Recommended Books
Adamson, Morgan. Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
A timely reassessment of political film culture in the 1960s and ’70s, Enduring Images examines international cinematic movements of the New Left in light of sweeping cultural and economic changes of that era. Looking at new forms of cinematic resistance—including readings of particular films, collectives, and movements—it makes a case for cinema’s centrality to the global New Left.
Aguayo, Angela J. Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media offers a new approach to understanding the networked capacity of documentary media to create public commons areas, crafting connections between unlikely interlocutors. In this process communities invest in the exchange of documentary moving image discourse around politics and social change. This book advances a new argument suggesting that documentary’s capacity for social change is found in its ability to establish forms of collective identification and political agency capable of producing and sustaining activist media cultures. It advances the creation of a conceptual, theoretical, and historical space in which documentary and social change can be examined, drawing upon research in cinema, media, and communication studies as well as cultural theory to explore how political ideas move into participatory action. This book takes a distinctive approach, understanding how struggles for social justice are located, reflected, and represented on the documentary screen, but also in pre- and post-production processes. To address this living history, this project includes over sixty unpublished field interviews with documentary filmmakers, critics, funders, activists, and distributors.
Alvarado, Alejandro. La poscensura en el cine documental de la transición española (Postcensorship in the Documentary Film of the Spanish Transition). Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2018.
Documentary cinema in Spain experienced one of its most productive moments during the years of the transition to democracy. This resulted in the production of some of the riskiest proposals, in aesthetic and political terms, in the history of Spanish cinema. These films filled the vacuum caused by the prohibition and propaganda with which Franco’s regime had controlled the documentary. But once democracy and freedom had been recovered, the new context did not favour documentary production; in fact to the contrary, as has been widely recorded by historians: the continuity of this type of cinema in Spain was a mirage. At the beginning of the 80s, various administrative, industrial and aesthetic factors came together that resulted in the practical disappearance of the documentary from the screens for more than two decades. Some of these films suffered processes that obstructed their production, distribution and screening, as was the case of El Proceso de Burgos, Despues de… or in a paradigmatic way Rocio, a documentary that continues to be affected, due to the fact that the screening of the complete film is still forbidden throughout the entire Spanish state to this day. In spite of the repeal of Francoist censorship in November 1977, the apparatus and the moral values of the regime and the triumph of political consensus subtly prolonged its influence. This study unravels the mechanisms that, by obstructing the production of a rupturist documentary cinema in full transition, could be called postcensorship because of the impact of these mechanisms against freedom of expression and creation during a full redefinition of public space in Spain.
Aufderheide, Patricia, Jaszi, Peter. Reclaiming Fair Use: Putting Balance back in Copyright. Second Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when a permissions i proves undottable. Analyzing the dampening effect that copyright law can have on scholarship and creativity, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi urge us to embrace in response a principle embedded in copyright law itself—fair use. Originally published in 2011, Reclaiming Fair Use challenged the widely held notion that copyright law is obsolete in an age of digital technologies. Beginning with a survey of the contemporary landscape of copyright law, Aufderheide and Jaszi drew on their years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals to lay out in detail how the principles of fair-use can be employed to avoid copyright violation. Taking stock of the vibrant remix culture that has only burgeoned since the book’s original publication, this new edition addresses the expanded reach of fair use—tracking the Twitter hashtag #WTFU (where’s the fair use?), the maturing of the transformativeness measure in legal disputes, the ongoing fight against automatic detection software, and the progress and delays of digitization initiatives around the country. Full of no-nonsense advice and practical examples, Reclaiming Fair Use remains essential reading for anyone interested in law, creativity, and the ever-broadening realm of new media.
Baron, Jaimie and Fuhs, Kristen, eds. I Am Not Your Negro: A Docalogue. Routledge, 2020.
As the inaugural volume in the Docalogue series, this book models a new form for the discussion of documentary film. James Baldwin’s writing is intensely relevant to contemporary politics and culture, and Peck’s strategies for representing him and conveying his work in I Am Not Your Negro (2016) raise important questions about how documentary can bring the work of a complex thinker like Baldwin to a broader public. By combining five distinct perspectives on a single documentary film, this book offers different critical approaches to the same media object, acting both as an intensive scholarly treatment of a film and as a guide for how to analyze, theorize, and contextualize a documentary.
Battaglia, Giulia. Documentary Film in India: an Anthropological History. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
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.
Bennett-Carpenter, Benjamin. Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill | Rodopi, 2017.
Memento mori is a broad and understudied cultural phenomenon and experience. The term “memento mori” is a Latin injunction that means “remember mortality,” or more directly, “remember that you must die.” In art and cultural history, memento mori appears widely, especially in medieval folk culture and in the well-known Dutch still life vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet memento mori extends well beyond these points in art and cultural history. In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori. Bennett-Carpenter shows that documentaries may offer composed transformative experiences in which a viewer may renew one’s consciousness of mortality – and thus renew one’s life.
Bernard, Sheila Curran and Rabin, Kenn. Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music. Second Edition. Routledge, 2020.
Fully revised and updated, Archival Storytelling second edition is a timely, pragmatic look at the use of audiovisual materials available to filmmakers and scholars, from the earliest photographs of the 19th century to the work of media makers today. Whether you’re a top Hollywood filmmaker or a first-time documentarian, at some point you are going to want to find, use, and license third-party materials—images, audio, or music that you yourself did not create—to use in your work. This book explains what’s involved in researching and licensing visuals and music, and exactly what media makers need to know when filming in a world crowded with rights-protected images and sounds. Filled with insights from filmmakers, archivists, and intellectual property experts, this second edition defines key terms such as copyright, fair use, public domain, and orphan works. It guides readers through the complex archival process and challenges them to become not only archival users but also archival and copyright activists.
Boyle, Deirdre. Ferryman of Memories: The Films of Rithy Panh. Rutgers University Press, 2023.
Rithy Panh survived the Cambodian genocide and found his life work. Aesthetics and ethics inform all he does, whether he is directing Isabel Huppert in The Sea Wall, following laborers digging trenches or interrogating the infamous director of S-21 prison. Written for film lovers as well as scholars, Ferryman of Memories introduces Panh and his incomparable cinema. With remarkable access to the director and his work, Deirdre Boyle introduces readers to Panh’s groundbreaking approach to perpetrator cinema and dazzling critique of colonialism, globalization, and the refugee crisis. Ferryman of Memories reveals the art of one of the masters of world cinema today, focusing on nineteen of his award-winning films, including Rice People, The Land of Wandering Souls, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and The Missing Picture.
Bricca, Jacob. How Documentaries Work. Oxford University Press, 2023.
How Documentaries Work breaks down the hidden conventions of documentaries in clear and accessible language for film students and documentary enthusiasts alike. Jacob Bricca, ACE, an award-winning documentary director, producer, and editor, provides a behind-the-scenes, under-the-hood view of what’s really going on in the construction of nonfiction films and television shows. This book presents examples from contemporary documentaries and docuseries and delivers insights from some of the most exciting nonfiction filmmakers and craftspeople working today, including director Steve James (City So Real, Hoop Dreams), producer Amy Ziering (Allen v. Farrow, The Hunting Ground), editor Aaron Wickenden, ACE (Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, 20 Feet from Stardom), and composer Miriam Cutler (RBG, Lost in La Mancha). Chapters such as “Flow,” “Narrative,” and “Time” offer a new way of looking at documentary film language, while others like “Titles,” “Music,” and “Sound” deliver extraordinary insights on seemingly ordinary topics. A compact volume written in plain, easy-to-understand language, this book promises to change the way you think about nonfiction films and television shows forever.
Bricca, Jacob. Documentary Editing: Principles and Practice. Second Edition. Routledge Press, 2023.
This book offers clear and detailed strategies for tackling every stage of the documentary editing process, from organizing raw footage and building select reels to fine cutting and final export. Written by a Sundance award-winning documentary editor with a dozen features to his credit and containing examples from over 100 films, this book presents a step-by-step guide for how to turn seemingly shapeless footage into focused scenes, and how to craft a structure for a documentary of any length. The book contains insights and examples from seven of America’s top documentary editors, including Geoffrey Richman, ACE (The Cove, Tiger King), Kate Amend, ACE (¡Viva Maestro!, The Keepers), and Mary Lampson (Harlan County U.S.A.). Written for both practitioners and enthusiasts, this book offers unique and invaluable insights into the documentary editing process. The second edition is completely revised and updated with contemporary examples and contains a new chapter titled, “Editing the Short Documentary.” “Documentary Editing” YouTube Channel.
Brylla, Catalin, Kramer, Mette, eds. Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
This groundbreaking edited collection is the first major study to explore the intersection between cognitive theory and documentary film studies, focusing on a variety of formats, such as first-person, wildlife, animated and slow TV documentary, as well as docudrama and web videos. Documentaries play an increasingly significant role in informing our cognitive and emotional understanding of today’s mass-mediated society, and this collection seeks to illuminate their production, exhibition, and reception. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the essays draw on the latest research in film studies, the neurosciences, cultural studies, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and the philosophy of mind. With a foreword by documentary studies pioneer Bill Nichols and contributions from both theorists and practitioners, this volume firmly demonstrates that cognitive theory represents a valuable tool not only for film scholars but also for filmmakers and practice-led researchers.
Bui, Camille. Cinépratiques de la ville: Documentaires et urbanité après Chronique d’un été. Presses Universitaires de Provence, Aix en Provence, 2018.
Le paysage urbain, qui engendre des visions mythiques dans le cinéma de fiction, tend à être discret dans la création documentaire, en particulier celle qui s’inscrit dans la continuité du cinéma direct et du cinéma-vérité. Si certains documentaires font perdre de vue les architectures spectaculaires ou les panoramas de carte postale, c’est pour inviter à mieux saisir la ville dans ses pratiques quotidiennes. C’est ce cinéma de l’urbanité qu’inauguraient, en 1960, Jean Rouch et Edgar Morin avec Chronique d’un été, film de parcours et d’interactions qui propose une expérience vivante au cœur de la géographie parisienne. S’appuyant sur ce film-matrice pour analyser un ensemble de films contemporains, cet ouvrage montre comment la mise en scène documentaire peut devenir agent d’une urbanité démocratique à l’heure de la globalisation et du néolibéralisme. Car pour Johan van der Keuken à Amsterdam, Richard Sandler à New York ou encore Shannon Walsh à Montréal, faire un film permet autant de témoigner que de prendre part à la vie urbaine aux côtés de citadins ordinaires. Comment rendre compte de ce rapport dynamique entre images et praxis ? Par une analyse sensible à la façon dont les forces de l’urbanité (mouvement, interaction, gentrification…) rencontrent des formes filmiques (cadre, son synchrone, montage…). Nourrie par l’apport des études urbaines, cette approche esthétique envisage comment le cinéma documentaire a le pouvoir de représenter et de pratiquer l’espace au présent, tout en projetant des villes à venir.
Cahill, James Leo and Caminati, Luca, eds. Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice. Routledge, 2021.
Drawing together 18 contributions from leading international scholars, this book conceptualizes the history and theory of cinema’s century-long relationship to modes of exploration in its many forms, from colonialist expeditions to decolonial radical cinemas to the perceptual voyage of the senses made possible by the cinematic apparatus. This is the first anthology dedicated to analysing cinema’s relationship to exploration from a global, decolonial, and ecological perspective. Featuring leading scholars working with pathbreaking interdisciplinary methodologies (drawing on insights from science and technology studies, postcolonial theory, indigenous ways of knowing, and film theory and history), it theorizes not only cinema’s implication in imperial conquest but also its cutting-edge role in empirical expansion and experiments in sensual and critical perception. The collected essays consider filmmaking in cross-cultural contexts and films made in or about peoples in South America, Asia, Africa, Indigenous North America, as well as polar, outer space, and underwater exploration, with famous figures such as Jacques Yves Cousteau alongside amateur and scientific filmmakers.
Cammaer, Gerda, Fitzpatrick, Blake, Lessard, Bruno, eds. Critical Distance in Documentary Media. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
This collection of essays presents new formulations of ideas and practices within documentary media that respond critically to the multifaceted challenges of our age. As social media, augmented reality, and interactive technologies play an increasing role in the documentary landscape, new theorizations are needed to account for how such media both represents recent political, socio-historical, environmental, and representational shifts, and challenges the predominant approaches by promoting new critical sensibilities. The contributions to this volume approach the idea of “critical distance” in a documentary context and in subjects as diverse as documentary exhibitions, night photography, drone imagery, installation art, mobile media, nonhuman creative practices, sound art and interactive technologies. It is essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students working in fields such as documentary studies, film studies, cultural studies, contemporary art history and digital media studies.
Campo, Javier, Crowder-Taraborrelli, Tomas, Garavelli, Clara, Piedras, Pablo, and Wilson, Kristi, eds. Documentary Cinema. An Aesthetic and Political Crossroads. Prometeo, 2020.
Este libro actualiza el panorama crítico, académico y ciné?lo sobre el cine documental mediante un conjunto de indagaciones recientes que abordan un territorio audiovisual complejo, multiforme y en continua expansión. Especialistas de renombre internacional algunos de ellos por primera vez publicados en nuestro idioma re?exionan en este volumen sobre las aristas culturales, estéticas, políticas y éticas que caracterizan el exponencial crecimiento del documental contemporáneo. La masificación y el desarrollo de las tecnologías digitales, las políticas de fomento cinematográfico, los nuevos consumos de contenidos audiovisuales en diferentes plataformas, son parte del fenómeno actual de renovación del documental. Desde perspectivas que combinan enfoques técnicos e historiográ?cos novedosos, este libro se dedica a estudiar problemáticas que hacen a las interacciones entre memoria e historia, poética y género, sexualidades y nuevas subjetividades, entre otras, en las películas de no ?cción.
Campo, Javier, Pérez-Blanco Humberto, eds. A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema: The Hour of the Furnaces Fifty Years Later. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the premiere of La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (Getino and Solanas, 1968), A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema is an edited collection that closely analyses the film, looking to the context and the sociopolitical landscape of 1960s Argentina, as well as the film’s legacy and contemporary relevance. Attention is paid to the corpus of political documentaries made between 1968 and 1976, including those that marked the last coup d’état in Argentina, to emphasize how formal and thematic trends relate to their Argentinian social context. In order to highlight The Hour of the Furnaces’s contemporary relevance as a form of politically engaged activism, the book will also look at Fernando Solanas’s documentary output in the twenty-first century.
Cazenave, Jennifer. An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. SUNY Press, 2019.
Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann’s twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the pre-digital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.
Chambers, Ciara, Jönsson, Mats, Vande Winkel, Roel, eds. Researching Newsreels: Local, National and Transnational Case Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
This volume addresses the underscrutinised topic of cinema newsreels. These short, multi-themed newsfilms, usually accompanied by explanatory intertitles or voiceovers, were a central part of the filmgoing experience around the world from 1910 through the late 1960s, and in many cases even later. As the only source of moving image news available before the widespread advent of television, newsreels are important social documents, recording what the general public was told and shown about the events and personalities of the day. Often disregarded as quirky or trivial, they were heavily utilised as propaganda vehicles, offering insights into the socio-political norms reflected in cinema during the first half of the twentieth century. The book presents a range of current research being undertaken in newsreel studies internationally and makes a case for a reconsideration of the importance of newsreels in the wider landscape of film history.
Chanan, Michael. From Printing to Streaming: Cultural Production Under Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2022.
For mainstream economics, cultural production raises no special questions: creative expression is to be harvested for wealth creation like any other form of labor. As Karl Marx saw it, however, capital is hostile to the arts because it cannot fully control the process of creativity. But while he saw the arts as marginal to capital accumulation, that was before the birth of the mass media. Engaging with major issues in Marxist theory around art and capitalism, From Printing to Streaming traces how the logical of cultural capitalism evolved from the print age to digital times, tracking the development of printing, photography, sound recording, newsprint, advertising, film and broadcasting, exploring the peculiarities of each as commodities, and their recent transformation by digital technology, where everything melts into computer code. Showing how these developments have had profound implications for both cultural creation and consumption, Chanan offers a radical and comprehensive analysis of commodification of artistic creation and the struggle to realize its potential in the digital age.
Chang, Anita Wen-Shin. Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics. Peter Lang, 2020.
This book offers a theory and methodology of transmedia arts activism within the technocultural and sociopolitical landscape of expanded documentary production, distribution, reception and participation. Through a detailed analysis of the author’s transmedia project on indigenous and minority language endangerment and revival that consists of the feature-length documentary Tongues of Heaven and the companion web application Root Tongue: Sharing Stories of Language Identity and Revival, she reveals the layers and depths of a critical arts practice when confronted with complex sociopolitical issues while working with multiple communities across territorial/national boundaries. In the context of the growing field of transmedia documentaries, the author discusses the potentials and benefits of a critical design practice and production ethics that can transform this field to pilot new collaborations in documentary and digital media platforms towards a third digital documentary.
Clark, Joseph. News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
In News Parade, Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history. Clark focuses on the sound newsreel of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that it represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into commodity culture. Using several case studies, including the newsreel’s coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the Sino–Japanese War, News Parade shows how news film transformed the relationship between its audience and current events, as well as the social and political consequences of these changes. It pays particular attention to how discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship. In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.
Cohen, Hart. The Strehlow Archive: Explorations in Old and New Media. Routledge, 2018.
The Strehlow Archive is one of Australia’s most important collections of film, sound, archival records and museum objects relating to the ceremonial life of Aboriginal people. The aim of this book is to provide a significant study of the relationship of archives to contemporary forms of digital mediation. The volume introduces a specific archive, the Strehlow Collection, and tracks the ways in which its materials and research dissemination practices are influenced by media forms we now identify with the emergence of digital technology.
Conway, Mike. The Tunnel and the Struggle over Television News in Cold War America. University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.
In 1962, an innovative documentary on a Berlin Wall tunnel escape brought condemnation from both sides of the Iron Curtain during one of the most volatile periods of the Cold War. The Tunnel, produced by NBC’s Reuven Frank, clocked in at ninety minutes and prompted a range of strong reactions. While the television industry ultimately awarded the program three Emmys, the U.S. Department of State pressured NBC to cancel the program, and print journalists criticized the network for what they considered to be a blatant disregard of journalistic ethics. It was not just The Tunnel’s subject matter that sparked controversy, but the medium itself. The surprisingly fast ascendance of television news as the country’s top choice for information threatened the self-defined supremacy of print journalism and the de facto cooperation of government officials and reporters on Cold War issues. In Contested Ground, Mike Conway argues that the production and reception of television news and documentaries during this period reveals a major upheaval in American news communications.
Coover, Roderick, ed. The Digital Imaginary: Literature and Cinema of the Database. Bloomsbury, 2020.
Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories. The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process form differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike.
Daniels, Jill. Memory, Place and Autobiography: Experiments in Documentary Filmmaking. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
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.
Evrard, Audrey. Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century. University of Wales Press, 2022.
This book brings an original perspective on French cinema’s ‘return to work’ in the early twenty-first century, focusing on the transformation of cinematic activism in view of the rapid dissolution of class narratives and solidarities. It is argued that, reckoning with widespread anxieties about job insecurity, social uncertainty, loss and invisibility in French society, filmmakers catalysed new modes of intervention best described as embodied praxes of sociality. Combining rigorous film analyses with concepts borrowed from philosophy, sociology, geography and political theory, this study positions documentary as a privileged point of articulation between aesthetics, politics and ethics. The wide-ranging film corpus features well-established auteurs and less canonical filmmakers to celebrate the vitality of contemporary French documentary cinema and its creative contributions to international discussions about work, precarity and social resilience.
Formenti, Cristina. The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution. Bloomsbury, 2022.
The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution is the first book to provide an historical insight into the animated documentary. Drawing on archival research and textual analysis, it shows how this form, usually believed to be strictly contemporaneous, instead took shape in the 1940s. Cristina Formenti integrates a theoretical and a historical approach in order to shed new light on the animated documentary as a form as well as on the work of renowned studios such as The Walt Disney Studios, Halas & Batchelor, National Film Board of Canada and never before addressed ones, such as Corona Cinematografica. She also highlights the differences and the similarities existing among the animated documentaries created between the 1940s and the mid-1980s and those produced today so as to demonstrate how the latter do not represent a complete otherness in respect to the former, but rather an evolution.
Fox, Broderick. Documentary Media: History, Theory, Practice. Second Edition. Routledge Publishers, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
In a digital moment where both the democratizing and totalitarian possibilities of media are unprecedented, the need for complex, ethical, and imaginative documentary media—for you, the reader of this book to think, question, and create—is vital. Whether you are an aspiring or seasoned practitioner, an activist or community leader, a student or scholar, or simply a curious audience member, author Broderick Fox opens up documentary media, its changing forms, and diversifying social functions to readers in a manner that is at once rigorous, absorbing, and practical. This new edition updates and further explores the various histories, ideas, and cultural debates that surround and shape documentary practice today. Each chapter engages readers by challenging traditional assumptions, posing critical and creative questions, and offering up innovative historical and contemporary examples. Additionally, each chapter closes with an “Into Practice” section that provides analysis and development exercises and hands-on projects that will assist you in generating a full project prospectus, promotional trailer, and web presence for your own documentary.
Freeman, Marilyn. The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory & Contemplative Practice of Media Art. The 3rd Thing, 2020.
In this fragmentary and fluent little gem, writer and time-based artist Marilyn Freeman offers up her own contemplative practice of dowsing for and creating “opportune moments” of insight and healing. With humor and humility, Freeman reveals her innovative approach to making video essays, a process developed over years of art-making, study and personal searching—a process of waking up again and again to the extraordinary possibilities hidden in everyday existence. Freeman introduces a theory of “evocative” practice as an alternative to the conventions of narrative and non-fiction filmmaking—a risky and rigorous engagement with form that invites the audience to participate in the creation of meaning. Her examination of the dialectical relationship of sound and image takes us far deeper than just a critical study of audio/visual media—deep into the human heart with its dark traumas and its shimmering capacity for honest and compassionate reckoning. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries and trading authority for authentic inquiry, Freeman takes us with her on a foray into time-based art that leaps and wanders from movie theaters to museums to Instagram in search of the “illuminated spaces” where we encounter ourselves and each other. This book is an essential resource for artists who question the importance of their work in these dark times, and for anyone seeking wisdom and wonder in our ordinary world.
French, Lisa. The Female Gaze in Documentary Film: An International Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
The Female Gaze in Documentary Film – an International Perspective makes a timely contribution to the recent rise in interest in the status, presence, achievements and issues for women in contemporary screen industries. It examines the works, contributions and participation of female documentary directors globally. The central preoccupation of the book is to consider what might constitute a ‘female gaze’, an inquiry that has had a long history in filmmaking, film theory and women’s art. It fills a gap in the literature which to date has not substantially examined the work of female documentary directors. Moreover, research on sex, gender and the gaze has infrequently been the subject of scholarship on documentary film, particularly in comparison to narrative film or television drama. A distinctive feature of the book is that it is based on interviews with significant female documentarians from Europe, Asia and North America.
Fritsche, Maria. The American Marshall Plan Film Campaign and the Europeans: A Captivated Audience? London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
The American Marshall Plan Film Campaign and the Europeans is the first book to explore the use of the Marshall Plan films and, importantly, their distribution and reception across Europe. The study examines every available film – the 170 that remain from the 200 estimated to have been made – and looks at how they were designed to instil hope, argue the case for economic restructuring and persuade the Europeans of the superiority of the liberal-capitalist system. The book goes on to reason that the films served as a powerful weapon in the cultural Cold War, but that the European audiences were by no means passive victims of the US propaganda effort. Maria Fritsche discusses the Marshall Plan films in the context of countries across Western, Northern and Southern Europe, covering the majority of the 17 European countries that participated in the Plan in the process. The book incorporates 70 images and utilises a vast number of archival sources to explore the strategies the US adopted to sway the minds of the Europeans, the problems they encountered in the process and, not least, the varied responses of the European audiences.
Geva, Dan. The Ethics Lab Guidebook. CILECT, 2019.
Establishing a video collection of ethical testimonies of students, teachers, filmmakers, and scholars from film schools throughout the world lies at the heart of The Ethics Lab’s effort to explore the ethical dimension of our lives and art-making. This Guidebook explores, step by step, The Ethics Lab’s goals and methodology that return to and revitalize a primordial human practice: recounting autobiographies. Ethics, in this worldview, is no longer perceived as a set of restrictive dos and don’ts. Nor is it imposed as a set of universal abstracts or legal imperatives. Rather, our ethical landscape is shaped by its community members, who serve as a vital source for creative self-growth and comprise a nurturing locus of inspiring communality. The Ethics Lab Guidebook’s challenge is to inspire people to navigate their moral landscape under the guidance of the beckoning lights of thousand-year-old stars of moral wisdom—making an invaluable contribution to the film school educational system and to contemporary research in the field of ethics.
Geva, Dan. A Philosophical History of Documentary, 1895-2022. Springer Link, 2021.
This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of “documentary” between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic language games from close range while focusing on their historical roots and concealed philosophical sources of inspiration. Dan Geva’s principal argument is twofold: first, that each definition is an original ethical premise of documentary; and second, that only the structured assemblage of the entire set of definitions successfully depicts the true ethical nature of documentary insofar as we agree to consider its philosophical history as a reflective object of thought in a perpetual state of being-self-defined: an ethics sui generis.
Geva, Dan. Toward a Philosophy of the Documentarian: A Prolegomenon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
The theme of this book is the documentarian—what the documentarian is and how we can understand it as a concept. Working from the premise that the documentarian is a special—extended—sign, the book develops a model of a quadruple sign structure for-and-of the documentarian, growing out of enduring traditions in philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and documentary theory. Dan Geva investigates the intellectual premise that allows the documentarian to show itself as an extremely sophisticated, creative, and purposeful being-in-the-world—one that is both embedded in its own history and able to manifest itself throughout its entire documentary life project, as a stand-alone conceptual phase in the history of ideas.
Ghosh, Bishnupriya, Sarkar, Bhaskar, eds. The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
This collection presents new work in risk media studies from critical humanities perspectives. Defining, historicizing, and consolidating current scholarship, the volume seeks to shape an emerging field, signposting its generative insights while examining its implicit assumptions. When and under what conditions does risk emerge? How is risk mediated? Who are the targets of risk media? Who manages risk? Who lives with it? Who are most in danger? Such questions—the what, how, who, when, and why of risk media—inform the scope of this volume. With roots in critical media studies and science and technology studies, it hopes to inspire new questions, perspectives, frameworks, and analytical tools not only for risk, media, and communication studies, but also for social and cultural theories. Editors Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar bring together contributors who elucidate and interrogate risk media’s varied histories and futures.
Glick, Joshua. Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018.
Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 explores how documentarians working between the election of John F. Kennedy and the Bicentennial created conflicting visions of the recent and more distant American past. Drawing on a wide range of primary documents, Joshua Glick analyzes the films of Hollywood documentarians such as David Wolper and Mel Stuart, along with lesser-known independents and activists such as Kent Mackenzie, Lynne Littman, and Jesús Salvador Treviño. While the former group reinvigorated a Cold War cultural liberalism, the latter group advocated for social justice in a city plagued by severe class stratification and racial segregation. Glick examines how mainstream and alternative filmmakers turned to the archives, civic institutions, and production facilities of Los Angeles in order to both change popular understandings of the city and shape the social consciousness of the nation.
Godmilow, Jill. Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars. Columbia University Press, 2022.
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
Gordon, Rachel. The Documentary Distribution Toolkit: How to Get Out, Get Seen, and Get an Audience. Routledge, 2021.