Alum Kris Fallon on Docalogue December
BCNM alum Kris Fallon's film review "Networks, Connection and Information" was featured on Docalogue for the Decemeber film National Bird!
Docalogue is an online space for scholars, filmmakers, and documentary enthusiasts to engage in conversation about contemporary documentaries. Each month, Docalogue features one documentary and the conversation is initiated by two writers who have been asked to write a few words about that film. Once these initial posts are up, the site is open for comments and discussion from the larger community.
This site grew out of a desire for more regular conversations about documentary, and for productive dialogue about the possibilities – and perhaps problems – of the documentary form in the current moment.
From Fallon's review:
In the opening scenes of National Bird, Sofia Kennebeck’s 2016 portrait of the humans behind the early years of the United States’ unoccupied aerial vehicle – or drone – warfare program, we meet Heather as she introduces herself to several other students in her massage therapy training program. She chose massage, she explains, because she wanted to connect with other people and heal them while she healed herself. Direct physical contact, she reasons, might provide an antidote to the trauma of witnessing and contributing to violence and death at a distance, an experience she endured analyzing images and identifying targets for the Air Force’s drone program during her tour in the military. While her theory makes a good deal of sense, it also raises a number of challenges: to the fundamental promise of drone warfare, but also for the project of the film, and documentary more broadly. These are contradictions the film tacitly explores without ever fully resolving.
Read the rest of his review and keep up with Docalogue here.