The document explores the intersection of essay films and interactive documentaries through the lens of affective knowing, utilizing Deleuze's concept of the affect-image. It discusses how interactivity can reshape the diary film and provides a framework for understanding new media expressions in documentary filmmaking. The work emphasizes the potential for personal expression and theoretical contributions within the evolving landscape of documentary practices.

1. Towards “Affective Knowing” in the Diary Film !
and Interactive Documentary
Hannah Brasier
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2. theme
in honours
I applied Deleuze’s concept of the affect-image, outlined in
Cinema One: the movement image, as a framework for the
creation of two interactive online videos.
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3. question
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4. then
What can the essay film contribute to interactive documentary?
What can interactive documentary contribute to the essay film?
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5. now
What can the essay film contribute to interactive documentary?
What can interactive documentary contribute to the essay film?
How may interactivity as an affective system, and the diary film
as “affective knowing”, provide a framework for new ways of
making and theorising the diary film, and interactive
documentary?
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6. now…
How may interactivity as an affective system, and the diary film
as “affective knowing”, provide a framework for new ways of
making and theorising the diary film, and interactive
documentary?
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7. interactivity
modularity means each element of a whole maintains their
“separate identities…without losing their independence” (Manovich
30)
variability means a new media object is “not something fixed
once and for all, but something that can exist in different,
potentially infinite versions” (Manovich 36)
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8. interactivity
“as a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of
items, and it refuses to order this list” (Manovich 225)
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9. interactive documentary
Manovich finds it surprising why “narratives—still exist in new
media,” when there is “nothing in the logic of the medium itself
that would foster its generation” (228)
Miles considers that because documentaries focus on the
contemplation of ideas, as opposed to narrative movement, they
can be considered as a collection of contemplative affective
moments.
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10. interactive documentary
a working concept of interactive documentary is a collection of
modular affective video clips that are interacted with by a user
through an interface.
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11. affective system
“what matters in interactive documentary is the enlarging of the
interval between perception and action…so that deciding
becomes analogous to understanding. This is synonymous with
Deleuze’s affect image” (Miles 24)
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12. diary film
from the essay film
described by Corrigan as a “(1) testing of expressive
subjectivity through (2) experiential encounters in a public
arena, (3) the product of which becomes the figuration of
thinking or thought” (30)
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13. diary film
to the diary film
where essayistic subjectivity continually reinvents itself
“between the extremes of boredom and emergency as a
series of different, daily, and redemptive time
zones” (Corrigan 144)
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14. “affective knowing”
In the diary film, affective moments of contemplation are
constructed to show reinventions of enquiring subjectivity
through lived experience, and could be viewed as the diarist
moving towards a sort of “affective knowing” (Miles 22)
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15. towards
I envision this PhD to focus on how the diary film is a form of
documentary filmmaking that is particularly suited to “affective
knowing”, and how this may lend itself to affective systems of
interaction.
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16. how
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17. how
Gibson in “The Known World” suggests
“Artist-researchers have the chance to woo two modes of
knowing: the implicit and the explicit. They have the
chance to entwine the insider’s embodied know-how with
the outsider’s analytical precepts” (11)
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18. how
an essayistic approach to writing which displays the
“essayist’s train of thought in full view”
and for the essayist to combine these thoughts to produce a
“constellation of meanings that surround any of the issues
considered by the essayist” (Montero 8)
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19. how
The essayist as meditator and combiner mimics the dual
knowings of Gibson’s proposition that you need to “step both
outside and inside the mystery” (Gibson 4)
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20. project one
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21. making
lists “function primarily as provocations, as litanies of
surprisingly contrasted curiosities” (Bogost 26)
mirroring becomes an observational tool to learn “something
about the researcher, as well as, perhaps, something about the
phenomenon” (Mason 181)
“expertise is sensation to notice, coupled with techniques for
analysis of, use of, or enquiry into, that noticing” (Mason 35)
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22. project one
The project asks to what extent does Marker notice? As a
probe to think about what has been noticed, and how one
might mirror such noticing.
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23. why
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24. why
transformations of the diary film into a new media context
emerging practices of personal expression
contributions to documentary theory and new media studies
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25. tasks
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26. tasks
now
year 1
6m
1 yr
!
making
Sunless K-film!
confirmation document!
10,000 words
exegetical
writing
Project # 2
to Sunless K-Film!
10,000 words
reading
10 books!
31 articles!
12 films watched
documenting
diary film!
affect theory!
new media theory
blog!
diary
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for
publication!

27. tasks
1.5 yr
year 2
making
3rd project
exegetical
writing
to 2nd project!
10,000 words
2 yr
4th project
for
publication
to 3rd project!
10,000 words
reading
documenting
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for
publication

28. tasks
2.5 yr
year 3
making
exegetical
writing
3 yr
editing
to 4th project!
10,000 words
finalising
for
editing
publication!
finalising
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29. cited
Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology. Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012. Print.
Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema One: The Movement Image. London: Continuum International Publishing Group,
1986. Print.
Gibson, Ross. “The Known World.” Text 8 (2010): 1–11. Print.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. United States of America: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 2001. Print.
Miles, Adrian. “Interactive Documentary and Affective Ecologies.” New Documentary Ecologies. Ed. Kate
Nash, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes. London: Palgrave, Forthcoming. Print.
Montero, David. Thinking Images: The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema. Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2012. Print.
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