The Documentary Film Book

The Documentary Film Book
Author: Brian Winston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 893
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1838718745

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.

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.

Making Documentary Films and Videos

Making Documentary Films and Videos
Author: Barry Hampe
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2007-12-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780805081817

Outlines each step in creating documentaries, from conception to final film, and offers advice on capturing human behavior and recreating past events, with advice on how to get started in the field, a section on researching and developing a project, and current resources.

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.

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.

Introduction to Documentary, Second Edition

Introduction to Documentary, Second Edition
Author: Bill Nichols
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2010-12-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 025300487X

This new edition of Bill Nichols’s bestselling text provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues in documentary history and criticism. Designed for students in any field that makes use of visual evidence and persuasive strategies, Introduction to Documentary identifies the distinguishing qualities of documentary and teaches the viewer how to read documentary film. Each chapter takes up a discrete question, from "How did documentary filmmaking get started?" to "Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?" Carefully revised to take account of new work and trends, this volume includes information on more than 100 documentaries released since the first edition, an expanded treatment of the six documentary modes, new still images, and a greatly expanded list of distributors.

Journey Through Documentary Film

Journey Through Documentary Film
Author: Luke Dormehl
Publisher: Oldacastle Books
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2012-10-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1842435922

From Nanook of the North to Exit Through the Gift Shop, an overview of nonfiction film history from the early pioneers to the directors dominating the field todayAs one of the most fascinating areas of filmmaking, documentaries have broken down societal taboos, changed legislation, strengthened and rocked entire governments, freed wrongly convicted prisoners, and taught us more about the world in which we live. This overview of documentary history takes readers from the early "actualities" of pioneering nonfiction filmmakers such as Robert J. Flaherty and John Grierson, to the documentaries of Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, and the directors dominating the field—and box office—today. An essential resource for film students, documentary buffs, filmmakers, and anyone interested in nonfiction film, it looks in-depth at more than 60 documentaries from around the world, covering a century of cinema, to illustrate what "documentary" means, and the changes and transitions that have occurred in nonfiction filmmaking over the years. Covering films such as Night Mail, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and the Pity, F for Fake, The Thin Blue Line, Hoop Dreams, Fahrenheit 9/11, Grizzly Man, and Man on Wire, each analysis includes an introductory synopsis, as well as detailed notes on the film's production history, filmmaker, unique innovations, construction, and key themes and issues.

Create Documentary Films, Videos, and Multimedia

Create Documentary Films, Videos, and Multimedia
Author: James R. Martin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-01-02
Genre: Documentary films
ISBN: 9780982702321

How to use documentary visual storytelling concepts and production techniques to make documentaries of all types and formats. Producing, Writing, Directing, Camera, Editing and Distribution including Pre-production, Production and Post-production. Fully IllustratedThird Edition.

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.

Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film

Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film
Author: Ian Aitken
Publisher:
Total Pages: 648
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

This encyclopedia examines individual films and the careers of individual film makers, it also provides overview articles of national and regional documentary film history. It explains concepts and themes in the study of documentary film, the techniques used in making films, and the institutions that support their production.