Nea Ehrlich – Animated Documentaries as Masking

When Exposure and Disguise Converge

Since the 1990s there has been a rise in the use of documentary materials in film and visual arts, most commonly referred to as “The Documentary Turn” (Nash, 2004). The complexity of what defines realities and the questioning of epistemological limits is part of the contemporary fascination with the documentary. M. Doel and D. Clarke spotlight some of the central issues of this discourse when they claim that “today we must face…the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real” (1999, p. 265). Past distinctions between fact and fiction now require reconsideration and, as this paper will show, the changing uses of animation in contemporary visual culture emphasise these increasingly blurred boundaries. The emerging field of animated documentaries highlights many of the challenges that abound in current explorations of the nature and documentation of realities and the truth value required of an image to be accepted as a representation of the real. [Source: http://journal.animationstudies.org]
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