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Collecting Visible Evidence
In documentary studies, the old distinctions between fiction and nonfiction no longer apply, as contemporary film and video artists produce works that defy classification. Coming together to make sense of these developments, the contributors to this book effectively redefine documentary studies. They trace the documentary impulse in the early detective camera, in the reenactment of battle scenes from World War I, and in the telecast of the Nevada A-Bomb test in 1949. Other topics include experiments in virtual reality; the crisis of representation in anthropology; and video art and documentary work that challenges the asymmetry of the postcolonial Us/Them divide.
Documentary Time
Finding the theoretical space where cinema and philosophy meet, Malin Wahlberg's sophisticated approach to the experience of documentary film aligns with attempts to reconsider the premises of existential phenomenology. The configuration of time is crucial in organizing the sensory affects of film in general but, as Wahlberg adroitly demonstrates, in nonfiction films the problem of managing time is writ large by the moving image's interaction with social memory and historical figures. Wahlberg discusses a thought-provoking corpus of classical and recent experiments in film and video (including Andy Warhol's films) in which creative approaches to the time of the image and the potential archiv...
Ciné-ethnography
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, et...
The Right to Play Oneself
Discussions of “committed” documentary by a “committed” historian of film.
The Subject of Documentary
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 constructin...
F is for Phony
Fake documentaries mimic documentary genre expectations, unraveling the documentary's authority and dismantling understandings of identity, history, and nation. The interdisciplinary essays in F Is for Phony discuss a broad scope of works and explore issues raised by "fake docs" such as the fiction/documentary divide, the ethics of reality-based manipulation, and whether documentariness derives from form or reception. Defining the borderline between fact and fiction, the contributors reveal what fake documentaries imply and usually make explicit: that many documentaries lie to tell the truth, and that the truth is relative. Contributors: Steve Anderson, Catherine L. Benamou, Mitchell W. Block, Luis Buñuel, Marlon Fuentes, Craig Hight, Charlie Keil, Alisa Lebow, Eve Oishi, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Gregorio C. Rocha, Jane Roscoe, Catherine Russell, Elisabeth Subrin. Alexandra Juhasz is professor of media studies at Pitzer College. She is author of Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minnesota, 2001). Jesse Lerner is associate professor of media studies at Pitzer College.
Ferocious Reality
Over the course of his career Werner Herzog has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries. And yet, in a statement delivered during a public appearance in 1999, the filmmaker declared: "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." This book asks how this conviction, hostile to the traditional tenets of documentary, can inform the work of one of the world's most provocative documentarians. In close, contextualized analysis of more than twenty-five films spanning Herzog's career, the author makes a case for exploring documentary films in terms of performance and explains what it means to do so.--From publisher description.
Kill the Documentary
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 ultim...
Recording Reality, Desiring the Real
Addressing the paradox of documentary.
First Person Jewish
Examining more than a dozen films from Jewish artists, this book reveals how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. It focuses on Jewish filmmakers working on the margins and examines the work of Jonathan Caouette, Chantal Akerman and many more.
