The Doc, the Mock and the What? : Events of Realing, Mockumentalities and the Becoming-Political of the Viewing Subject

This study aims at making inquiry into what happens when a viewing subject encounters a film where it proves difficult to recognize if it is factual or fictional. In order to meet this aim the dissertation offers an experimental approach of both theoretical and methodological nature. Drawing on materialist-affective theory and Deleuzian philosophy a method assemblage for mediamateriality is suggested. This offers a set of conceptual keys that makes it possible to trace the unfolding of actual encounters with blurred boundaries between the factual and the fictional. By performing a reception study whereby six data-producers engage with Exit Through the Giftshop, (Banksy 2010), I’m Still Here (Affleck 2010) and Catfish (Joost and Schulman 2010), a three-fold data is produced. Making this resonate through the method assemblage, the series of events of spectating is seen to have functioned as an event of destabilization of the relationship between the viewing subject and the discourse of factuality, what is called an event of realing. This functions as a challenge to the existential territory of the viewing subject-asspectator, bringing forth a certain mockumentality that can give cause to practices of a becoming-political of the viewing subject, notably by serving as a reconfiguration of the regime of truth. However, as will be guarded against, mockumentality may potentially bring about practices that both flatten as well as hierarchize relations of power. Following this, the dissertation will end with a suggestion that the method assemblage for mediamateriality, besides as a tool for the analytic endeavour and an ethical practice for the viewing subject (inside or outside of academia), can also be put to work in a pedagogical aim, as a moving-image-pedagogics