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  • Vivre ici: Space, Place, and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary by Alison J. Murray Levine
  • Eric Bulakites (bio)
Alison J. Murray Levine. Vivre ici: Space, Place, and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary. Liverpool UP. 2018. 303 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1786940414.

In the past three decades, French documentary film has experienced a notable boom. Not only have production and viewership increased, but documentary is attracting more and more attention from critics and academics. In the first chapter of her book Vivre Ici: Space, Place, and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary, Alison J. Murray Levine traces out, "[d]ocumentary film's increasing visibility in the French national cultural landscape since 2000" (27). [End Page 846] Mixing theoretical analysis with empirical and qualitative research, Levine looks at a variety of factors that have contributed to this increased visibility. For instance, private and public agencies and associations have increased funding for documentary projects, and television stations have begun to allot more hours to airing documentary. The number of festivals and university programs devoted to documentary creation has also increased in recent decades. At the onset of chapter 1, Levine states that she will study a collection of films produced in the past twenty years in an effort to look at the "significant expansion in the growth and popularity of documentary film in France" (21) as well as provide an "overview of the creative ecosystem within which these films emerged and continue to circulate" (22).

Despite the sheer quantity of French documentary production since the 1990s, Levine is able to create a coherent argument without creating a generalizing analysis that flattens the diversity of the works she studies. She outlines broad trends in the contemporary ecosystem of French documentary all while respecting the specificity and uniqueness of the nearly twenty works in her analysis. After providing an overview of the vast landscape of documentary production in France in the first half of chapter 1, Levine defines and narrows the parameters of her study. Her corpus includes works that she qualifies as creative documentaries that provide an experience of embodied spectator-ship. Throughout Vivre Ici, Levine conducts close readings of the creative, embodied documentaries in her corpus while highlighting how these works have influenced general tendencies in French documentary production.

Levine begins by defining embodied spectatorship and experiential documentary in the introduction. However, it is not until the end of chapter 1 that she explicitly states that her corpus will consist of documentaries that provide an experience of embodied spectatorship and that are also creative. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy and film theory, Levine explains that embodied spectatorship involves providing the viewer with a multisensorial experience that immerses her in the world being filmed. This entails engaging all of the viewer's senses, not just vision and hearing. In particular, this requires having haptic images that enable the spectator to have a tactile experience of what is happening in the filmed space. Rather than providing explanation or commentary, the documentarian invites the viewer into the world of the filmed subjects and allows her to experience this world with all of her senses. Relying heavily on the work of Vivian Sobchack and Bill Nichols, Levine asserts, "[i]f documentary's assertions are about the world, then the film space must be spatially contiguous with the space of the viewer's life-world" (8). In other words, documentary must use the language of embodied experience (i.e. sight, sound, touch, etc.) in order to build a connection between the viewer's world and the world of the documentary. Once the viewer is inside the filmed world, she then has a multisensorial, bodily experience of this world. This results in a "feeling of being there" within the frame of the documentary rather than having this world simply explained to or narrated for the spectator. [End Page 847]

While the idea of having an embodied viewing experience may still seem unclear by the end of the introduction, Levine does not leave her readers in the dark and clarifies these abstract concepts and theories with concrete examples in the following chapters. In the second half of chapter 1, she defines the term "creative documentary," another qualifier for the films...

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