UC San Diego
Department of Communication
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David Andrew RiceDavid Andrew Rice

Email Address: darice@ucsd.edu

C.V.: David's C.V.

Research Interests

Andy Rice (I go by Andy though my first name is David) is an ABD graduate student advised by professor Lisa Cartwright.  The starting point of my research is in the domain of documentary studies, traditionally a subdiscipline of film studies.  A key problem for documentary theory is to define how filmic texts understood as documentary differ from those understood as fiction.  Where and how is it, in other words, that spectators understand particular films or moments within films as documentary as opposed to fiction?  One strain of theory identifies the subjective experiences of viewers, the sensory “charge of the real,” as a suggestive point of departure for documentary theory in a digital age.

 My dissertation applies this way of thinking about documentary to analyze the subjective, embodied experiences of participants in reenactments and simulations, away from screens per se, while offering points of connection with the experiences of observational/participatory documentary filmmakers regarding the world from behind a camera.  I am working through how to apply Edwin Hutchins’ concept of “distributed cognition” to these complex performances, in which internal thought processes are neither visible in the moment of reenactment, nor effectively communicable in interviews conducted after the fact.  To date, I have written about and presented on reenactments of battles of the Revolutionary War in post-9/11 Massachusetts, the aims of filmmakers working within the discipline of sensory ethnography, performativity in personal documentary camerawork, and documentary representations of embodied training simulations at the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin as the military shifted its focus from conventional to counterinsurgency war.

Prior to graduate school, I spent nearly ten years working as a documentary filmmaker and teaching video production classes in a variety of venues.  I have completed two feature length videos, and screened a fine cut of a third, titled About Face!, at the Athens International Film Festival in Ohio.  In recent years, I have worked more on activist media projects in response to the economic crisis in 2008 and the ensuing budget cuts and fee hikes within the UC system.

I am currently working on a project with Professor Zeinabu irene Davis on the LA Rebellion film movement, in conjunction with an initiative of the UCLA Film and Television Archive to revisit this work, sponsor a series of film screenings, restore prints of films, and publish an edited anthology of articles about the LA Rebellion filmmakers.

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