Chronicle of a Last Summer

Chronicle of a Last Summer
Author: Yasmine El Rashidi
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2017-06-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0770437311

A young Egyptian woman recounts her personal and political coming of age in this brilliant debut novel. Cairo, 1984. A blisteringly hot summer. A young girl in a sprawling family house. Her days pass quietly: listening to a mother’s phone conversations, looking at the Nile from a bedroom window, watching the three state-sanctioned TV stations with the volume off, daydreaming about other lives. Underlying this claustrophobic routine is mystery and loss. Relatives mutter darkly about the newly-appointed President Mubarak. Everyone talks with melancholy about the past. People disappear overnight. Her own father has left, too—why, or to where, no one will say. We meet her across three decades, from youth to adulthood: As a six-year old absorbing the world around her, filled with questions she can’t ask; as a college student and aspiring filmmaker pre-occupied with love, language, and the repression that surrounds her; and then later, in the turbulent aftermath of Mubarak’s overthrow, as a writer exploring her own past. Reunited with her father, she wonders about the silences that have marked and shaped her life. At once a mapping of a city in transformation and a story about the shifting realities and fates of a single Egyptian family, Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer traces the fine line between survival and complicity, exploring the conscience of a generation raised in silence.

Ciné Ethnography

Ciné Ethnography
Author: Jean Rouch
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 432
Release:
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781452906102

One of the most influential figures in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch has made more than one hundred films in West Africa and France. In such acclaimed works as Jaguar, The Lion Hunters, and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Rouch has explored racism, colonialism, African modernity, religious ritual, and music. He pioneered numerous film techniques and technologies, and in the process inspired generations of filmmakers, from New Wave directors, who emulated his cinema verite style, to today's documentarians. Cine-Ethnography is a long-overdue English-language resource that collects Rouch's key writings, interviews, and other materials that distill his thinking on filmmaking, ethnography, and his own career. Editor Steven Feld opens with a concise overview of Rouch's career, highlighting the themes found throughout his work. In the four essays that follow, Rouch discusses the ethnographic film as a genre, the history of African cinema, his experiences of filmmaking among the Songhay, and the intertwined histories of French colonialism, anthropology, and cinema. And in four interviews, Rouch thoughtfully reflects on each of his films, as well as his artistic, intellectual, and political concerns. Cine-Ethnography also contains an annotated transcript of Chronicle of a Summer--one of Rouch's most important works--along with commentary by the filmmakers, and concludes with a complete, annotated filmography and a bibliography. The most thorough resource on Rouch available in any language, Cine-Ethnography makes clear this remarkable and still vital filmmaker's major role in the history of documentary cinema.

The Adventure of the Real

The Adventure of the Real
Author: Paul Henley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2010-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226327167

Though relatively unsung in the English-speaking world, Jean Rouch (1917–2004) was a towering figure of ethnographic cinema. Over the course of a fifty-year career, he completed over one hundred films, both documentary and fiction, and exerted an influence far beyond academia. Exhaustively researched yet elegantly written, The Adventure of the Real is the first comprehensive analysis of his practical filmmaking methods. Rouch developed these methods while conducting anthropological research in West Africa in the 1940s–1950s. His innovative use of unscripted improvisation by his subjects had a profound impact on the French New Wave, Paul Henley reveals, while his documentary work launched the genre of cinema-vérité. In addition to tracking Rouch’s pioneering career, Henley examines the technical strategies, aesthetic considerations, and ethical positions that contribute to Rouch’s cinematographic legacy. Featuring over one hundred and fifty images, The Adventure of the Real is an essential introduction to Rouch’s work.

The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles
Author: Ray Bradbury
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1451678193

The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by humans who want to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth.

Three Documentary Filmmakers

Three Documentary Filmmakers
Author: William Rothman
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-03-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781438425023

Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers’ philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.

Making Dead Birds

Making Dead Birds
Author: Robert Gardner
Publisher: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Publications Department
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2007
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Gardner's Dead Birds is one of the most highly acclaimed and controversial documentary films ever made. This account of the process of making the movie is also a thoughtful examination of what it meant to record the rituals of warrior-farmers in New Guinea and to present to the world a graphic story of their behavior as a window onto our own.

Documentary Film Classics

Documentary Film Classics
Author: William Rothman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1997-01-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780521456814

A study of classic documentary film.

Documentary

Documentary
Author: Erik Barnouw
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1993
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780195078985

Presents a history of the documentary film

Issues in Contemporary Documentary

Issues in Contemporary Documentary
Author: Jane Chapman
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-08-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745640109

Jane Chapman brings to life the challenges of contemporary documentary by balancing theoretical discussion with use of cutting-edge material from Europe and North America and the developing world.