what allowed [her] to function, like Isis, as a gatherer and compiler of historical bodies and faces that would have otherwise remained on the battleground of the artistic revolution.” Gadassik does similar work for the montagesses and the many women who labored in and through anonymous authorship. Rosen and Gadassik pose variations of a question tidily formulated by Jonathan Gray (2013): When is an author? Their contributions allow us to examine the manners in which authorship shifts in minor and substantial ways throughout the film production process, but also how our perceptions of authorship (and who or what is an author) shift over time.
The tensions between individuals and collectives evident in the cases of revolutionary art forms, or between artisans, departments, and industrial practices that characterize what André Bazin christened “the genius of the system” of classical studio filmmaking (Bazin 1957: 11) are brought further into relief by the substantial role of institutions, granting agencies, and corporations in the production and distribution of nonfiction and documentary films. Such attention opens to analysis how authorship gets configured in such well‐known cases as the institutions that Grierson helped found and lead – the Empire Marketing Board and the National Film Board of Canada, and other such government film agencies that Zoë Druick examines in her contribution – or in the cases of nonfilm corporations, such as the furriers (Revillon Frères) who sponsored Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) or to the oil and energy corporations examined by Brian R. Jacobson in his contribution to this section. Druick and Jacobson ask what conceptual adjustments must be made to authorship when the subjectivity expressed is not the first person I (which has, perhaps, always been a convenient reduction of the many voices and hands that contribute to the production of a text) and, alternately, how must personhood be rethought when claimed by corporation? What adjustments to interpretive and analytic practices should scholars bring to the textual products of institutional and corporate entities, for whom the film plays a far more explicit mediating function between organization and imagined public, and is often a means to another, noncinematic, end?
Jacobson's “Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry” draws on a deep well of archival research in developing a “symbiotic” approach to authorship through his consideration of documentaries made for corporations. Using the case study of the relationship between Société Cinétest (a producer of industrial films) and the oil company Société Nationale des Pétroles d'Aquitaine, Jacobson racks focus between a micro‐level attention to the artisans and would‐be auteurs at work and a macro‐level attention to the corporate images that are the expression of abstract corporate authors. He expands our understanding of the entwined histories of documentary capture and forms of extractive capitalism and petrocultures, considering the aesthetics and visual cultures of modern energy. Like Gadassik's study of the analog information processing powers of the montagesses, Zoë Druick's “Documentality: The Postwar Mental Health Film and the Database Logic of the Government Film Agency” interweaves close and distant readings of two series of mental health films – Mental Mechanisms, which enjoyed wide distribution, and Mental Symptoms, which was intended for use by medical professionals – to sketch a genealogy of what we now call the “database documentary” that develops through the instrumental use of documentary film as a tool of governmentality, or as she develops it with reference to Hito Steyerl, “documentality.” Conceptualizing the post–World War II efforts of the National Film Board of Canada as an “information apparatus of the welfare state,” Druick reads the state‐sponsored documentaries as entries into a bureaucratic archive and proto‐database of modern life. These case studies consider authorship at the level of the state, the film institution, and the clinic, and pose the “text” as not just the films, but the attempted management of an imagined national population as “written” and administered in the liberal state's image.
Audiovisual writing and erasure in or against the state's image forms the subject of the final entry to this section on Authors, Authorship, and Authoring Agents. Joshua Neves's “Unmanned Capture: Automatic Cameras and Lifeless Subjects in Contemporary Documentary” analyzes the highly networked, posthuman modality of unmanned capture. Foregrounding the connective aspects of AuNT, he explores the forms of audiovisual recording in which the presumptive ethical agent of an in‐the‐flesh human camera operator – often theorized as bearing witness to what she records – has been redistributed between computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and human actors working remotely, such as in the case of camera‐equipped drones and closed‐circuit surveillance video. To this, he also adds the countervailing emergence of forms of highly subjective and personal witnesses through cell‐phone video uploads that produce a form of event perspectivalism, whose unruly potential is increasingly tamed by algorithmic processing and interpretation. Neves mobilizes episodes from across the globe (including Tripoli, Foshon, and Ferguson) to consider how such emergent forms of networked and unmanned audiovisual encounter push at the limits of actuality, authorship, and what, following Michael Renov (2004), we might (still?) call the “subject of documentary.” Who is or isn't made recognizable by such distributed audio‐visual practices in the era of unmanned capture? How do these new forms of nonfiction image‐making and interpretation participate in the redistribution and reconsideration not just of authorship but of “the human subject and subjectivity”? These questions indicate the stakes involved in the struggle over whose images, voices, and lives count – and how they get counted – in the cacophony of a globalized audiovisual public sphere, and why historically and theoretically nuanced approaches to authors, authorship, and authoring agencies remain vital to the study of documentary and nonfiction media.
References
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