ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some aspects of documentary film. It describes that the documentary easily lends itself to an exploitative attitude in which the director projects collective conceptions or subjective views on the world. The chapter explains many basic perspectives on intercultural competence. Due to the emergence of postcolonial theory during the past thirty years, moral questions have established themselves as a counterweight to the predominantly epistemological theoretical discussion about documentary representation. The chapter focuses on the documentary film maker Trinh T. Minh-ha, who exemplifies a critical movement that contests the ideal of the dispassionate or dissociated observer and tries to replace it with a focus on engagement. It is concerned with the experimental documentary film movement that the role of the subject is of particular relevance. The chapter sheds light on how the epistemological shift has been dependent on particular strategies, namely a strategy to integrate several voices and a strategy to make visible the materiality of the representations.
