Wrestling with Representation

Abstract

As they embrace sensual experience and emphasize the social encounter, my films are unequivocally engaged with reality. This thesis is my attempt to articulate what, for me, are the most significant aspects of my process, by concentrating on specific examples from several of my films. I believe that poetics and epistemology are essentially inextricable from form in (my) documentary films. However, I hope that by unpacking a few specific aspects of my work – including allegory, intersubjectivity, improvisation, embodied ethnography, and the unmarking of whiteness and masculinity – readers will have an enriched sense of the work, and of my relation to it.