Post-1990 Documentary

Post-1990 Documentary
Author: Camille Deprez
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2015-06-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474403875

This book questions the meanings of 'independence' for documentaries made in the post-1990 context, a period of unrivalled disruption and creativity in the field. Based upon a reasoned selection of contributions, it is the first collection of in-depth case studies cutting across formats, media, subject matters, purposes and national divides. Writing from a wide range of academic perspectives, the contributors shed new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the independent documentary, in order to better comprehend the radical transformations of the form over the past twenty-five years. Compared to existing studies, this volume focuses on works and practitioners existing at the margins of the traditional media, the mainstream film industry and the prevailing economic and socio-political systems; yet greatly contributing to changing our perception of documentaries. And in doing so, it addresses an important gap in the global understanding of documentary practices and styles.

Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 1

Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 1
Author: Aida Vallejo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2020-05-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030173208

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the global landscape of documentary film festivals. Contributors from across the globe offer in-depth analysis of both internationally renowned and more alternative festivals, including Hot Docs (Canada), Nyon (Switcherland), Yamagata (Japan), DocChina, Full Frame (US), Belgrade (former Yugoslavia), Vikalp (India), and DocsBarcelona (Catalonia, Spain), among others. With a special focus on historical and political developments, this first volume draws a map of documentary festivals operating today, and then looks at their origins and evolution. This volume is organized in three sections: the first addresses methodological problems film historians and social scientists face when researching documentary film festivals, the second looks at the historical development of this circuit within the wider frame of history of world and national cinemas, and the third reflects on how politics find their way through festival programs and actions. Curatorial, organizational, industrial and political changes occurred in the festival realm addressed in this book help better understand how these affected documentary production, distribution, curation, exhibition and reception up to this day.

The Documentary Film Book

The Documentary Film Book
Author: Brian Winston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1838718753

Powerfully posing questions of ethics, ideology, authorship and form, documentary film has never been more popular than it is today. Edited by one of the leading British authorities in the field, The Documentary Film Book is an essential guide to current thinking on documentary film. In a series of fascinating essays, key international experts discuss the theory of documentary, outline current understandings of its history (from pre-Flaherty to the post-Griersonian world of digital 'i-Docs'), survey documentary production (from Africa to Europe, and from the Americas to Asia), consider documentaries by marginalised minority communities, and assess its contribution to other disciplines and arts. Brought together here in one volume, these scholars offer compelling evidence as to why, over the last few decades, documentary has come to the centre of screen studies.

Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina

Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina
Author: Verónica Garibotto
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2019-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253038537

For roughly two decades after the collapse of the military regime in 1983, testimonial narrative was viewed and received as a privileged genre in Argentina. Today, however, academics and public intellectuals are experiencing "memory fatigue," a backlash against the concepts of memory and trauma, just as memory and testimonial films have reached the center of Argentinian public discourse. In Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina, Verónica Garibotto looks at the causes for this reticence and argues that, rather than discarding memory texts for their repetitive excess, it is necessary to acknowledge them and their exhaustion as discourses of the present. By critically examining how trauma theory and subaltern studies have previously been applied to testimonial cinema, Garibotto rereads Argentinian films produced since 1983 and calls for an alternate interpretive framework at the intersection of semiotics, theories of affect, scholarship on hegemony, and the ideological uses of documentary and fiction. She argues that recurrent concepts—such as trauma, mourning, memory, and subalternity—miss how testimonial films have changed over time, shifting from subaltern narratives to official, hegemonic, and iconic accounts. Her work highlights the urgent need to continue to study these types of narratives, particularly at a time when military dictatorships have become entrenched in Latin America and memory narratives proliferate worldwide. Although Argentina is Garibotto's focus, her theory can be adapted to other contexts in which narratives about recent political conflicts have shifted from alternative versions of history to official, hegemonic accounts—such as in Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, South African, and Holocaust testimonies. Garibotto's study of testimonial cinema moves us to pursue a broader ideological analysis of the links between film and historical representation.

Chinese Film in the Twenty-First Century

Chinese Film in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Corey Schultz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2023-10-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000986233

This book examines Chinese film in the twenty-first century. Organized around the themes "movements," "genres," and "intermedia," it reflects on how Chinese cinema has changed, adapted, and evolved over past decades and prognosticates as to its future trajectories. It considers how established film genres in China have adapted and transformed themselves, and discusses current shifts in documentary filmmaking, the ethos and practices of "grassroots intellectual" independent filmmakers, and the adaption of foreign film genres to serve the ideological and political needs of the present. It also explores how film is drawing on the socio-historical and political contexts of the past to create new cinematic discourses and the ways film is providing a voice to previously marginalised ethnic groups. In addition, the book analyses the influences of past aesthetic traditions on the creative and artistic expressions of twenty-first-century films and cinema’s relation to other media forms, including folktales, moving image installations, architecture, and painting. Throughout, the book assesses how Chinese films have been conceptualized, examined, and communicated domestically and abroad and emphasizes the importance of new directions in Chinese film, thus highlighting the plurality, vitality, and hybridity of Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

(Un)veiling Bodies

(Un)veiling Bodies
Author: Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto
Publisher: Legenda
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781781884294

Documentary plays an essential role in the struggles over memories of Latin America's dictatorial pasts. Ever since Chile's military coup of 11 September 1973, whether inside the country or in exile, filmmakers have passionately and incessantly documented, created, and reenacted memories from this traumatic event and its aftermath. (Un)veiling Bodies analyses the rich landscape of Chilean documentary during the first two decades after the restoration of civilian rule in 1990. Ramírez-Soto proposes a trajectory that shifts from revealing the bodies of direct victims to unveiling the body of the film itself. This is a journey deeply intertwined with the country's own democratic transition. Informed by the affective turn in film studies, this book offers a novel approach to this largely unexplored field of Chilean cinema by arguing that these heterogeneous works shift from a 'cinema of the affected' to a 'cinema of affect'. By doing so, these documentaries contribute to Chilean society's own restoration of the senses. Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her articles have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. She is also the coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (2016).

The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia

The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia
Author: Ian Aitken
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781474407205

Based on rare archival documents and films, this anthology is the first to focus primarily on the use of official and colonial documentary films in the South and South-East Asian regions. Drawing together a range of international scholars, the book sheds new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film, in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in the colonial, late colonial and immediate post-colonial period. Covering diverse geographical and colonial contexts in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Hong Kong, and focusing on under-researched or little-known films, it demonstrate the complex set of relations between the colonisers and the colonised throughout the region.

DV-Made China

DV-Made China
Author: Zhen Zhang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2015-04-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0824846826

In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. Happening upon the crucial platform of an older independent film movement, this digital turn has given us a "DV China" that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups, including ethnic and religious minorities and LGBTQ communities. DV-Made China takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices after the digital turn around the beginning of the new century. The volume shows how Chinese independent, amateur, and activist filmmakers energize the tension between old and new media, performance and representation, fiction and non-fiction, art and politics, China and the world. Essays by scholars in cinema and media studies, anthropology, history, Asian and Tibetan studies bring innovative interdisciplinary methodologies to critically expand upon existing scholarship on contemporary Chinese independent documentary. Their inquiries then extend to narrative feature, activist video, animation, and other digital hybrids. At every turn, the book confronts digital ironies: On the one hand, its portability facilitates forms of radically private film production and audience habits of small-screen consumption. Yet it also simultaneously links up makers and consumers, curators and censors allowing for speedier circulation, more discussion, and quicker formations of public political and aesthetic discourses. DV-Made China introduces new frameworks in a Chinese setting that range from aesthetics to ethical activism, from digital shooting and editing techniques to the politics of film circulation in festivals and online. Politics, the authors urge, travels along paths of aesthetic excitement, and aesthetic choices, conversely, always bear ethical consequences. The films, their makers, their audiences and their distributional pathways all harbor implications for social change that are closely intertwined with the fate of media culture in the new century of a world that both contains and is influenced by China.

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films
Author: Alan Rosenthal
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1990
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

"For me, working in documentary implies a commitment that one wants to change the world for the better. That says it all."--Alan Rosenthal An international documentary filmmaker with more than 60 films to his credit including the Peabody Award winner "Out of the Ashes," Rosenthal has written the first book to address the realities facing a documentary filmmaker. Rather than dealing with theory or hardware, this book tackles the day-to-day problems of the documentary filmmaker from initial concept through distribution. Rosenthal explains in a down-to-earth manner how to approach, create, write, and direct the "new" documentary He emphasizes the research and writing of documentaries, from approach and structure through interviewing, narration writing, and the complexities of editing. The organization of the book follows the process of making a film. Part 1 discusses ideas, research, and script structure; parts 2 and 3 go over preproduction and production; part 4 explores film editing and narration writing; part 5 discusses distinctive film styles; and the concluding chapter offers a perspective on the entire filmmaking process.

Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-assessment

Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-assessment
Author: Philip C. Logan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 131711938X

Humphrey Jennings ranks amongst the greatest film makers of twentieth century Britain. Although a relatively unknown figure to the wider public, his war-time documentaries are regarded by many (including Lord Puttnam, Lindsay Anderson and Mike Leigh) as amongst the finest films of their time. Groundbreaking both in terms of their technique and their interest in, and respect for, the everyday experiences of ordinary people, these films are much more than mere government propaganda. Instead, Jennings work offers an unparalleled window into the British home-front, and the hopes, fears and expectations of a nation fighting for its survival. Yet until now, Jennings has remained a shadowy figure; with his life and work lacking the sustained scholarly investigation and reassessment they deserve. As such film and social historians will welcome this new book which provides an up-to-date and thorough exploration of the relationships between Jennings life, ideas and films. Arguing that Jennings's film output can be viewed as part of a coherent intellectual exercise rather than just one aspect of the artistic interests of a wide ranging intellectual, Philip Logan, paints a much fuller and more convincing picture of the man than has previously been possible. He shows for the first time exactly how Jennings's artistic expression was influenced by the fundamental intellectual, social and cultural changes that shook British society during the first decades of the twentieth century. Combining biography, social history and international artistic thought, the book offers a fascinating insight into Jennings, his work, the wider British documentary film movement and the interaction between art and propaganda. Bringing together assessments of his tragically short life and his films this book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in British cinema or the social history of Britain in the 1930s and 40s.