New realisms on cinema and television: politics of representation in audiovisual narratives

Abstract

Our research subject intertwines two fields of research that are as much close to each other as they are diverse: cinematic discourse in the form of documentary movies and journalistic discourse, on its turn, in the form of television news. The corpus selection will be driven towards the theme of social stigma in interface with psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, language sciences and communication. Regarding its objective, the research aims to study media discourses which convey a realistic approach to them - documentary and journalism - in order to perform a contrastive analysis between both, pointing out proximities and distances. As one of our research hypothesis we are to demonstrate that the limits between fact/reality and tale/fiction are set during the very tensioning of their assumed ground. New realisms are established in audiovisual narratives broadening the boundaries between "referentiality" and "fictionality", thus contributing to the debate on the contemporary statute of images. The research thus focuses on the ways by which social stigma representation is built on contemporary audiovisual narratives taking into account the processes of identification and of distribution of the sensible that they evoque. Through documentary film and television show analysis we intend report on the issue of new realisms identified on media discourses today recurring to a historical perspective on the modes of addressing the concrete world. In that sense, we also look at technical images injunctions part of a mediatic culture ever shaped by production processes that aim at effects of reality and bounce between the return of the real and being in praise of fiction. (AU)