*gothic frontiers chapter 04-gothumentary by robbins and woofter

Gothumentary: The Gothic Unsettlingof Documentary’s Rhetoric of Rationality

Papagena Robbins, Kristopher Woofter

AbstractIn this paper we theorise gothumentary not as a subgenre, but as a critical concept. Through this concept we analyse some of the ways documentary and the Gothic have come together as discursive and rhetorical modes in cinema in order to address similar questions: how the past manifests in the present, how a subject can be represented and interpreted through documents, and how the limits of knowledge are drawn in our representations. Recent cinematic texts such as Capturing the Friedmans (d. Andrew Jarecki, ), In the Realms of the Unreal (d. Jessica Yu,

), Must Read After My Death (d. Morgan Dews, ), Cropsey (d. Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio, ), and Resurrect Dead (d. Jon Foy, ) show the potential of the Gothic to undermine longstanding notions that positivistic strategies of representation are the key to what documentary has to offer both audiences and scholars. We theorise that the Gothic tradition’s engagement with the pleasures and torments of the text, along with its manifest anxieties regarding representation, can provide a critical intervention in the current crisis surrounding documentary realism. In contrast to conventional documentary modes, the films included in this study emphasise possibility over conclusiveness to suggest that perhaps the most productive way of thinking about the mysteries of our world is through speculation, interpretation, contemplation, and a certain fearful wonderment.

Keywords: Gothic, documentary, uncanny, reflexivity, hermeneutics

While Gothic tropes have been present in documentary film-making since early cinema, there has been an increase in the combination of the two discourses in recent nonfiction films such as Wisconsin Death Trip (James Marsh, ), Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, ), In the Realms of the Unreal (Jessica Yu, ), Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, ), Must Read After My Death (Morgan Dews, ), Cropsey (Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio,

), Double Take (Johan Grimonprez, ), and Resurrect Dead

PAPAGENA ROBBINS, KRISTOPHER WOOFTER

(Jon Foy, ), to name only a few. Here, Gothic and documentary discourses collide at the intersection of the dread of knowledge (epistephobia) and the desire for knowledge (epistephilia). Rather than presenting persuasive narratives that reach definitive conclusions, the gothumentary combines the Gothic tradition of unsettling our relationships with what we think we know with questions brought out in experimental and hybrid documentary to push the spectator into more active modes of inquiry about how the historical world is represented. In the gothumentary, knowledge is often elusive, even monstrous in its resistance to the documentarian’s efforts. The gothumentary subject or event may be too large or too small to be represented satisfactorily by any means. The gothumentary conjures up a world that is uncanny in its resistance to our attempts to seek knowledge, and its ‘truths’ are often emotional, multiple, conflicting, partial or highly personal. In juxtaposing the documentary’s discourses of rationality and sobriety with the Gothic’s focus on affect, excess and inscrutability, the gothumentary creates a space for the reevaluation of the philosophical and cultural relevance of both forms.

As the mechanical eye made the world more visually available in the nineteenth century, a dilemma concerning the purpose of looking became increasingly apparent: “should we look for knowledge or for pleasure?” (Cowie : ). Following the Enlightenment push to manage, contain and understand the place of desire in all realms of experience, the use of cinema as a prosthetic device could be accepted by what Bill Nichols calls the “discourses of sobriety” (Nichols : ) only if the pleasures of cinema were renounced in its documentary uses. Early experimentations in Continental Europe by avant-garde film-makers like Jean Vigo, Alberto Cavalcanti, Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens and Jean Epstein attempted to acknowledge nonfiction cinema’s poetic and affective representational possibilities, asking viewers to think more deeply about issues prior to the demands of state power, like subjectivity, representation and perception (Nichols : ). The Griersonian documentary, which was favoured by state and corporate production to serve reactionary goals, pushed aside the avant-garde documentary of the s as a potential source of lineage for the genre over the next half century (Nichols : ). As a result, by the s the split along these lines seemed to be finalised:

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the enjoyment of cinema’s spectacle belonged solely to the fiction spectator, while the documentary spectator (supposedly) watched only to know. The result of this emphasis on seeing for knowledge, not pleasure, was a mandate that the documentary produce positivistic knowledge claims, whether or not there was enough evidence, visual or otherwise, to support totalising claims.

Throughout its history, but especially since observational cinema’s failure to convey satisfactorily an objective world by de-emphasising the film-making apparatus, documentary has experimented with reflexivity to address its problems concerning the roles of realism and representation. The convergence of Gothic and documentary strategies in the gothumentary film highlights the potential for reflexivity to produce critical relationships between film-maker, text and audience at the intersection of three conceptual axes: hermeneutics, desire, and epistemology. Gothumentary deploys the contemporary Gothic’s polyvocal and polysemic textuality, its emphasis on endless interpretation by its narrators, and its evocation of a reality that defies representation, so as to create a ‘mysterium hermeneutics’ that challenges the exclusive reign of positivism which has dominated much of the documentary tradition.

Capturing the Friedmans illustrates the gothumentary’s mingling of pleasure and dread in contemplating an event that resists representation. The subjects of a disturbing case of alleged pervasive child molestation are front-and-centre in the film, but their chill reserve and fragmented or unreliable access to memories of the events suggests that no combination of evidence, testimony or (re)framing will lay open the ‘real’ story, which is fraught with both terror and melancholy. Additionally, the film’s uncanny proliferation of accounts by its social actors causes viewers to shift allegiances throughout the film, highlighting an irresolvable perspectivism. Jarecki’s film constructs a sublime awareness of a world in flux, possibly unrepresentable in the enormity of its traumas and truths.

In gothumentary, the pleasure is less in solving all of the mysteries of the text than in acknowledging its limitations. Gothumentary’s goal is not one of disambiguation, as we find in positivistic discourse, but one of sustained acts of hesitation that stress polysemy of meaning and plurality of enunciation to hold open the possibility for


interpretation. The hermeneutics of gothumentary are negativistic: though interpretations are building up, the void becomes the ultimate focus, the foregrounded problem. The knowledge produced is of an absence due to the ever-widening circles of further questions that surround new knowledge. In the gothumentary, decoding reality is seen as always already based on a Nietzschean notion of infinite interpretation, an acknowledgement that there are no complete texts. In reading the evidence presented in the gothumentary, we seek not to close the circle to discover the incontrovertible truth of the thing-in-itself, but rather to discover more about the dimensions of the yawning chasm of mystery between ourselves and that of which we seek to grasp some part.

Roger B. Salomon has argued that the “ambiguous situation” common to the narratives of Gothic and horror “represents precisely the paradigm of truth in the contemporary world – its radically subjective, limited, or otherwise objectively unratifiable dimension” (Salomon : ). The gothumentary, like the Gothic narrative, does not so much nihilistically eliminate solutions in its emphasis on “indeterminacy of meaning” (Salomon :

), but instead withholds solutions, to emphasise documentary construction and reception as an extended act of interpretation. The “ambiguous situation” is our postmodern reality, and gothumentaries open up and address that reality by resisting easy solutions and closure. As we find in films like Grizzly Man, Resurrect Dead, and Must Read After My Death, the gothumentary often turns its focus upon what Edgar Allan Poe called “the text which does not permit itself to be read” (Poe [ ] : ). Its central subjects (often deceased or otherwise absent, always enigmatic) and objects (often ruins, cryptic texts, or abandoned spaces) elude the grasp of the documentary camera, which circles around them. The central figure of the gothumentary is fragmented and reachable only through the documents they have left behind. Though these documents are often not intended to be presented to the public, they confront us nonetheless. The creators of these texts do not necessarily have an audience in mind; in fact, their texts often function as a form of introspection or self-interrogation. We collude with the film-maker in trespassing upon these personal transmissions, hoping to become worthy of deciphering their deeper significance. In the gothumentaries

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that focus on the documents left behind by individuals who have been pushed to the margins and who would otherwise have no voice, the airing of these records holds redemptive possibilities. In Must Read After My Death, for example, protagonist, Allis, has left upon her death her audio confessions and home movies to her family, who knew nothing of the pain she experienced while living in a suburban patriarchal hell. As we examine the images of the supposedly happy family, her voice intercedes to confront the spectator with the knowledge that, while these images are not faked or intentional deceptions, without the voice that conveys experience, they can only tell the story we already think we know, which is revealed to be an impoverished fabrication. In this case, a voice desperately calls out from the past demanding redemption for an injustice that the images are unable or unwilling to confirm, and thus unsettles the conventionalised strategies we rely upon to feel that we know what has happened in the past.

The narrative of Resurrect Dead revolves around the quest of several young men to crack the numerous cryptic missives alluding to Kubrick’s : A Space Odyssey and the ideas of historian Arnold J. Toynbee, and left embedded in the streets of major cities by a reclusive visionary . The excessiveness of the energy the creator of the ‘Toynbee tiles’ puts out to communicate his message is matched by his equally intense desire to remain hidden. He is a traumatic ghostly figure who demands redemptive power through being heard and not seen. The (dreadful) pleasure of watching the documentarians’ quest to find this man lies in the anticipation that he will be exposed, potentially disclosing his motives, and in the equally disturbing possibility that he will not emerge to decode his communication. In Resurrect Dead, we see that there may be more power in probing the limits of the documentary subject-as-cipher than there is in reaching conclusive statements about the ‘real’ man at the film’s centre. Foy’s film is ultimately satisfied with its ability to open up a space for interpretation around this enigmatic individual’s motives and what the documentarian’s desire to know about him says about the spectator’s own experience of the world.

Several hundred of these tiles have been discovered since the late s in cities throughout North and South America. They all contain some variation of the message: “Toynbee Idea In Movie Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter”.


The Gothic’s reflexive tendency to hold considerations of the real in sway, through limited perspective and an excessive “play of codes, signs and images” (Botting : ), is key to its usefulness in such films as Must Read After My Death and Resurrect Dead that wish to call attention to the pleasures, torments and manipulative powers of representation, the strategies of truth-telling, and the way knowledge is constructed. While Gothic reflexivity can be effective in promoting critique through such ruptures, there is a danger in elevating the Gothic to a place where it becomes an infallible tool for critique in documentary. There are many clear instances in which Gothic and documentary discourse combine in commercialised and/or purely spectacular manners, such as in fantastical pseudo-documentaries like Chariots of the Gods ( ), and reality television series like Discovery Channel’s A Haunting ( - ) and Syfy’s Ghost Hunters ( -present). However, when Gothic stylisation, tropes, and narrative are combined with experimental and hybrid documentary strategies of representation, the resulting texts – those we call gothumentaries – are capable of deeply unsettling the spectator’s naturalised relationships with knowledge, reality, representation, memory, history and the self.

As a critical concept, gothumentary is not meant merely to indicate documentary explorations of traditionally Gothic subject matter, but instead often suggests a mode of documentary concerned with the notion of knowledge itself as monstrous, especially when it is unattainable. Additionally, the gothumentary subverts conventional documentary bids for transparency, such as one finds in many made-for-TV documentaries, by highlighting the process by which knowledge is constructed in documentary. Monstrous subjects alone (serial killers, traumatic events, the paranormal) cannot constitute the gothumentary; rather, gothumentary focuses on the monstrosity of subject matter not typically conceived as monstrous, such as a document, a timid individual, or a trusted institution. This aspect of gothumentary’s approach to the real is key in distinguishing the mode from what we call fantastical pseudo-documentaries, which are teleologically oriented only towards rendering the world strange through juxtaposing speculation with strings of unanswered questions and evidence often extracted from historical or cultural contexts.

For Gary D. Rhodes, in fantastical pseudo-documentaries such as the television series In Search of… ( - ), and Unsolved

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Mysteries ( -present), “the question becomes the answer” (Rhodes : ). That is, the potentially critically productive ambiguity inherent in an open “What if?” ending is here a fulfilment of fantastical pseudo-documentary conventions; open endings in the fantastical pseudo-documentary serve largely to fulfil a narrative drive to take events that are explicable within the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology or geography, and tilt them rhetorically towards the supernatural. The fantastical pseudo-documentary plays reflexively into the genre expectations of an often rather savvy audience that expects it to turn away from rational explanations to the fantasy of a possible world where sceptics are fools and believers in the preternatural and supernatural see their unconventional conclusions supported, if not by evidence, then by an opening-outward that the fantastical pseudo-documentary emphasises in its final “Or is it?” moments. Fantastical pseudo-documentaries may flirt with questioning the positivistic conclusions of rational (scientific) discourse, as Rhodes suggests, but, unlike gothumentaries, they do not highlight themselves as acts of interpretation that open up critical pathways. The ambiguities evoked by fantastical pseudo-documentaries can be read generically (and ironically) as rhetorical closure to the narrative. Accordingly, the fantastical pseudo-documentary is retrograde in its aesthetics, following an expository formula in which, according to Rhodes “[i]magery and utterance combine to lead the audience to a monolithic conclusion to their esoteric questions: the exalted truth, rendered impersonally and without apparent bias” (Rhodes : ).

Contrary to the fantastical pseudo-documentary’s rhetorical and narrative play, gothumentary is a more critically productive reflexive mode – a form of both meta-documentary and meta-horror. It re-enacts Gothic and horror genre conventions with the purpose of revealing monstrous ruptures in the real that genre conventions typically convey through patently fictional events and recognizable (because often formulaic) iconographic and narrative constructs. Framing the world as though teetering on the brink of the inscrutable and the irrational, the gothumentary points to and disrupts our vague or illusory sense of the real by rendering it through the conventions of the darkly fantastic, while still maintaining a link to the historical world, so crucial within the documentary tradition.


Because the gothumentary film-maker has recognised the inability of one explanation to satisfy the central mystery of the text (that is, s/he has embraced the Nietzschean notion of infinite interpretation), the focus becomes an examination of the text and texture of evidence in which the available documents’ insufficiencies, contradictions and over-determined meanings become vulnerable to multiple probings. As documentary theorist Stella Bruzzi observes in her analysis of the Zapruder tape – a compulsively viewed -second, mm home movie that shows the clearest view of the Kennedy assassination – no matter what degree of purity, clarity or value a piece of footage possesses, there will always be essential questions that no amount of viewing will be able to answer (Bruzzi : - ). In the case of the Kennedy assassination, neither the killer nor the motive could be proven through the photographic evidence available. But because vision has long been linked to knowledge, the Zapruder tape has been viewed and reviewed ad nauseam, in the hopes of finding some previously unrecognised evidence. Bruzzi calls this expectation that visible evidence will give up the secrets of what it represents, the Zapruder paradox, attributing the problem to a confusion over the explanatory capabilities of the re-presentation (Bruzzi : ).

Gothumentary openly speaks to the ever widening “whys?” surrounding the failure of evidence, visible or otherwise, to tell us what we really want to know about the past and about how the past persists in the present, informing us in almost imperceptible ways about aspects of ourselves almost successfully repressed, and just about forgotten. For instance, in films like Cropsey, Resurrect Dead, Capturing the Friedmans, In the Realms of the Unreal and Must Read After My Death, the film-makers present a wealth of evidence that circles endlessly around mysteries that will never be solved. Gothumentary films thus train their lens on the general problems of documentary’s reliance on readable evidence. In Cropsey, for example, one interviewee discusses the less-than-incontrovertible nature of a photograph used to indict Staten Island resident Andre Rand as a child murderer, pointing out the multiple readings about Rand’s character that could be imposed upon the photo, which shows Rand in an ostensibly abject posture, head-down and hunched over, eyes rolled upwards. The film presents a sort of Kuleshov test, the interviewee’s voice heard over the photograph

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as he offers different interpretations of the image as representing either a heroic humanitarian or a brutal murderer, to suggest the tenuous claim the photo has to representing the ‘real’ Rand. The film also holds itself up to scrutiny in this manner, featuring Rand’s open criticism of the film-makers in a letter in which he remarks on the futility of their documentary to ever intervene as evidence in his case. Cropsey film-makers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio also appear as investigative social actors in their own film, voicing their doubts, frustrations and suspicions about the evidence they have collected, and filming themselves probing Rand’s supposed former haunts, being denied an interview with him, and opening and reading aloud his letters to them. Questions regarding whether Rand’s letters are his attempts to manipulate the documentarians further serve to render evidence in the film as increasingly suspect, even unreadable. Cropsey suggests that we can still learn from evidence of this sort, but the lessons will be different; we may not get the answer, but will learn about the problem of looking at and understanding evidence. Gothumentary films such as Cropsey create interpretive openings on the way evidence is collected, analysed and deployed. Their reflexivity highlights discourses around the more conventional uses of evidence by the press, the justice system, and academic institutions. In their ability to be reflexive about the multiple meanings and even failings in their own use of evidence, gothumentary films highlight the ruptures and inconsistencies that prominent institutions often eschew while serving their positivistic mandates.

Similar to the mockumentary’s highlighting of the power of documentary form to create convincing manipulations of the real to set up a hoax, gothumentaries often self-consciously exploit the possibilities of fiction in order to complicate the reality they construct. The visual record as presented by gothumentary can be characterised by a number of strategies derived from fiction – and especially genre – film-making. Via impressionistic imagery, such films as The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy ( ) and In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger convey a sense of their absent subjects (similar to Resurrect Dead and Must Read After My Death), constructing them via juxtapositions of their own artistic or introspective output via journal writing and/or illustrations. Both films have limited or no access to visual records of the subjects


they trace: in Sound, the “mummy’s” journal – a daily account of his suicide by starvation in the forest – is the only record of his existence; and in Realms, three photographs of Darger; hundreds of Darger’s paintings, collages and sketches; and Darger’s , -page work of fantasy, provide the primary access to his existence. Accordingly, both films rely heavily upon images that attempt to evoke their subjects, as well as to render the world they (and we) live in as unsettling.

While Gothic narrative strategies have long acknowledged the power of the document to heighten realism, documentary film has drawn on the power of the sublime and the visual lure (spectacle) to engage its viewers affectively in its narrative quest for knowledge, even as the genre has ostensibly positioned itself against this practice. The desire to know and to see – and even to take pleasure through seeing – has always been present in nonfiction photographic media, and it has been theorised that documentary itself has developed according to different limitations regarding the styles, techniques and narratives that expose us to people, events, places and ideas. Nichols has shown ( ; ; ) that documentary has moved towards an increasing emphasis on mediation in order to convey a higher degree of realism, and this has its parallels in twenty and twenty-first-century Gothic’s formal and thematic extrapolation of earlier Gothic’s focus on proliferations of (often inscrutable, fragmented or illegible) documents and the fear and desire generated in contemplating them. It has been only recently, however, that documentary theory and public discourse have begun to acknowledge a place for desire, affect and the (Lacanian) “real” within the documentary frame due to an unfortunate division that was made in the early days of cinema and reasserted in the interwar period. Michael Renov ( ) and Elizabeth Cowie ( ; ) have both urged contemporary documentary film theory to take into account the spectator’s desire for knowledge and spectacle, factuality and affect. An ever-growing body of gothumentary films have combined the subjective, emotional, visual (and aural) pleasures of the non-fiction filmic experience, still largely disavowed by today’s mainstream documentary, with Gothic reflexive strategies to challenge the very foundations of documentary’s use of visible evidence to construct reality and knowledge as comprehensible, objective and accessible.

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Nichols sees films that combine “an avant-garde impulse with a documentary orientation” as particularly well suited to the task of “disabus[ing] their viewers of any commonsense reality” (Nichols

: ). Such uses of documentary discourse to engage spectators with their own powers of interpretation and critical engagement with perception are a crucial step towards rescuing documentary from its Griersonian alignment with state and corporate propaganda. Gothumentary signals a new strategy for bringing desire, dread, pleasure and active viewership back into documentary as a way of undermining the discourses of sobriety, ultimately presenting a real challenge to how they have co-opted our visions of what reality is. By creating a spectatorship that is actively involved in the construction of the text, gothumentary constitutes a return of suppressed avant-garde possibilities in documentary. It reintegrates the pleasures of textuality into documentary not as a simple erotics, but as an essential part of a meaning-making process that encourages a critical understanding of the historical world through being moved by it.

Gothumentary legitimates the scrutinising gaze of the spectator, encouraging productive pleasurable viewing. Cowie argues that documentary imagery responds to two types of desire: there is, first, the “desire for reality held and reviewable for analysis as […] a world of evidence confirmed through observation and logical interpretation”, and, second, the “desire for the real not as knowledge but as image, as spectacle” (Cowie : ). Gothumentary films highlight the tension between these two desires, questioning the first by exploring the possibilities of the latter – that is, by constructing a pleasurable gaze that seeks to scrutinise, however successfully that scrutiny produces conventional ‘proof’. The gothumentary gaze seeks a different kind of knowledge, one gained through the contemplation of affect rather than through teleological structures.

The degree to which the gothumentary deploys visual technology to bring viewers into an affective relationship with their world parallels popular mockumentary horror films, such as The Blair Witch Project ( ) and the Paranormal Activity series ( ; ;

; ). In these films, the visual record is rendered suspect in that it often fails to capture the (usually monstrous) object the amateur film-makers have set their sights on. The camera in mockumentary horror falls into the hands of obsessive recorders with the urge to


chronicle every moment of lived experience, and yet still fails to capture anything meaningful. In the Paranormal Activity films, the technology used for self-surveillance by the films’ haunted families is at least as monstrous in its pervasiveness in the home as the presence of demons. And the failure of the documentary project in Blair Witch prompts Brigid Cherry to remark that the film is “about the way technology gets in the way of seeing” (Cherry : ). James Keller extends this point, arguing that “in many ways the subject of Blair Witch is the progressive loss of control of the cinema process” (Keller : ). As one Blair Witch character admits, the visual record offers only a “filtered reality”, one that deflects attention from a traumatic and ultimately unreachable real. Not unlike these and other mockumentary horror films, gothumentary films are a site where fiction and nonfiction strategies converge to create ruptures in the way we frame the world in our visual representations.

Gothumentary unsettles, destabilises and defamiliarises those constructs we conjure up to (re)present reality. It functions not merely through an evocation of terror, but through a deployment of Gothic tropes and affect to disrupt the conventional documentary’s positivist drive, creating a critical distance between text and spectator in order to question both reality and its representation. The gothumentary is the result of specific historical convergences and epistemological impasses that require a mysterium hermeneutics to emphasise more interpretive modes of reception. Stemming from the three axes around which documentary and the Gothic revolve to form a critical concept – hermeneutics, epistemology and desire – we can identify several major strategies of representation found in recent gothumentary films, including, but not limited to: an undermining of the visual record; an emphasis on the failure of evidence to satisfy our epistephilic desires; a reflexive focus on, or evocation of, unreadable objects, subjects or texts; a reconfiguration of the pleasurable gaze of the spectator as both active and productive; and an over-determination of meaning that acts as a counterpoint to conventional documentary representations and strategies. The introduction of the Gothic to documentary foregrounds a trend that has been unfolding in documentary for several decades towards eschewing positivistic, conclusive containments of subjects, objects and events, to emphasise a new basis for documentary realism.

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In these films, failures of interpretation can be seen to open up a field in which to explore our anxieties about how we form and communicate our relationships to reality. In this way, it could be said that the gothumentary moves its viewers closer to a sense of the real by acknowledging where we cannot go in the search for truth. Gothumentary is about revealing ruptures in rational discourses; it is about asking different questions of reality and knowledge, about stressing absences and negatives rather than the revelations and truths required by positivism.

References

BOTTING, FRED, , Gothic, Routledge, London and New York.BRUZZI, STELLA, , New Documentary, Routledge, London-New York.CHERRY, BRIGID, , Horror, Routledge, New York.COWIE, ELIZABETH, , “The Spectacle of Actuality”, in J. Gaines and

M. Renov (eds), Visible Evidence, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. - .

COWIE, ELIZABETH, , Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

KELLER, JAMES, , “‘Nothing that Is Not There and the Nothing that Is’: Language and the Blair Witch Phenomenon”, in S. L. Higley and J. A. Weinstock (eds), Nothing that Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies, Wayne State U.P., Detroit, pp. - .

NICHOLS, BILL, , Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Indiana U.P., Bloomington.

NICHOLS, BILL, , Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, Indiana U.P., Bloomington.

NICHOLS, BILL, , “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde”, Critical Inquiry ( ), pp. - .

POE, EDGAR ALLAN, [ ] , “The Man of the Crowd”, in P. F. Quinn (ed.), Poe: Poetry and Tales, Library of America, New York, pp. -

.RENOV, MICHAEL, , The Subject of Documentary, University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.RHODES, GARY D., , “In Search of Questions, or, A New Age Film

Odyssey”, in G. D. Rhodes and J. P. Springer (eds), Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, McFarland, London-Jefferson (NC), pp. - .

SALOMON, ROGER B., , Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative, Cornell U.P., Ithaca (NY).


Films

Chariots of the Gods. Dir. Harald Reini. VCI Entertainment, . In Search of … Alan Landsburg Production. Visual Entertainment Inc,

- .Wisconsin Death Trip. Dir. James Marsh. Home Vision Entertainment,

. The Blair Witch Project. Dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez. Lions Gate,

. Capturing the Friedmans. Dir. Andrew Jarecki. HBO Video, . In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger. Dir. Jessica Yu.

Fox Lorber, . A Haunting. Dir. Tom Naughton, Nicolas Valcour. New Dominion Picture,

- .Must Read After My Death. Dir. Morgan Dews. Gigantic Releasing, . Grizzly Man. Dir. Werner Herzog. Lions Gate, . Cropsey. Dir. Joshua Zeman, Barbara Brancaccio. Vicious Circle Breaking

Glass Picture, . The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy. Dir. Peter Liechti. Lorber Films,

. Double Take. Dir. Johan Grimonprez. Kino International, . Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. Dir. Jon Foy. Entertainment

One, . Unsolved Mysteries. Dir. Robert Stack. First Look Home Entertainment

( - ).Ghost Hunters. Dir. Jay Bluemke, Richard Monahan. Vision ( - ).Paranormal Activity - . Dir. Oren Peli. Paramount, , , , .

*gothic frontiers chapter 04-gothumentary by robbins and woofter

Documents