An integrated look at the political films of the 1960s and ’70s and how the New Left transformed cinema 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 detailed readings of particular films, collectives, and movements—Morgan Adamson makes a case for cinema’s centrality to the global...
Gargoyle - Rivista non convenzionale di Mentalismo - n. 4
by Aroldo Lattarulo, Matteo Filippini, and Federico Ferrari
Over the past fifty years, a unique hybrid genre of nonfiction cinema called the "avant-doc" has emerged in the world of independent film. Combining the unconventional techniques of avant-garde auteurs like Stan Brakhage with the verisimilitude of traditional documentaries, the avant-doc expands the way cinema captures and chronicles events. Drawing on firsthand interviews with nineteen of the form's chief practitioners and participants, Avant-Doc constructs an oral history that provides the fir...
Taking the Long View is a study of documentary series such as Michael Apted’s world-famous Seven Up films that set out to trace the life-journeys of individuals from their earliest schooldays till they are fully grown adults, often with children of their own. In addition to Seven Up, the book provides extended accounts of the two other best known longitudinal series to have been produced in the last three or four decades: Winifred and Barbara Junge’s The Children of Golzow and Swedish director R...
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...
The beginning of the author's adventure with a camera - filming wildlife across the world for the BBC Natural History Unit and other major TV companies - began in 1978 when he joined the RSPB's film unit. Untangling the Knot gives an in-depth look into what is involved in capturing the sequences needed for a natural history film, using comprehensive diaries and over 200 photographs. Mike describes the stresses of international flying with 20 cases of film equipment, sometimes alone, to distant c...
Directing the Documentary, Sixth Edition is the definitive book on the form, offering time-tested principles to help you master the craft. Ideal for documentary courses as well as aspiring and established documentary filmmakers, this book has it all, with in-depth lessons and insider perspectives on every aspect of preproduction, production, and postproduction. Focusing on the hands-on work needed to make your concept a reality, this new edition covers it all, from the fundamental to advanced el...
Documentary Filmmaking: A Contemporary Field Guide, Second Edition, is a skills-oriented, step-by-step guide to creating documentary films, from the initial idea phase to distribution. Thoroughly updated to highlight the effects of technological advances and social media, this compact handbook offers something for all types of students: documentary recommendations (for the film buff); illustrations, examples, and commentary from working documentary makers, producers, editors, and distributors (f...
This volume is the first book-length study of the extensive career and prolific works of D.A. Pennebaker, one of the pioneers of direct cinema, a documentary form that emphasizes observation and a straightforward portrayal of events. With a career spanning decades, Pennebaker's many projects have included avant-garde experiments (Daybreak Express), ground-breaking television documentaries (Primary), celebrity films (Dont Look Back), concert films (Monterey Pop), and innovative fusions of documen...
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...
A refreshing new practical approach to documentary filmmaking, Get Close: Lean Team Documentary Filmmaking equips new and veteran filmmakers with the knowhow to make artistically rewarding documentaries for less money, less hassle, and less time. Author and veteran filmmaker Rustin Thompson shows that by stripping away, sidestepping, or reassessing the entrenched industry hurdles-long waits for funding, the unwieldy crews, the unnecessary gear, the gauntlet of film festivals, pitch forums, and d...
New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is the first book to offer a lengthy examination of the relationship between fiction and documentary from the perspective of art and poetics. The premise of the book is to propose a new category of nonfiction film that is distinguished from – as opposed to being conflated with – the documentary film in its multiple historical guises; a premise explored in case-studies of films by distinguished artists and filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Ben...
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...
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...
Love and Resistance in the Films of Mai Masri (Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema)
by Victoria Brittain
This book covers Mai Masri’s three decades documenting iconic moments of Palestinian and Lebanese linked history. Her films, unique for giving agency to her subjects, tell much about the untold, unseen people, namely women and children, who lived these experiences of war and occupation. Former Lebanese political prisoner Soha Bechara praised her feature film 3000 Nights as “the ‘Lest we forget’ of Palestine." Her focus on the social and political climates of the vivid lives of unseen people conn...
The Grierson Effect (Cultural Histories of Cinema)
Adventures in the Lives of Others: Ethical Dilemmas in Factual Filmmaking
Putting readers into the shoes of film and TV professionals, Adventures in the Lives of Others is a gripping insider's account of ethics, problem-solving and decision-making at the cutting edge of documentaries and factual television.Both accessible and authoritative, the book brings together a range of intimate, candid accounts of the struggles involved in making documentary film and television, from Grey Gardens and Hoop Dreams to Man on Wire, Super Size Me and Benefits Street. Contributors i...
The Documentary Film Book
Women and Global Documentary (World Cinema)
In what innovative ways are women documentary filmmakers seeking to prioritize and promote political awareness, alternative modes of allyship, and advocacy for those most marginalized by patriarchy and global capitalism? Women and Global Documentary answers the urgent need to re-evaluate not only the significance of women’s documentary practices and their contributions to feminist world-building, but also the state of documentary studies as it engages with political, aesthetic, and industrial...
'He is in a category of one. You can't believe that a person like this stalks the earth. A complete original and an amazing person' MARINA HYDE'A visionary masterpiece' JOHN GRAY, NEW STATESMANThe long-awaited memoir by the legendary filmmaker and celebrated author. Told in Werner Herzog's inimitable voice, this is the story of his epic artistic career, as inventive and daring as anything he has done before.Hauling a steamship over a mountain in the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the de...