Anthology of essays on the artistic and persuasive aspects of documentary film from a range of critical viewpoints.
Introduction -- Authenticity -- Evidence -- Authority -- Responsibility -- Argument -- Dramatic stories, poetic and essay documentaries -- Editing -- Camerawork -- The profilmic -- Sounds / coauthored with Carl Lewis.
Since Robert Flaherty's landmark film Nanook of the North (1922) arguments have raged over whether or not film records of people and traditions can ever be ""authentic."" And yet never before has a single volume combined documentary, ethnographic, and folkloristic film making to…
What happens when we turn the camera on ourselves? This question has long plagued documentary filmmakers concerned with issues of reflexivity, subject participation, and self-consciousness. Documenting Ourselves includes interviews with filmmakers Les Blank, Pat Ferrero, Jorge P…
Providing a unique collection of perspectives on the persistence of documentary as a vital and dynamic media form within a digital world, New Documentary Ecologies traces this form through new opportunities of creating media, new platforms of distribution and new ways for audien…
"Documentary remains a vital and dynamic media form, one that has persisted through decades of change in patterns of media production, distribution and reception, from its early conception in silent filmmaking, through 'new' media such as television, to the current explosion of …
"The Maysles brothers' particular style, which they called "direct cinema," helped usher in a new, more probing and realistic form of documentary. They are mentioned in many historical surveys of documentary film, but The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles is the first fu…
Film and atrocity : the Holocaust as spectacle / Sophia Wood -- Documenting the Holocaust in Orson Welles's The Stranger / Jennifer L. Barker -- Remembering revolution after ruin and genocide : recent Chilean documentary films and the writing of history / Michael J. Lazzara -- "…
Scholarship on utopias in film has so far focused exclusively on dystopias - but utopias are about criticizing the present rather than telling a gripping story, and Utopia and Reality looks into propaganda and documentaryfilms for depictions of better worlds.
'Direct Cinema' is a comprehensive study of the seminal 'direct cinema' movement of 1960s America.
"Michael Chanan traces the history of the documentary from the first Lumiere films to Grierson and his contemporaries, through to Free Cinema, Cinema verite and Direct Cinema, up to the current resurgence of documentary with high profile films such as those of Michael Moore."--J…