Remediations of Nonfiction: Animation, Interactivity, and Documentary From Africa

Abstract

This article explores re-mediations of nonfiction through an examination of so-called animated documentary and interactive documentary. By focusing on case studies from Africa, the article proposes that while these processes and methods are not conventionally aligned with documentary practice in a customary sense, they offer aesthetic strategies that allow artists and filmmakers to consider their position reflexively as authors, curators, and participants in the narratives that they seek out to explore. Their films exist on the periphery of typical classifications of this genre, and this peripheral status allows them degrees of freedom that would otherwise not be possible with conventional methods. In animation, for example, they are able to draw on specific aesthetic motifs or culturally located iconography that resonates with local audiences. Through interactivity they are able to tap into the participatory cultures and user-generated content to encourage polyvocality as a means to examine “truth” and in turn to question the authority of the author.

Notes

1 On the Index, see C. S. Pierce (1958), The Collected Papers. Volumes 7 & 8, Arthur Burks (Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2 Casetti's (2011) essay on cinema and the digital image positions the absence of an existential link between the thing and its representation as a necessary consequence of digital technologies on cinema. The implications of this are felt upon discourses of indexicality. For the purpose of this discussion, these ideas are extrapolated to consider animation as lacking a similar link.

3 Bolter discussed remediation with specific reference to new media, digital technology, and its impact (remediation) of older types of media such as print, film, and television. This concept is extended here to accommodate the refashioning of other artistic forms in the context of animation.

4 Animation scholars tend to make references to Nichols's classifications (2001) and align animation within these different modes. Furthermore, within animation studies the engagement with the so-called animated documentary and the role it can play within a documentary format is focused mostly on examples from Europe or the United States (Beckman, 2011; Del Gaudio, 1997; Honess Roe, 2013; Strom, 2003; Ward, 2005; Wells, 1997).

5 Nonetheless, it will be possible to identify aspects of the discussion on testimony as resonating with certain modes defined by animation scholars, such as Wells's (1997) subjective mode or Honess Roe's (2011) discussion on evocative functionality, for example.

6 This is especially true of early ethnographic films and their misuse and misrepresentation in the colonial project.

7 Kibushi's interest in testimony appears in other aspects of his work, such as the work commissioned by the KU Leuven University in Belgium to head the KADOC heritage project, Congo 2010 (http://kadoc.kuleuven.be/congo2010/fr/pro.php). In this project Kibushi gathers a range of Congolese recollections of the experience of colonization and the perceptions of the introduction of Christianity and related religious practices. The material collected consisted of photographic imagery, sound recordings of interviews, and filmed interviews that were used to create a short film exhibited at the KU Leaven exhibition, Religion, Colonisation, and Decolonisation in Congo (1885–1960), from November 8–10, 2010 (KADOC Annual Report 2011; see http://kadoc.kuleuven.be/pdf/jv/jv2011.pdf).

8 The technique of moving a drawing under the camera is common in Japanese manga anime as a cost-efficient method that involves drawing only one foreground image that moves on the background rather than a sequence of drawings.

9 Mkorogo is a Swahili term also used to refer to a popular toxic skin-bleaching concoction used in East Africa.

10 Testimonio is the term used to describe a type of nonfiction narrative that emerged in Latin America in the context of the liberations movements of the 1960s where the narrator is considered subaltern. “The word testimonio translates literally as testimony, as in the act of testifying or bearing witness in a legal or religious sense. That connotation is important because it distinguishes testimonio from simply recorded participant narrative, as in the case of ‘oral history.’ In oral history it is the intentionality of the recorder—usually a social scientist—that is dominant, and the resulting text is in some sense ‘data.’ In testimonio, it is the intentionality of the narrator that is paramount” (Beverly, 1989, p. 14).

11 The images included illustrations of minstrels, cartoons of colonizers and colonized, photographs of slave traders hanging African men, drawn illustrations of female genitalia, illustrations of British soldiers gazing at the Hottentot Venus, photographic images from eugenic literature, maps, and other imagery of this type.

12 It is important to note that, at times, the representation and assembly of these testimonies in Beyond Freedom (2005) appear to be positioned from a positivist account aligned with the moral-theological underpinnings of the TRC view, one that seeks to enable and promote political transformation. Therefore, the film's engagement with testimonies and “truths” sits in the context of the officiating narratives.

13 Liyana (2017) effortlessly interweaves the live footage of a group of animated orphaned children narrating a fictional story of their own making with the artistic representations as 3D CGI (computer-generated images) by Coker that are set up like tableau vivant. Their story in a sense can be seen as a collective testimony of the children's own experiences. In visual contrast, the animated sequences are unusually still. They rely simply on the movement of the camera [in the vein of La Jetée (1962)], and in this way they evoke a sense of the still images one finds in a child's storybook. The film reflexively explores how narrative and storytelling can offer a catharsis to the children who have experienced traumatic events in their life, while offering a degree of personal protection and agency through the character Liyana, whose story they can affect and change.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paula Callus

Paula Callus ([email protected]) is a senior lecturer at the National Centre of Computer Animation at Bournemouth University. She holds a PHD in “Sub-Saharan African Animation” from The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and has published on animation from this region. Previous experience includes educational consultancy and training for UNESCO's “Africa Animated” projects and compiling animation programs for various festivals such as Africa in Motion (Edinburgh), Cambridge African Film Festival, Meknes Animation Festival (Morroco), Africa at the Pictures (London).