Zsolt Gyenge

Animated documentary is one of the most controversial genres of the representation of reality due to the fact that – in a strictly Kracauerian sense – it goes against the direct visual indexicality of the medium itself. Probably this is one of the main reasons for the rare use of animation by documentary filmmakers; or when this happens, it is mostly in the form of re-enactments (as Bill Nichols has shown it). With the advent of the digital era, where the boundaries between prerecorded indexical images and artificially crafted ones became more blurred than ever, animated documentaries started to be produced, and finally scholarship also has found interest in it.

One main path taken by filmmakers using animation for the depiction of reality is based on a post-structuralist understanding of reality that states that all reality is subjective, being grounded in the culturally and personally defined perception and interpretation of the real. So my assumption is that a so-called perceptual understanding of reality is present in most interesting animated documentaries, a representation that is always grounded in the embodied perceptual experience of reality. This is why the theoretical approach of the paper will be based on the phenomenology of perception developed by Merleau-Ponty and its translation into the realm of film theory by Vibian Sobchack.

After the examination of the most important forms of expression of animated documentaries, the paper will focus on the work of Anca Damian. I will try to analyze and understand the effects on the representation of reality of the avantgarde collage-aesthetic used by the Romanian animator in her two full-length feature animated documentaries.

Zsolt Gyenge is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Studies of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Budapest, Hungary) since 2007, where he teaches courses in film theory, film history and visual communication theory. His fields of research include interpretation theories (phenomenology, hermeneutics), experimental films and video art. The title of his PhD thesis was: »Image, Moving Image, Comprehension. A Phenomenological Theory of Film Analysis.« He is the editor of the scholarly journal on design and visual culture, »Disegno«. He is also active as freelance film critic.