Lecture: "The documentary disposition"

Professor Michael Renov is a 2021/2022 IAS Distinguished Scholar of the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies.

Abstract:
We live in a moment of epistemic crisis. Truth claims made by public officials and cultural producers alike seem more and more to require our sustained critique. From so many quarters – the realms of politics, the fine arts, journalism, reality television, the literary memoir, experimental ethnography – citizens and cultural consumers are learning to ask: “What do we know and how do we know it?” In this presentation, I interrogate the status of the documentary film to think about the very idea of truth-telling through media forms. I hope to discover something of the complex character of nonfiction film and media by way of the notion of “disposition,” a word that entered the English language in the 12th century and carries with it a multiplicity of meanings that encompass historical, formal, philosophical, and ideological nuances.