Cover the blood: a theoretical and creative-practice examination of intra-activity and documentary filmmaking

This thesis proposes a posthuman philosophical framework for investigating the relationship between autoethnographic filmmakers and the films they make. It begins with a discussion of intra-activity (Barad, 2003) and its applications to filmmaking processes (Benjamin, 1935, Anders, 1956). It then considers first-person, essay, autobiographic, and auto-ethnographic filmmaking practices through the lens of this intra-active framework, asking how such filmmakers are engaged in renegotiating, embodying, and enacting boundaries of agency. The documentary-films Heart of a Dog (Anderson, 2015), I want to make a film about women (Pearlman, 2019), and The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) are analysed as examples of how the intra-active framework might interpret particular films and their formal construction. This research outlines and resists the habit of representationalism in film theory and posits an understanding of filmmaker and film as authoring one another in the filmmaking process. This research also includes a creative-practice film, Cover the Blood (2021), which is an investigation and enaction of the ideas discussed within the written thesis.