ABSTRACT
This chapter explores documentary strategies, which can be understood not as a realism but rather as a 'relationalism' engaging the proliferation of dynamic material objects. Depletion is where the common begins, in sites to which no one lays claims anymore because they have been exhausted. Exhaustion leaves fragments, ruins, waste, it is what comes after production, after use, after work. The documentary The Forgotten Space by Noel Burch and Allan Sekula 'follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system'. 'Part of Mettler's research into clouds, the process involved remote-controlled cameras; the montage emphasizes this sense of 'machine looking at machine'. In the documentary Clouds, James George and Jonathan Minard use visualizations based on motion capture data that complement their more traditional talking-heads interview footage, drawing attention to forms of machinic vision based on the real-time analysis of the body movements.
