Testifying for the Invisible: Documentary Poetics of Estrangement

This exposition is a dialogical -and dialectically composed – textual, visual and metacinematic inquiry into the potential of methods and poetics of estrangement in documentary and history-based cinema in representing the “neoliberal condition” in present day society. Helke and Pedregal’s dialogue is reflecting and rethinking ideas stemming from different theories and strategies of emancipatory practices in cinema, recognizing the tensions between conventions such as social documentary, political cinema, different conceptions of realism versus the idea of defamiliarizing as an artistic strategy.