Cinema as Testimony and Discourse for History: Film Cityscapes in Autobiographical Documentaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Film images testify to the real appearance of the past, or at least its aesthetic, through old films or archival footage. However, the meaning of an image is never transparent but part of a cultural discourse to be interpreted. Therefore, cinema offers two possible historical readings: firstly as repository of authentic visual traces of the past, and secondly as representation that reveals the zeitgeist of a period. Classic documentaries tried to deal with historical issues in an objective way, but the evolution of the genre placed subjectivity at the centre of discourse. This paradigm shift explains why memory and identity are two of the main topics of post-modern documentaries, such as some “urban autobiographies” that recall the emotional experience of missing cityscapes: Roger and Me (Michael Moore, USA, 1989), My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2007) and Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, UK, 2008). These films share a similar subjective approach to portraying the decline of industrial towns through personal memories, despite their belonging to three different subgenres: the performative political documentary, the essay film and the self-fiction. The analysis of their formal devices can be very useful to reflect on our contemporary systems of historical representation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".