Prof. Jihoon Kim from Chung-ang University will be presenting his new book, Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary.

Please join us this Thursday on Zoom for our second Rough Cut event of the semester. Prof. Jihoon Kim from Chung-ang University will be presenting his new book, Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary.

Here is the link to register: https://yale.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqfuivqzguE9HRhUZAhRHs7iH401eEfzO5

This talk provides an overview of my latest book, Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary. The book offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens’ vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. The book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which I label as the ‘twenty-first-century documentary,’ dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jihoon Kim is professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University, South Korea. He is the author of Documentary’s Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Currently he is working on two book projects, Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981-2021, and The Cinema of Operations: Film and Moving Images in the Post-cinematic Condition.