Documentary polyptychs: multi-screen documentary on a theme of climate change

Abstract

This MFA explores how the problematic phenomenology of climate change might be approached by revisiting an ancient visual art form, the Early Renaissance polyptych. I posit the polyptych as a proleptic form of installation art, providing a historical overview and analysis of multi-channel forms up to contemporary expanded cinema, before narrowing my focus to documentary film and video installations. I propose that principles of dialectical montage apply between spatialised screens and that, as a richly affective form, the relationship between screens coexisting within a single field of view might productively be considered using Deleuze’s notion of the time-image crystal. Furthermore that the visitor, in becoming an ‘editor’ via bodily movement, might be positioned in a lineage to Vertov’s kino-eye, thus becoming a kinaesthetic eye. I use Mark Boulos’ All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2008) and Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010), two- & nine-channel works respectively, to discuss these ideas. The ‘unseen’ nature of anthropogenic climate change poses particular challenges both for a culture that emphasises ‘seeing is believing’ and for documentary forms traditionally reliant on visible evidence. My creative work focuses on the phenomenon of sea level rise, and is presented in the form of a documentary polyptych with which the viewer physically engages. Without delivering a climate change polemic, the work explores crucial dissociations — of cause from effect, of today’s action from tomorrow’s result, of behaviour here from outcome there — through an open, affective form that replaces documentary’s traditionally temporal strategies with spatialised montage. More generally I position the form amidst both the veritable renaissance of multi-channel video art and the proliferation of multiple screen devices in contemporary society. How might documentary’s potential for creating meaning — and perhaps inspiring agency — change when it moves to multiple screens?