Story Movements

Story Movements
Author: Caty Borum Chattoo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-05-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0190943440

Only a few years after the 2013 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Blackfish - an independent documentary film that critiqued the treatment of orcas in captivity - visits to SeaWorld declined, major corporate sponsors pulled their support, and performing acts canceled appearances. The steady drumbeat of public criticism, negative media coverage, and unrelenting activism became known as the "Blackfish Effect." In 2016, SeaWorld announced a stunning corporate policy change - the end of its profitable orca shows. In an evolving networked era, social-issue documentaries like Blackfish are art for civic imagination and social critique. Today's documentaries interrogate topics like sexual assault in the U.S. military (The Invisible War), racial injustice (13th), government surveillance (Citizenfour), and more. Artistic nonfiction films are changing public conversations, influencing media agendas, mobilizing communities, and capturing the attention of policymakers - accessed by expanding audiences in a transforming media marketplace. In Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change, producer and scholar Caty Borum Chattoo explores how documentaries disrupt dominant cultural narratives through complex, creative, often investigative storytelling. Featuring original interviews with award-winning documentary filmmakers and field leaders, the book reveals the influence and motivations behind the vibrant, eye-opening stories of the contemporary documentary age.

New Challenges for Documentary

New Challenges for Documentary
Author: Alan Rosenthal
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2005-05-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780719068997

Publisher Description

A New History of Documentary Film

A New History of Documentary Film
Author: Betsy A. McLane
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2013-03-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 144118998X

A New History of Documentary Film, Second Edition offers a much-needed resource, considering the very rapid changes taking place within documentary media. Building upon the best-selling 2005 edition, Betsy McLane keeps the same chronological examination, factual reliability, ease of use and accessible prose style as before, while also weaving three new threads - Experimental Documentary, Visual Anthropology and Environmental/Nature Films - into the discussion. She provides emphasis on archival and preservation history, present practices, and future needs for documentaries. Along with preservation information, specific problems of copyright and fair use, as they relate to documentary, are considered. Finally, A History of Documentary Film retains and updates the recommended readings and important films and the end of each chapter from the first edition, including the bibliography and appendices. Impossible to talk learnedly about documentary film without an audio-visual component, a companion website will increase its depth of information and overall usefulness to students, teachers and film enthusiasts.

The Innocent Man

The Innocent Man
Author: John Grisham
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2010-03-16
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0307576019

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LOOK FOR THE NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES • “Both an American tragedy and [Grisham’s] strongest legal thriller yet, all the more gripping because it happens to be true.”—Entertainment Weekly John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction: a true crime masterpiece that tells the story of small town justice gone terribly awry. In the Major League draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the state of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa. In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row. If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you. Don’t miss Framed, John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man, co-authored with Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey.

Kill the Documentary

Kill the Documentary
Author: Jill Godmilow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231554702

Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the “pedigree of the real” and the “pornography of the real,” they fail to activate their viewers’ engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an “us-watching-them” mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption. In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a “postrealist” cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Buñuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.

New Documentary

New Documentary
Author: Stella Bruzzi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2002-01-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134739443

New Documentary: A Critical Introduction provides a comprehensive account of the last two decades of documentary filmmaking in Britain, the US and Europe. Stella Bruzzi's engaging textbook discusses key genres, filmmakers, and issues for the study of non-fiction film and television, including: * key texts such as the Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination, Shoah, Hoop Dreams and Michael Apted's 7 Up series * documentary genres, from current affairs programming to 'fly on the wall' documentaries to 'reality tv' series * the work of documentary filmmakers such as Emile de Antonio, Fred Wiseman, Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen and Paul Watson * the work of avant-garde filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Patrick Keiller, Peter Greenaway and Wim Wenders, whose films challenge conventions of documentary filmmaking * movies based on historical events, such as 'JFK' and 'Nixon' * faux documentaries such as This is Spinal Tap, Bob Roberts and Man Bites Dog * gender identity, queer theory, performance, 'race' and spectatorship. Bruzzi shows how theories of documentary filmmaking can be applied to contemporary texts and genres, and discusses the relationship between recent, innovative examples of the genre and the more established canon of documentary.

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement
Author: Chris Berry
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9888028510

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement is a groundbreaking project unveiling recent documentary film work that has transformed visual culture in China, and brought new immediacy along with a broader base of participation to Chinese media. As a foundational text, this volume provides a much-needed introduction to the topic of Chinese documentary film, the signature mode of contemporary Chinese visual culture. These essays examine how documentary filmmakers have opened up a unique new space of social commentary and critique in an era of rapid social changes amid globalization and marketization. The essays cover topics ranging from cruelty in documentary to the representation of Beijing; gay, lesbian and queer documentary; sound in documentary; the exhibition context in China; authorial intervention and subjectivity; and the distinctive "on the spot" aesthetics of contemporary Chinese documentary. This volume will be critical reading for scholars in disciplines ranging from film and media studies to Chinese studies and Asian studies.

Documentary in Dispute

Documentary in Dispute
Author: Sarah M. Miller
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 026204417X

The recreation of a landmark in 1930s documentary photography. The 1939 book Changing New York by Berenice Abbott, with text by Elizabeth McCausland, is a landmark of American documentary photography and the career-defining publication by one of modernism's most prominent photographers. Yet no one has ever seen the book that Abbott and McCausland actually planned and wrote. In this book, art historian Sarah M. Miller recreates Abbott and McCausland's original manuscript for Changing New York by sequencing Abbott's one hundred photographs with McCausland's astonishing caption texts. This reconstruction is accompanied by a selection of archival documents that illuminate how the project was developed, and how the original publisher drastically altered it. Miller analyzes the manuscript and its revisions to unearth Abbott and McCausland's critical engagement with New York City's built environment and their unique theory of documentary photography. The battle over Changing New York, she argues, stemmed from disputes over how Abbott's photographs—and photography more broadly—should shape urban experience on the eve of the futuristic 1939 World's Fair. Ultimately it became a contest over the definition of documentary itself. Gary Van Zante and Julia Van Haaften contribute an essay on Abbott's archive and the partnership with McCausland that shaped their creative collaboration. Copublished with Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto

The 'New' Documentary Nexus

The 'New' Documentary Nexus
Author: Anna Wiehl
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527534995

In the last ten years, the field of documentary has been subject to substantial paradigm shifts due to the rise of digital media practices. This publication explores some central questions arising in this context: Who are the different interactors networking within the ‘new’ documentary nexus? How can we conceptualize interactive documentary practices as encounters and dynamic interactions within digital media culture and beyond? How can one methodologically approach this complex networked yet dynamic nexus in its constant flux? Developing a coherent and expandable operational set of methods to describe and analyse paradigmatic cases, this book addresses documentary theorists, (new) media scholars and students of media and communication studies who want to gain a survey of current developments in the field of interactive documentary practices.

Documentary Superstars

Documentary Superstars
Author: Marsha McCreadie
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2010-02-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1581157207

The first book to trace the rise of documentaries as mainstream entertainment. When did documentaries get glamorous? Documentary Superstars looks at the history of documentaries and traces their transition from hands-off to in your face. Exclusive interviews with Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, Errol Morris, George Clooney, Sacha Baron Cohen, Morgan Freeman, Al Gore, and more of the biggest names in the field show the impact of the documentary style on mainstream movies and on our society. From cinema verite to the inserted narrator, from the “balanced” point of view to the charismatic commentator (a la Fahrenheit 9/11), to the documentarian starring in his own narrative (as in Supersize Me) to filmmakers’ innovative use of cameos, pseudocameos, and archival footage, and much more, Documentary Superstars examines the way in which this evolving art form has changed—and changed us. • Newfound box-office clout makes documentaries big business • Interviews with Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, Al Gore, Sacha Baron Cohen, more • Includes career advice for new documentary filmmakers Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.