alternatives to the predominant certainties of western metaphysics have been central to our discussions and to our making.

Alongside this, we are starting to look beyond our internal collaborations, in order to take the insights that we have gained into wider collaborations and projects. This is opening up the conversation by bringing in new members from across different disciplinary and cultural contexts. It is also taking our work as documentary practitioners into more applied community-based projects grounded in our own localities .

The project is not currently linked to any funding bodies, although a small grant was secured from the Screen Industries Growth Network to develop the creative interventions. We are seeking further funding to help move things forwards. You can sign up to our mailing list at the bottom of this page and get in touch via our ‘contact us’ page if you would like to join our ever-expanding community.

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