The living landscape of Jakarta in Leonard Retel Helmrich's documentary triptych

Focusing on the lives of three generations of a lower-class Indonesian family, Leonard Retel Helmrich’s documentary triptych Eye of the Day (2001), Shape of the Moon (2004) and Position Among the Stars (2010) offers a unique insight into the hectic life of the slums of Jakarta, presenting its landscape as a living, breathing organism; a landscape of people. Utilizing an innovative cinematographic style referred to as ‘Single Shot Cinema’, these films give a perspective on Indonesia that is at once intimate, spectacular, personal and immersive. To the cursory eye, this project may appear to be reliving the impossible dream of Direct Cinema. Yet rather than pursuing an outdated and unattainable ideal of objective documentary, these films embrace a broader, more inclusive concept of reality, of which the intuitive, subjective perspective of the filmmaker forms as much a part as the events that are represented. These films, we argue, can therefore be seen as exemplary of a ‘subjective turn’ that is taking place in documentary filmmaking, which entails a re-evaluation and repositioning of the role of documentary subject, from passive subject or victim of social circumstance to active, empowered individual. This development furthermore encompasses a ‘metamodern’ rethinking of the purpose of documentary, beyond a postmodern disillusionment with the project of capturing ‘reality’ singular and towards the embracement of subjective, personal, and pluralistic perspectives

Activism, affect, identification: trans documentary in France and Spain and its reception

This article explores the documentation of trans activism in France and Spain since the 2000s. The first part addresses questions surrounding the place of affect and narrative in documentary film, particularly in relation to trans issues. The second part o f the article analyses an audience case study from a screening at the International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Barcelona of Valérie Mitteaux's Girl or Boy, My Sex is not my Gender (2011), considering how different viewers respond to the representatio n of trans identities. The article builds on qualitative research whilst extending the exploration of sexuality and gender in previous audience studies to a consideration of documentary film, seeking to provide a more nuanced understanding of what audience claims for identification in politicised contexts mean

Terminological challenges in the translation of science documentaries: a case-study

This article aims to describe some of the main terminological problems audiovisual translators have to face when dealing with the translation of science documentaries, specifically in the English-Catalan combination. The first section of the article presents some theoretical concepts which underlie this research and which are taken, for the most part, from Cabré's Communicative Theory of Terminology. Then, specific terminological problems audiovisual translators have to solve are described using the data provided by a corpus of four science documentaries lasting approximately 50 minutes each. These challenges include identifying a term, understanding a term, finding the right equivalent, dealing with the absence of an adequate equivalent, solving denominative variations, choosing between in vivo and in vitro terminology, and overcoming mistranscriptions