Dr Joni Multimedia
Documentary filmmaking has always been an engaging genre and artistic practice for me. In this post, I present definitions, characteristics, and seminal examples of poetic, avant-garde, and experimental documentary films as well as my own cinematic works to illustrate the discussion.
Born and raised in Manila, I moved to Hong Kong in 2013 to pursue my PhD studies in Communication and Film. I earned the degree in 2018 and even though I have since then immigrated here in the USA, I still consider Hong Kong home. In this post, I share five short films that I shot in Hong Kong. These works remind me of my personal journey while I was living there as a postgraduate student and why this beautifully complex city will always have a special place in my heart.
This final section presents the summary of the findings and conclusions of the study in three major aspects: (1) a prospective model of cinematic realism that resulted from the project’s phenomenological approach in investigating Kracauerian cinematic-realist film aesthetics; (2) an account of reckoning the Husserlian notion of the Lebenswelt which Aitken (2006) specified to be ‘a key to understanding Kracauer’s assertion that “physical reality” can be redeemed through cinema’ (Wils, 2016, p. 76); and (3) the implications and findings of using film practice and criticism as tools in examining Kracauerian cinematic realism (KCR). Lastly, this section will propose recommendations for further research into the subject using both written and film-based means.
The first public screening of the film was at the Hong Kong Baptist University on 7 April 2017 in an event organized by the Centre for Film and Moving Image Research (FMIR) of the Academy of Film. In this lecture-seminar, I talked about Life-world Series (2017) in terms of phenomenalist-realist film aesthetics.