For, while documentary scholars have in the past privileged the photographic image's indexical relation to the real, Hongisto highlights how the repeated use of the photograph of the filmmaker's missing uncle functions in Two Uncles not just as a visible sign/evidence of what has been, but for how it directs the viewer's attention beyond the photograph's visible content and to the external field. Soul of the Documentary continues this trend, for example in its consideration of how Kaksi enoa/Two Uncles (Kanerva Cederström, Finland, 1991) imbues the photographic image with intense subjective investment. The screen is conceptualised as a site of negotiation between filmmakers, viewers, and filmed subjects, and ethics is discussed less in terms of moral judgments than as an investigation into how documentaries orchestrate relationships between subjects coexisting in a shared world. Unlike earlier works that foreground the documentary filmmaker's responsibility to her subjects as the primary ethical consideration, these authors focus their attention on documentary form and its power creatively to shape reality. Soul of the Documentary fits within a broader constellation of recent works that take a philosophical approach to documentary aesthetics and ethics (see Renov 2004 Cooper 2006 Wahlberg 2008 Nagib 2011 Piotrowska 2014 Nichols 2016).
To build her argument, Hongisto introduces three processes enacted by the documentary frame: imagination (chapters 1–2), fabulation (chapters 3–4), and affection (chapters 5–6), which I will explain in more detail below. Moreover, framing is a fundamentally relational process while frames draw boundaries around documents, bodies, and events, they also mark a threshold between the image and what remains beyond the frame. Influenced by New Materialism, the book argues that framing gives form to pro-filmic reality, and that it intensifies the expressivity of the material world by imposing limits on it. Building on Aristotle's view that the soul describes the possibilities immanent to the body, the “soul” of documentary refers to documentary's ability to articulate its own capacities as it reframes, observes and witnesses the world (pp. Ilona Hongisto's Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics theorises “an aesthetics of the frame” in order to rethink documentary cinema's relation to the real, which Hongisto argues is one of participation in the world's expressive becoming (p.
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