Experimental Documentary Films: Communicating Social Discontinuities in Contemporary Cinema

Abstract

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There is a clear proliferation of documentary films whose boundaries are blurred and transfigured because of the evolutive process that affects every artistic and social creation. As a consequence of this confusion of genres, a new interpretative approach arises and gives social scientists the necessary freedom to develop their job according to their necessities without emulating any particular scientific model. Regarding to experimental cinema, the requirement of moral objectivity and neutrality disappears, as well as the strict separation between theories and real data. From a transdisciplinary perspective, experimental language might imply a representation mode that allows the exploration of numerous possibilities considering the challenges and complexities of the representation of these realities. In this paper we set out the development of avant-garde and experimental cinema as a possible answer to the narrative challenges imposed by an increasingly complex society: How can we understand this discontinuous world that surround us from a determined mentality riddled with prejudices that were formed in a former social context? This theoretical work is based on documentary analysis, as well as on the authors international professional experience and on teaching innovation in the field of audiovisual communication, which has been founded by institutions such as Santander Bank and Complutense University of Madrid. We provide a solid study of social-political documentary films in its experimental form. As a main result we highlight the bigger freedom for questioning social continuities, allowing the development of new perspectives from a holistic approach. In addition, the limited budget that is required for these films, that are usually self-produced, may result in a bigger autonomy to transmit a discourse with political critique. Moreover, from the receiver point of view, experimental documentary cinema breaks the mechanistic media consumption and expands the audience s aesthetic experience, so they become more aware of the limits of perception and representation that are outside and inside them. Finally, we tackle the best practices and challenges of this mode of representation that combines experimental language and socio-political documentary cinema. In the current context, when mass-production and mass-diffusion media are accumulated in powerful minorities, independent discourses that are diffused by collaborative and non-commercial circles and that evade the control of the industry, gain greater and greater importance. The questioning of social reality can be done from numerous perspectives, however, the documentary cinema and the open-mindedness of its experimental form, really can foster a critical thought, a complementary and diverse point of view facing the continuous and unifier one. In conclusion, a society of human beings which are slightly freer and more aware of themselves and of the outside environment where they can apply their innate capacity of transformation.