The camera's capacity to organize space within a “frame” produces the fundamental unit of movie making: the shot. Dramatic Effects with a Movie Camera is a practical guide to the visual storytelling potential of different camera techniques, demonstrating how they can produce compelling shots and sequences. By exploring how a close-up shot of a character’s face can help the viewer share their fear or joy, or how a moving camera can reveal plot points, connect objects and characters in space or...
The Danish Directors 3
Emphasizing the new documentary cinema, this book features film-makers who belong to the generation born in the 1970s. Many of the interviewees were trained at the National Film School of Denmark’s now legendary Department of Documentary and Television. The term ‘new’ also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the film-makers. For example, for the generation in question, internationalization and the development of a new digital media culture are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and...
Die Textperson Im Dokumentarischen Film (Journalistische Praxis)
by Gregor Alexander Heussen
Performing Place in French and Italian Queer Documentary Film
by Oliver Brett
This book explores the space of queer documentary through the modernist optic of Marcel Proust's 'lieu factice' (artificial place), a perspective that problematizes the location of place in a post-postmodern world with a dispersed sense of the real. The practice of queer documentary in France and Italy, from the beginning of the new millennium onwards, is seen to re-write the coherence of 'place' through a range of emerging queer realities. Proposing the post-queer as a way of contending with th...
In diesem Buch werden Dokumentarfilme analysiert, welche prominent die zeitgenössische Ernährung zum Thema haben. Die audiovisuelle Dokumentation wird dabei als Argumentation begriffen, das Zusammenspiel von bestimmten Inszenierungs-Modi in Sachen Bewegtbild und Ton als rhetorische Figuren, genauer als Tropen, welche jeweils bestimmte Persuasionen zu evozieren imstande sind. Frei nach Ansätzen aus dem Bereich der Neuen Rhetorik und der Psychoanalytischen Filmtheorie (u. a. Christian Metz) wird e...
During the 1970s and 1980s, the independent community media and various youth movements across Europe inspired and abetted each other. The young activists discovered the video tape as a medium and as a means to express their protesting mood and concerns. The easily produced moving images in videos soon also became also a weapon in the political and communication fights for the autonomous culture spaces the movement demanded in many countries. Videos were participative productions, done almost in...
Screen documentary has experienced a marked rise in visibility and popularity in recent years. What are the reasons for the so-called 'boom' in documentaries at the cinema? How has television documentary met the challenge of new formats? And how do audiences engage with documentaries on screen? Watching the world extends the reach of documentary studies by investigating recent instances of screen documentary and the uses made of them by audiences. The book focuses on the interfaces between textu...
The Grierson Effect (Cultural Histories of Cinema)
"This boldly original book traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Kris Fallon examines the emergence of several key media forms?social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization?and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing o...
Telling Migrant Stories (Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America)
Telling Migrant Stories explores how contemporary documentary film gives voice to Latin American immigrants whose stories would not otherwise be heard. Contributors analyze films including Harvest of Empire, Sin Pais, The Vigil, De Nadie, Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba, Abuelos, La Churona, and Which Way Home as well as internet documentaries distributed via platforms like YouTube. They examine the ways these films highlight the individual agency of immigrants as well as the global sys...
Theresienstadt – Filmfragmente und Zeitzeugenberichte (Wissen, Kommunikation Und Gesellschaft)
Im Ghetto, Durchgangs- und Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt sind, unter erzwungener Beteiligung der Deportierten, filmische Aufzeichnungen entstanden und unter dem Titel „Theresienstadt – Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet“ bekannt geworden. Als besonders perfider Teil nationalsozialistischer Propaganda wirken diese Aufnahmen bis in die Gegenwart nach: Leugner des nationalsozialistischen Genozids verweisen bis heute auf diesen Film. Im Rahmen des Sammelbandes wird die Sonde...
Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina (New Directions in National Cinemas)
by Veronica Garibotto
For roughly two decades after the collapse of the military regime in 1983, testimonial narrative was viewed and received as a privileged genre in Argentina. Today, however, academics and public intellectuals are experiencing "memory fatigue," a backlash against the concepts of memory and trauma, just as memory and testimonial films have reached the center of Argentinian public discourse. In Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina, Veronica Garibotto looks at the causes for...
Syria is now one of the most important countries in the world for the documentary film industry. Since the 1970s, Syrian cinema masters played a defining role in avant-garde filmmaking and political dissent against authoritarianism. After the outbreak of violence in 2011, an estimated 500,000 video clips were uploaded making it one of the first YouTubed revolutions in history. This book is the first history of documentary filmmaking in Syria. Based on extensive media ethnography and in-depth...
This fascinating book from veteran film journalist Ian Haydn Smith, with a foreword from award-winning director Asif Kapadia, explores 100 of the most compelling documentaries, each with the power to radically change our perceptions and challenge the way we see the world. Every so often a documentary comes along with the power to change the way you think, to share alternative perspectives, to make you furious about injustice or warm your heart. Contained in this book are documentaries that f...
The Loneliness Room (Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography)
by Sean Redmond
This remarkably unique book takes the conceit of the loneliness room to show how everyday artistic practice opens up loneliness to new definitions and new understandings. Refusing to pathologise loneliness, the book draws on the creative submissions supplied by its participants to demonstrate that being lonely can mean different things to different people in differing contexts. Filled with the photographs, paintings, videos, songs, and writings of its participants, The loneliness room is a deepl...
The Insiders’ Guide to Factual Filmmaking is an accessible and comprehensive ‘how to’ guide about the craft of making documentaries for TV, online or social media. Filmmaker Tony Stark distils a long career at the BBC and as an independent producer to explain the conceptual, visual, editorial and organisational skills needed to make impactful and stylish factual films. Interviews with top industry professionals in the UK and US - commissioners, executive producers, filmmakers, strand editors a...
Researching Newsreels (Global Cinema)
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 eve...
Revolutionary thinking around gender and race merged with new film technologies to usher in a wave of women's documentaries in the 1970s. Driven by the various promises of second-wave feminism, activist filmmakers believed authentic stories about women would bring more people into an imminent revolution. Yet their films soon faded into obscurity. Shilyh Warren reopens this understudied period and links it to a neglected era of women's filmmaking that took place from 1920 to 1940, another key per...
This landmark collection of essays considers the global legacy of John Grierson, the father of British documentary. Featuring the work of leading scholars from around the world, The Grierson Effect explores the impact of Grierson's ideas about documentary and educational film in a wide range of cultural and national contexts – from Russia and Scandinavia, to Latin America, South Africa and New Zealand. In reconsidering Grierson's international infl uence, this major new study emphasises the ma...