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Offering both beginning and more experienced filmmakers an updated, comprehensive guide to the process of documentary filmmaking In a new edition of this popular guidebook, filmmakers Alan Rosenthal and Ned Eckhardt show readers how to utilize the latest innovations in equipment, technologies, and production techniques for success in the digital, webbased world of documentary film. All twentyfour chapters of the volume have been revised to reflect the latest advances in documentary filmmaking....

An authentic visionary of cinema, Japanese filmmaker Hara Kazuo has spent the past four decades pioneering a stark documentary style that challenged the mores of postwar Japanese society. His works feature dramatic narratives and characters--radicals, outcasts and those on the margins--who struggle against adversity: "I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society," Kazuo has avowed. Camera Obtrusa is the first English-language publication addressing his work. Composed as a straightforward handb...

David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), written by producer James Vanderbilt and adapted from the true crime works of James Graysmith, remains one of the most respected films of the early 21st century. As the second film featuring a serial killer (and the first based on fact) by Fincher, Zodiac remains a standout in a varied but stylistically unified career. It similarly stands out among a new wave of crime cinema in the early 2000s, including the modern classics Inside Man, Michael Clayton, and Academy...

The art of the observer is a personal guide to documentary filmmaking, based on the author’s years of pioneering work in the fields of ethnographic and documentary cinema. It stands in sharp contrast to books of academic film criticism and handbooks on visual research methods, being based extensively on concrete examples from the author’s own filmmaking experience. The book places particular emphasis on observational filmmaking and the ways in which this approach is distinct from other forms of...

Based on rare archival documents and films, this anthology is the first to focus primarily on the use of official and colonial documentary films in the South and South-East Asian regions. Drawing together a range of international scholars, the book sheds new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film, in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in the colonial, late colonial and immediate post-colonial period. Covering d...

Sinophone Cinemas considers a range of multilingual, multidialect and multi-accented cinemas produced in Chinese-language locations outside mainland China. Showcasing a variety of new and fascinating case studies from Britain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia, and canvassing a range of formats including commercial co-productions, short films, documentaries and independent films, the book highlights the contemporary screen cultures of Chinese-language communities situated on the margins...

"Trump knew from early on that he who controls the story controls the world." Writer/director Robert Orlando, locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic, learned Citizen Kane was Trump's favorite film, and the parallels were astonishing. Both Kane and Trump are swaggering masters of media, and both claim to stand for the working man. "Orson Welles, the boy genius of Kane, was possessing me from the grave," states Orlando. In Orlando's acclaimed documentary Citizen Trump, we witness Trump, like...

Remember a time when all of Hollywood-with the expressed encouragement and investment of the government-joined forces to defend the American way of life? It was World War II and the gravest threat faced the nation, and the world at large. Hollywood answered the call to action.This is the riveting tale of how the film industry enlisted in the Allied effort during the second World War-a story that started with staunch isolationism as studios sought to maintain the European market and eventually er...

What key concerns are reflected in documentaries produced in and about the United States? How have documentaries engaged with competing visions of US history, culture, politics, and national identity? This book examines how documentary films have contributed to the American public sphere - creating a kind of public space, serving as sites for community-building, public expression, and social innovation. Geiger focuses on how documentaries have been significant in forming ideas of the nation, bot...

"A realist with a sense of humor, Chasse is both stringent and encouraging as she covers every aspect of creating a successful production." —Booklist starred review How to Make and Distribute a Documentary without Losing Your Mind or Going Broke Documentary filmmaking requires more than just a passion for the subject, whether it be one’s personal story or that of someone else, a historical event or a startling discovery, a political movement or a heinous crime. Making a documentary and gettin...

Aimed at students and educators across all levels of Higher Education, this agenda-setting book defines what screen production research is and looks like—and by doing so celebrates creative practice as an important pursuit in the contemporary academic landscape. Drawing on the work of international experts as well as case studies from a range of forms and genres—including screenwriting, fiction filmmaking, documentary production and mobile media practice—the book is an essential guide for those...

Winner of the 2020 Antonio Candido Prize for Best Book in the Humanities from the Brazil section of the Latin American Studies Association. This book examines the vibrant field of documentary filmmaking in Brazil from the transition to democracy in 1985 to the present. Marked by significant efforts toward the democratization of Brazil's highly unequal society, this period also witnessed the documentary's rise to unprecedented vitality in quantity, quality, and diversity of production-which inclu...

Flash Flaherty, the much-anticipated follow-up volume to The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, offers a people's history of the world-renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an annual event where participants confront and reimagine the creative process surrounding multiple document/documentary forms and modes of the moving image. This collection, which includes a mosaic of personal recollections from attendees of the Flaherty Seminar over a span of more than 60 years, highlig...

Lucid Dreaming is an unprecedented global collection of discussions with documentary and experimental filmmakers, giving film and video its rightful place alongside the written word as an essential medium for conveying the most urgent concerns in contemporary arts and politics. In these long-form conversations, film curator and arts journalist Cohn draws out the thinking of some of the most intriguing creators behind the rapidly developing movement of moving-image nonfiction. The collection fe...

Using examples and hard-earned experiences from the Author's courses and lectures at the esteemed MFA in Documentary Film Program at Stanford University, A Guide to (Short) Documentary Filmmaking: Creating Artful Short Documentary Films explores what is unique about the short-form documentary and guides the reader through the process – from ideation to completion and distribution. This accessible and practical textbook guides readers through the steps of creating powerful and artful documentari...