Dalia Hatalova Blog Post #18/15 (total core posts: 5; total non-core posts: 13)

Kelly Gates's presentation on forensic documentaries last week made me reflect on an older series that I used to watch on the New York Times website called Retro Report. The particular episode below is interesting because it describes an environmental disaster that caused a media uproar and led to the establishment of a Superfund site, bringing to mind Ensmenger's description of the polluted and highly populated Silicon Valley. However, what is also relevant, particularly about the older segments in the series, is an engagement with past televised news, which is sometimes deconstructed to a degree while being utilized by present-day filmmakers (even though their own modern-day footage is left to leave the appearance of objectively on the viewer). 

The distance that enabled putting the past media into quotation marks as an object for examination is enabled through time, though it is less extensive than in "Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol" (2021). As Gates pointed out, contemporary documentaries have begun to attempt an interrogation of even recent footage but also alter it while doing so. With cropping, cutting, editing, and overlaying footage to be able to perceive it more clearly (as these documentaries purport to do), the question is not about whether this should or should not be done – as to a greater or lesser extent, all cinema seems to treat footage in these ways for artistic or other ends – but how to deal with the original from which such footage derived. Perhaps, given the digital possibilities, a documentary that effaces its own devices could treat footage in a similar way to academic texts' treatment of citations, giving the viewer an option to revert from the text as a quotation to form their own assessment through direct access to an unprocessed version. As the digital provides new possibilities of interconnectivity, these could be utilized for reformating the viewing experience by adding metatextual levels that allow for a greater dissection of forensic documentaries.