Ten Years of Studies in Documentary Film

Ten Years of Studies in Documentary Film
Author: Deane Williams
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2018-08-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351590693

This volume will be a ‘time capsule’ of the first 10 years of Studies in Documentary Film (2007–2016), tracing not only the development of the journal but also of documentary studies in the same period. Issues such as the rise of digital documentary forms and authorship, documentary activism, and the Chinese Independent documentary, as well as diverse political issues, will be raised in the introduction and evidenced in the articles. The chapters have been chosen for the various themes they raise in documentary studies but also the broader field of documentary scholarship (including publishing), and the rise of the internet as a powerful force in documentary studies.

A Companion to Documentary Film History

A Companion to Documentary Film History
Author: Joshua Malitsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2021-04-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1119116309

This volume offers a new and expanded history of the documentary form across a range of times and contexts, featuring original essays by leading historians in the field In a contemporary media culture suffused with competing truth claims, documentary media have become one of the most significant means through which we think in depth about the past. The most rigorous collection of essays on nonfiction film and media history and historiography currently available, A Companion to Documentary Film History offers an in-depth, global examination of central historical issues and approaches in documentary, and of documentary's engagement with historical and contemporary topics, debates, and themes. The Companion's twenty original essays by prominent nonfiction film and media historians challenge prevalent conceptions of what documentary is and was, and explore its growth, development, and function over time. The authors provide fresh insights on the mode's reception, geographies, authorship, multimedia contexts, and movements, and address documentary's many aesthetic, industrial, historiographical, and social dimensions. This authoritative volume: Offers both historical specificity and conceptual flexibility in approaching nonfiction and documentary media Explores documentary's multiple, complex geographic and geopolitical frameworks Covers a diversity of national and historical contexts, including Revolution-era Soviet Union, post-World War Two Canada and Europe, and contemporary China Establishes new connections and interpretive contexts for key individual films and film movements, using new primary sources Interrogates established assumptions about documentary authorship, audiences, and documentary's historical connection to other media practices. A Companion to Documentary Film History is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses covering documentary or nonfiction film and media, an excellent supplement for courses on national or regional media histories, and an important new resource for all film and media studies scholars, particularly those in nonfiction media.

Memory, Place and Autobiography

Memory, Place and Autobiography
Author: Jill Daniels
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527524043

There has been a significant growth in autobiographical documentary films in recent years. This innovative book proposes that the filmmaker in her dual role as maker and subject may act as a cultural guide in an exploration of the social world. It argues that, in the cinematic mediation of memory, the mimetic approach in the construction of documentary films may not be feasible, and memory may instead be evoked elliptically through hybrid strategies such as critical realism and fictional enactment. Recognizing that identity is formed by history and what ‘goes on’ in the world, the book charts the historical trajectory of the British independent filmmaking movement from the mid-1970s to the present growth of new online distribution outlets and new media through digital technologies and social media.

Documentary's Expanded Fields

Documentary's Expanded Fields
Author: Jihoon Kim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0197603815

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary, ' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Three Documentary Filmmakers

Three Documentary Filmmakers
Author: William Rothman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-03-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438425163

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

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Patricia Aufderheide
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2007-11-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0199720398

Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to tell the truths worth telling. Beginning with an overview of the central issues of documentary filmmaking--its definitions and purposes, its forms and founders--Aufderheide focuses on several of its key subgenres, including public affairs films, government propaganda (particularly the works produced during World War II), historical documentaries, and nature films. Her thematic approach allows readers to enter the subject matter through the kinds of films that first attracted them to documentaries, and it permits her to make connections between eras, as well as revealing the ongoing nature of documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. Interwoven throughout are discussions of the ethical and practical considerations that arise with every aspect of documentary production. A particularly useful feature of the book is an appended list of "100 great documentaries" that anyone with a serious interest in the genre should see. Drawing on the author's four decades of experience as a film scholar and critic, this book is the perfect introduction not just for teachers and students but also for all thoughtful filmgoers and for those who aspire to make documentaries themselves. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Documentary Film in India

Documentary Film in India
Author: Giulia Battaglia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351375636

This book maps a hundred years of documentary film practices in India. It demonstrates that in order to study the development of a film practice, it is necessary to go beyond the classic analysis of films and filmmakers and focus on the discourses created around and about the practice in question. The book navigates different historical moments of the growth of documentary filmmaking in India from the colonial period to the present day. In the process, it touches upon questions concerning practices and discourses about colonial films, postcolonial institutions, independent films, filmmakers and filmmaking, the influence of feminism and the articulation of concepts of performance and performativity in various films practices. It also reflects on the centrality of technological change in different historical moments and that of film festivals and film screenings across time and space. Grounded in anthropological fieldwork and archival research and adopting Foucault’s concept of ‘effective history’, this work searches for points of origin that creates ruptures and deviations taking distance from conventional ways of writing film histories. Rather than presenting a univocal set of arguments and conclusions about changes or new developments of film techniques, the originality of the book is in offering an open structure (or an open archive) to enable the reader to engage with mechanisms of creation, engagement and participation in film and art practices at large. In adopting this form, the book conceptualises ‘Anthropology’ as also an art practice, interested, through its theoretico-methodological approach, in creating an open archive of engagement rather than a representation of a distant ‘other’. Similarly, documentary filmmaking in India is seen as primarily a process of creation based on engagement and participation rather than a practice interested in representing an objective reality. Proposing an innovative way of perceiving the growth of the documentary film genre in the subcontinent, this book will be of interest to film historians and specialists in Indian cinema(s) as well as academics in the field of anthropology of art, media and visual practices and Asian media studies.

The Subject of Documentary

The Subject of Documentary
Author: Michael Renov
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2004
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780816634415

The documentary, a genre as old as cinema itself, has traditionally aspired to objectivity. Whether making ethnographic, propagandistic, or educational films, documentarians have pointed the camera outward, drawing as little attention to themselves as possible. In recent decades, however, a new kind of documentary has emerged in which the filmmaker has become the subject of the work. Whether chronicling family history, sexual identity, or a personal or social world, this new generation of nonfiction filmmakers has defiantly embraced autobiography.In The Subject of Documentary, Michael Renov focuses on how documentary filmmaking has become an important means for both examining and constructing selfhood. By looking at key figures in documentary filmmaking as well as noncanonical video art and avant-garde artists, Renov broadens the definition of what counts as documentary, and explores the intersection of the personal and political, considering how memory can create a way into asking troubling questions about identity, oppression, and resiliency.Offering historical context for the explosion of personal nonfiction filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, Renov analyzes films in which the subjectivity of the filmmaker is expressly defined in relation to political struggle or historical trauma, from Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool to Jonas Mekas's Lost, Lost, Lost. And, looking beyond the traditional documentary, Renov contemplates such nontraditional modes of autobiographical practice as the essay film, the video confession, and the personal Web page.Unique in its attention to diverse expressions of personal nonfiction filmmaking, The Subject of Documentary forges a new understanding of the heightened role and function of subjectivity in contemporary documentary practice.Michael Renov is professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He is the editor of Theorizing Documentary and the coeditor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (Minnesota, 1996) and Collecting Visible Evidence (Minnesota, 1999).

Interactive Documentary

Interactive Documentary
Author: Kate Nash
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2021
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781315208862

"Tracing continuities in digital and documentary practices, this book is a study of interactive documentary from the perspective of documentary culture. Exploring the dizzy array of new documentary forms that have emerged in the past ten years, the book is grounded in the analysis of multiple, recent examples of digital documentary work, drawing out the key issues that the work raises. These issues provide a starting point for theoretical reflection, with each chapter developing concepts and frameworks to facilitate thinking with and through interactive documentary. The book explores questions of polyvocality, participation and political voice, as well as the sociality and performativity of digital documentary practice. By thinking deeply and critically about interactive documentary practice, the book charts the many and various ways in which interactive documentaries claim the real - contingently, partially or, in some cases, collectively. Each chapter draws on a range of examples - from digital games to data visualisations, database documentaries to virtual reality - demonstrating how we might engage with these 'unstable' digital texts. The book will be particularly valuable for students and researchers keen to make connections between documentary and digital media scholarship"--

Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film

Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film
Author: Elizabeth Daggett Matar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2024-01-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1040007112

Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film introduces the reader to this east-German filmmaker who, despite having made 40 films from the east side of the Berlin Wall, is practically unknown. Through the comparison of films made in the same year, one by an American and one by Böttcher, the author places him as ahead of his time in regards to technology, content, and style, and neck-and-neck with contemporary American filmmakers in cinéma vérité/direct cinema. The book moves beyond Böttcher’s dramatic biography to explore his role in the history of film. Was it actually the Germans who created sync sound for documentary? When and how were women featured? Offering a concise journey through the history of documentary film within this cultural context, but also a deep-dive into specific case-studies that show the nuances and complexities of classifying film texts, this volume will interest students and scholars of film studies, German cinema, cinéma vérité, film production, film theory, and world cinema.