Situating documentary film in a speculative future: an exploration in multi species entanglements

This practice-based research is a formal experiment in situating documentary film in an immanent future and, by doing so, puts forward propositions on what it means to be human in an entangled multispecies world.

The research consists of A Terrible Beauty, a feature length documentary, and this dissertation. The film was largely shot in Yiwu, home to one of the largest wholesale markets in the world and an important node in the New Silk Road. Set in the world of anthropomorphic goods and objects, including dolls, mannequins and androids, the film follows two timetravellers as they confront questions of time, mortality and what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. The dissertation describes the practice methodology that I developed in the course of the research and reflects on the propositions that the film offers for the future.

The research poses the question of how documentary film practice may be situated in a quotidian future and what the value of such a future orientation may be. At the methodological level, I suggest that there are extremely productive overlaps between science fiction and documentary film, and the dissertation reflects on the conceptual journey and experimental routes that I took to arrive at the idea of “speculative fictioning” as a method for documentary practice. The research is in conversation with – and also contributes to – critical concepts from science and technology studies. In particular, I draw on the work of Donna Haraway and extend her insights on human-animal relationalities (“companion species”) to the world of anthropomorphic objects and develop the idea of “companion copies” as a way of rethinking human-nonhuman interactions. If to be human has always entailed being human with other species, I ask what would it mean to discover our humanity with our companion copies such as robots and androids?

The research serves as an invitation to think about how an ontological regard for things may allow us to cultivate a better regard for fellow humans as well.