Upon its release in 2022, Brett Morgen's documentary Moonage Daydream sparked vigorous debate among film reviewers and fans of David Bowie. Many criticisms appear to stem from unmet expectations about what a music documentary might be, along with a dearth of scholarly examination of how the film is situated in relation to experimental approaches to documentary filmmaking. While considering the discursive implications of public commentary about Moonage Daydream, audiovisual analysis is employed to examine the intersection of found footage and avant-garde assemblage strategies, audiovisual aesthetics, and animation. By contextualising Brett Morgen's approach in relation to experimental approaches to documentary film, I explore Moonage Daydream in relation to the history of found footage film, music documentary, and avant-garde approaches to art. Through multimodal analysis of the film's audiovisual construction, I explicate Morgen's use of conceptually driven creative strategies - such as cut-up, bricolage, and remediation. I argue that these methods are not only consistent with the creative-critical agenda of found footage documentary filmmaking, but they also mirror Bowie's creative approach. While situating Moonage Daydream as a valuable example of remediation, contextually informed analysis reveals the creative-critical potential of found footage filmmaking and avant-garde approaches to audiovisual assemblage in music documentary.
The 2020 Baghjan oil blowout in Assam in which a gas well operated by Oil India Limited burned uncontrolled for 173 days, devastating the Maguri-Motapung wetland and displacing the indigenous Moran community was not a natural disaster but the structural consequence of a century of petroextractivism applied to areas surrounded by indigenous communities in postcolonial India's northeast. This paper argues that the blowout produced not one catastrophe but two: the material devastation of ecological destruction and indigenous dispossession, and the epistemological catastrophe of its misrepresentation. Through a comparative analysis of Inside the Burning (2021) and Baghjan Reels (2022), the paper demonstrates that these films construct fundamentally antagonistic realities of the same event. Drawing on documentary theory, semiotic analysis, catastrophe aesthetics, counter-visuality, and decolonial epistemology, it reveals how Inside the Burning deploys classical narrative conventions to transform systemic governance failure into a corporate epic of heroic resolution, while Baghjan Reels enacts a decolonial counter-visuality constituting the Moran community not as objects of knowledge but as its primary producers. The paper argues that in petroextractivist frontiers like Assam, environmental justice is inseparable from epistemic justice, and the right to represent disaster is the right to define harm.
This paper examines how contemporary Chinese independent documentaries represent pneumoconiosis workers and their entanglement with dust, labor, and disposability. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "wasted lives," alongside theories of slow violence and transcorporeality, it argues these films function as counter-visual practices that not only document structural neglect but also reframe the ethical and political value of marginalized lives in the public sphere. The first section explores how documentaries construct a "dust landscape," a visual ecology of industrial decay in which environmental degradation blurs the boundary between laboring bodies and ruined environments. Here, dust operates both as toxic material and as a metaphor for the erasure of vulnerable workers from developmentalist narratives of progress. The second section turns to the affective and embodied dimensions of illness, analyzing how pneumoconiosis patients are portrayed within intimate familial settings. These representations move beyond spectacle, showing how suffering is lived and negotiated within precarious kinship structures. The final section examines the ethics of circulation and reception, highlighting how digital platforms, participatory practices, and audience responses shape meaning. By situating filmmaker, subject, and viewer in a triangulated relation of visibility, these documentaries challenge dominant logics of productivity and open space for revaluing life through care, memory, and resistance.
Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) documentaries offer new possibilities for narrating trauma, yet their narrative grammar remains underdeveloped. This article examines how haptic sound supports trauma storytelling in my autobiographical CVR practice, The Road to Yesterday (2025). Drawing on Marks's concept of haptic perception, I develop a haptic sound framework grounded in the materiality of sound, low-frequency resonance, spatialised ambience and vibration-based haptics to explore how haptic sound can evoke embodied access to traumatic memory beyond linguistic or cognitive representation. I further argue that, within the documentary context, animated re-enactment and sound design beyond realism do not replicate reality but constitute an inquiry into reality and trauma. These nonrepresentational strategies offer an aesthetic buffer that creates distance from forced identity substitution or overstating "experiencing the other," thereby reducing the risk of improper witnessing. The Road to Yesterday positions the immersant as a proximate third-person witness, maintaining psychological autonomy while enabling ethical witnessing. The findings suggest that multisensory approaches, particularly haptic sound, may help mediate traumatic experience and open a potential therapeutic space. In contexts where mourning rituals are disrupted, such as pandemic-era bereavement, CVR can facilitate symbolic closure and sustain continuing bonds through sensory and imaginative engagement.
