Abstract/Summary

This thesis and its associated practice-as-research film, We Tattooed Your Mother, explore filmic realism and documentary objectivity through Karen Barad’s agential realism (1996; 2007). The practice-based research makes methodological use of editing, sound and visual effects to complicate the apparently teleological relationship between myself, my Brazilian, Catholic mother Regina, her mother Edith, and her Polish, Jewish grandmother Helena/Hencza. I term this methodology devised through rigorous experimentation diffractive, after Barad’s adaptation (2007; 2014) of Donna Haraway’s term (1997; 2004). The written and filmic components of this research thus generate a theory-practice-theory feedback loop through an essayistic first-person documentary of my transnational matrilineal genealogy, resulting in a filmic materialisation of my mother’s and my own entangled embodied reality. We Tattooed Your Mother investigates our entwined intergenerational identities, including questions of gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, class and religion within the context of a relatively commonplace scenario of Eastern European Jews immigrating to early 20th Century Brazil. The film is a story about intergenerational hauntings, the powerful currents of geopolitics and migration, and the complexities, limits and possibilities of an auto/biographical film produced over more than a decade. Barad’s account enfolds theoretical quantum physics with feminist and queer theory to challenge the representational metaphysics that also permeates documentary theory. Drawing from Barad’s materialist update (2007) of Judith Butler’s performativity (1999; 2011), I propose that the filmmaking apparatus is performative. I argue that agential realism generates a framework for documentary objectivity without a representational foundation that intrinsically separates human practices from nature. Engaging filmic realism through agential realism, I illustrate how Barad’s work suggests a different understanding of how film meaningfully enacts the world on screen. I conclude that, at their best, documentary films inspire a rethinking of reality by displacing boundaries that might otherwise be taken for granted, with material and ethical consequences.