Documentary and digital image. Transformations of indexicality in the new media

Transformaciones de la indicialidad en los nuevos medios.

Abstract

It could be argued that in recent years there has been a tendency in some media theorists – especially film theorists – that consists of making a dramatic break between images captured digitally and those that are analog, essentially in their indexical aspect. This aspect is, in Peircean semiotics,attributed to signs that maintain an existential relation with their objects, a trace of their presence in time and space. For some contemporary thinkers –the philosopher of technique Bernard Stiegler, for example –who is aligned with the theoretical tradition of photorealism led by figures such as Roland Barthes and Andre Bazin, the digital image is subjected to a discretization process in which the guarantee of the existence of what is portrayed is lost –in contrast with the analog photography– which is characterized by continuity, and which shows an absolute contiguity to its referent. Others like Tom Gunning or Arlindo Machado consider that this approach mystifies analogue photography and obliterates the complexity of its processes and its historicity. Contemporary documentaries, largely influenced by the emergence of new recording, editing and display technologies based on digital substrate, appear as a paradox in which a field of production, traditionally based on a strong indexical connection with its objects, get close to the issue of the digital revolution that establishes a crisis of beliefs based on a break between the image and its referent. We analyze this issue through 2 productions: Recollection (Kamal Aljafari, 2015), a film made possible by digital alteration tools, and Life in a Day (Kevin McDonald, 2011), a production that shows the importance of digital culture to carry out a large–scale collective documentary.