Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins (World Cinema)
by Guilherme Carréra
Winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2023 Award for Best First Monograph. Winner of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) 2022 Award for Best Monograph. Guilherme Carréra’s compelling book examines imagery of ruins in contemporary Brazilian cinema and considers these representations in the context of Brazilian society. Carréra analyses three groups of unconventional documentaries focused on distinct geographies: Brasília - The Age of S...
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...
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...
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, c...
A comprehensive guide to making documentary films, from the development of the initial idea to screening the finished film for an audience.
Staging West German Democracy (New Directions in German Studies)
by Jan Uelzmann
Staging West German Democracy examines how political “founding discourses” of the nascent Federal Republic (FRG) were reflected, reinforced, and actively manufactured by the Federal government in conjunction with the West German, state-controlled newsreel system, the Deutsche Wochenschau. By looking at the institutional history of the Deutsche Wochenschau and its close relationship to the Federal Press Office, Jan Uelzmann traces the Adenauer administration’s project of maintaining a “government...
La Poscensura En El Cine Documental de la Transicion Espanola (Estudios Hispanicos en el Contexto Global. Hispanic Studies, #6)
by Alejandro Alvarado
En Espana, el cine documental vivio uno de sus momentos mas fructiferos durante la transicion democratica (1977-1982), cuando el pais se encontraba en pleno proceso de recuperacion de las libertades tras el regimen de Franco. Sin embargo, distintas causas administrativas, industriales y creativas concluyeron practicamente con la desaparicion del documental de las pantallas espanolas a principios de los 80. Los residuos del regimen y el triunfo del consenso politico contribuyeron a la obstaculiza...
The Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions
by Sir David Attenborough
In 1954, the 28-year-old David Attenborough seized the opportunity to travel the world in search of rare animals for London Zoo's collection, and to film these fascinating expeditions for the BBC. The result was the successful television series, Zoo Quest. In Guyana the adventure begins with an encounter with a caiman, a visit to the River Mazaruni waterfalls, and an extraordinary painted cliff revealing a sequence of handprints and animal drawings not unlike France's Palaeolithic caves. Late...
Since the late 1990s in Israel, third-generation Holocaust survivors have become the new custodians of cultural memory, and the documentary films they produce play a major role in shaping a societal consensus of commemoration. In Remaking Holocaust Memory, a pioneering analysis of third-generation Holocaust documentaries in Israel, Steir-Livny investigates compelling films that have been screened in Israel, Europe, and the United States, appeared in numerous international film festivals, and won...
Documentary Making for Digital Humanists
by Darren R. Reid and Dudley Dean
As we approach the end of the ‘era of the witness’, given the passing on of the generation of Holocaust survivors, Claude Lanzmann’s archive of 220 hours of footage excluded from his ground-breaking documentary Shoah (1985) offers a remarkable opportunity to encounter previously unseen interviews with survivors and other witnesses, recorded in the late 1970s. Although the archive is all available freely to view online and includes extra footage of those who appear in Shoah, this book focuses o...
I Am Not Your Negro (Docalogue)
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...
Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects an...
Critical Distance in Documentary Media
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...
The Geo-Doc (Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication)
by Mark Terry
This book introduces a new form of documentary film: the Geo-Doc, designed to maximize the influential power of the documentary film as an agent of social change. By combining the proven methods and approaches as evidenced through historical, theoretical, digital, and ecocritical investigations with the unique affordances of Geographic Information System technology, a dynamic new documentary form emerges, one tested in the field with the United Nations. This book begins with an overview of the h...
The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience
Asian immigrants to America and their descendants have confronted numerous negative forces -- fear, arrogance, prejudice, and chauvinism -- and contributed many more positive elements -- courage, pride, tolerance, determination -- throughout their history in this country. This collection of key documents presents the rich Asian American heritage through primary sources -- speeches, diary entries, editorials, advertisements, court opinions, legislation, songs, and poems -- along with expert, conc...
Frederick Wiseman is America’s foremost chronicler of public institutions. His films have focused on city, state, and local governments; hospitals; asylums; creative organizations and museums; schools; libraries; and more. In recent years, Wiseman’s work has reached a new level of popularity, with films such as In Jackson Heights (2015), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), and City Hall (2020) all earning widespread acclaim. Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of Wiseman’s career, offering a c...
Constructions of the Real (Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education)
Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on, interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form, content, and process. The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate, first-person works where memory and identity...