Kill the Documentary (Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary)
by Jill Godmilow
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’ enga...
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 s...
With an emphasis on photographic works that offer new perspectives on the history of American social documentary, this book considers a history of politically engaged photography that may serve as models for the representation of impending environmental injustices. Chris Balaschak examines histories of American photography, the environmental movement, as well as the industrial and postindustrial economic conditions of the United States in the 20th century. With particular attention to a materi...
Dont Look Back, a documentary film of Bob Dylan's 1965 England tour, is recognised as a landmark work in the field of documentary film-making, contributing to the cultural life of an era. This text examines the aesthetic, thematic and social dynamics of the film in order to elucidate how and why it was a groundbreaking piece of documentary cinema.
The World at War is the most successful history series ever produced by British television. TV producer and writer Taylor Downing explores the style, ethos, television context and impact of the programme, in a study that includes interviews with the producer, Jeremy Isaacs, and original research gathered from archives.
An Introduction to Television Documentary
by Richard Kilborn and John Izod
A lively introduction to a subject which has attracted increasing interest in the last few years.. A wide-ranging and carefully constructed account. Likely to be adopted on many courses (both foundational level and advanced) which include the study of documentary as part of a wider Media Studies agenda.. Written in a highly accessible manner, it has the edge on rival publications on the subject, which have often proved to difficult for an undergraduate readership.
The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution
by Cristina Formenti
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...
The documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars. Reclaiming Popular Documentary reverses this long-standing tendency by showing that documentaries can be—and are—made for mainstream or commercial audiences. Editors Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson, who consider popular documentary to be a subfield of docu...
This book is an unvarnished look at how to originate, pitch, sell, and produce factual television programming for global broadcast television networks and streaming services. Grounded in firsthand experience, this essential "how to guide" walks readers through the crucial steps in the factual television process while unpacking valuable insights to successfully producing and delivering projects on time and on budget. With over 20 years of experience in the TV documentary arena, Executive Produc...
The Making of… Adaptation and the Cultural Imaginary (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by Jan Cronin
This book explores “Making of” sites as a genre of cultural artefact. Moving beyond “making-of” documentaries, the book analyses novels, drama, film, museum exhibitions and popular studies that re-present the making of culturally loaded film adaptations. It argues that the “Making of” genre operates on an adaptive spectrum, orienting towards and enacting the adaptation of films and their making. The book examines the behaviours that characterise “Making of” sites across visual media; it explores...
Documentary Film
Documentary Film: An Insider's Perspective introduces students to various writing selections on documentary films and filmmaking. The material addresses the genre and its history, shares unique views on documentaries, and includes writings from those who study, discuss, promote, teach, and produce them. Rather than an academic approach to the topic, the book is rooted in the perspective of the industry insider. Readers benefit from these perspectives, learning not only theory but the reality of...
The Personal Camera – The Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (Nonfictions)
by Laura Rascoroli
How do you make a successful documentary in an era of media turmoil, network disruption and increasing financial restrictions? This is the question Alan Rosenthal, distinguished international filmmaker and teacher, sets out to answer in The documentary diaries. Using seven of his recent releases as case studies - ranging from high-budget historical and political documentaries to shoestring observational films and hybrid docudramas - he explores with style and humour the challenges facing the con...
Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant American films ever made, Salesman (1966–9) is a landmark in non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The film follows a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan. Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the...
Only a few years after the 2013 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Blackfish - an independent documentary film that critiqued the treatment of orcas in captivity - visits to SeaWorld declined, major corporate sponsors pulled their support, and performing acts canceled appearances. The steady drumbeat of public criticism, negative media coverage, and unrelenting activism became known as the "Blackfish Effect." In 2016, SeaWorld announced a stunning corporate policy change - the end of its profita...
Framing the Nation: Documentary Film in Interwar France argues that, between World Wars I and II, documentary film made a substantial contribution to the rewriting of the French national narrative to include rural France and the colonies. The book mines a significant body of virtually unknown films and manuscripts for their insight into revisions of French national identity in the aftermath of the Great War. From 1918 onwards, government institutions sought to advance social programs they believ...
Das jeweils einzigartige Œuvre von Georg Stefan Troller und Hans-Dieter Grabe wird hier erstmals werk- und fernsehhistorisch umfassend analysiert. Ausführlich werden die dokumentarischen Methoden dieser wichtigen Wegbereiter des deutschen Fernsehdokumentarismus erläutert und ihre dramaturgischen und ästhetischen Konzepte beschrieben.
Ten Years of Studies in Documentary Film
This volume will be a ‘time capsule’ of the first 10 years of Studies in Documentary Film (2007–2016), tracing not only the development of the journal but also of documentary studies in the same period. Issues such as the rise of digital documentary forms and authorship, documentary activism, and the Chinese Independent documentary, as well as diverse political issues, will be raised in the introduction and evidenced in the articles. The chapters have been chosen for the various themes they rais...
This book analyzes the rise of socially and politically engaged Algerian documentaries, created in the period immediately following the end of the Algerian civil war (1991-1999). It uses case studies to highlight the works of four Algerian filmmakers, and devotes a chapter to each: Malek Bensmaïl, Hassen Ferhani, Djamel Kerkar, and Karim Sayad. The book makes visible productions that have been overlooked not only in distribution circuits but also within academia, and examines the political signi...