Documentality in contemporary art: paraesthetic strategies in the works of Salomé Lamas, Jeremy Shaw and Louis Henderson

This thesis intends to critically reflect on the particularities of the field of documentary film in the context of contemporary art. For that purpose, it seeks to mobilize various theoretical and aesthetical approaches to the field in order to answer the following questions: How do documentary film and contemporary art relate to each other? What are the aims and applications of self–reflexivity in documentary filmmaking? Drawing on Hito Steyerl’s notion of “documentality,” which she describes as being of crucial importance to the development of the documentary film in either becoming a form of governmental policy or a critical stance against it, it is asked: how can the concept of documentality be relevant to the study of the self–reflexive documentary? And finally, how does self–reflexive documentary filmmaking probe contemporary notions of documentality?