The variety of case studies included here should not give the impression that this volume was conceived as a comprehensive overview of the issue of independent documentary in contemporary times. Rather, it aimed at prompting new interest for, and innovative academic perspectives on, the manifold significations of independent documentary production today. Besides demonstrating the complexity, variability, pragmatism and paradoxes that this notion of ‘independent’ documentary entails, this collection of case studies also endeavoured to reveal important similarities among different practitioners in the field. In fact, the book chapters may be reshuffled to highlight other significant connections between them.

BIG NAMES, UP-AND-COMING FILMMAKERS AND A NEW APPROACH TO AUTHORSHIP

As Kristian Feigelson noted in his chapter on Chris Marker, the constant evolution of image technologies challenges documentary filmmaking practices, and it is striking to see how some celebrated authors, who started their careers well before the digital turn, have successively embraced the new possibilities offered by direct sound recording, analogue video and amateur camcorders, and subsequently by digital cameras and computerised editing devices and circulation modes. A forerunner and a doyen, Chris Marker has a few contenders in this field, as the works of Agnes Varda, Chantal Ackerman, Harun Farocki, Ogawa Shinsuke, Abbas Kiarostami and Werner Herzog demonstrate. Instead of being inhibited by successive technological developments, these filmmakers have actively participated in the renewal of documentary in film, video and digital media, using a playful approach to technology and rethinking their work methods to interrogate the documentary form. It is perhaps this very attitude that constitutes their legacy, and that has inspired subsequent generations of documentarists such as Rithy Panh. Although thematically coherent, each of Panh's films represents an opportunity to experiment with the documentary apparatus, while simultaneously confronting Cambodia's recent history, both ethically and methodically. Either televised or theatrical documentaries, his films are undoubtedly the creative works of an author whose achievements reach far beyond the realm of images. His cinematic stance on Cambodian history constitutes a personal and universal reflection on genocide.

If an experimental approach to the documentary is pervasive in recent independent films, the ideological legacy of previous filmmakers is still not accepted at face value. Following the post-1990s global power shifts and the critical reassessment of ethnography, new authors had to carefully re-evaluate their elders’ teachings, especially when the relations between filmmakers and filmed subjects were involved.