Ready for History: The Explosion of the Documentary

Documentary practices are situated in the midst of a constantly changing constellation of art, science, bureaucracy, journalism, justice, and truth politics. The documentary cannot be defined by specific formal or stylistic conventions; its characteristics are shifting constantly. Art’s ongoing and productive confrontation with the documentary shows not only how the latter keeps reemerging as an attractive, critical tool but also, in a wider context, how image criticism serves to reestablish the belief in images to convey information, meaning, and truth. One of the rules of correct handling of historical sources is the accurate separation of the actual, inaccessible events and material traces of them. Videograms of a Revolution was initially created as a cinematic contribution to the aforementioned debate in French and German media theory triggered by the Romanian revolution. In the early 1990s, media-critical theorems typically found artistic equivalents in the self-reflexive, antinarrative, deconstructive attitude of the new documentary film.