Interpretive Authority and Narrative shift: Framing January Events in State and Independent Documentaries

Abstract

This article compares how the January events are framed in state and independent documentary films through interpretive authority, attribution of agency, and narrative shift. The corpus consists of two episodes of “Qaraly Qantar” produced by Qazaqstan national TV channel and the “Koterilis” and “Qasiret” episodes of the Qantar project produced by Prosto Zhurnalistika YouTube channel. The four films have a combined running time of 4 hours, 53 minutes, and 9 seconds. Full transcripts were examined at sentence, semantic-segment, and audiovisual-episode levels. The coding results were organised in MAXQDA 2022 as a hierarchical code system and document-code matrix and compared through the Code Matrix Browser. In total, 171 code assignments were recorded: 162 under Human Rights or State Security and nine retained for qualitative visual analysis. Since the corpora differ substantially in duration, within-document frame shares and rates per ten minutes were reported together. Witnesses, victims, activists, and lawyers in the independent project receive greater interpretive authority to define causes and responsibility. The state documentaries connect personal grief to threat, criminal framing, state assistance, and stabilisation. The study’s conceptual contribution is to show how similar victim-related episodes can support different final arguments depending on their placement and subsequent narrative development. As coding was conducted by one researcher, the conclusions are limited to the four selected films.