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Documentary is one of the most fascinating areas of filmmaking. Documentaries have broken down societal taboos, changed legislation, strengthened and rocked entire governments, freed wrongly-convicted prisoners, and taught us more about the world in which we live. A Journey Through Documentary Film offers an overview of documentary history, taking readers from the early 'actualities' of pioneering non-fiction filmmakers such as Robert J. Flaherty and John Grierson, to the documentaries of Michae...

This book provides coverage of the diversity of Australian film and television production between 2000 and 2015. In this period, Australian film and television have been transformed by new international engagements, the emergence of major new talents and a movement away with earlier films’ preoccupation with what it means to be Australian. With original contributions from leading scholars in the field, the collection contains chapters on particular genres (horror, blockbusters and comedy), Indig...

This book analyzes how the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed in contemporary popular culture, using examples from film, literature and photography. In particular, the book explores why particular urban spaces, infrastructures and aesthetics – such as skyline shots in the opening credits of financial crisis films – recur in contemporary crisis narratives. Why are cities and finance connected in the cultural imaginary? Which ideologies do urban crisis imaginaries communicate? How do these imagi...

In the past twenty years, China has witnessed the flowering of an independent documentary cinema characterized by a particular verite aesthetic. Independent Chinese Documentary traces the roots of this style back to the 1980s, and the gradual abandonment of studio-based filmmaking, dominant during the Maoist era, for shooting live and on location. Known in Chinese as xianchang - or being on 'the scene' - this documentary practice is partly distinguished by its embrace of the contingent. Through...

This book explores the history of wildlife television in post-war Britain. It revolves around the role of David Attenborough, whose career as a broadcaster and natural history filmmaker has shaped British wildlife television. The book discusses aspects of Attenborough’s professional biography and also explores elements of the institutional history of the BBC—from the early 1960s, when it was at its most powerful, to the 2000s, when its future is uncertain. It focuses primarily on the wildlife ‘m...

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an eruption of nonfiction films on sex work. The first book to examine a cross-section of this diverse and transnational body of work, Sexography confronts the ethical questions raised by ethnographic documentary and interviews with sexually marginalized subjects. Nicholas de Villiers argues that carnal and cultural knowledge are inextricably entangled in ethnographic sex work documentaries. De Villiers offers a reading of cinema as a technolog...

As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc., the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is be...

This book highlights the important creative work of Belarusian theatre and filmmakers seeking to raise awareness of the Pro-democracy movement and human rights abuses in Belarus and to build communities of care and mourning following the fraudulent 2020 presidential elections in Belarus. Examining the work of the Belarus Free Theatre, Andrei Kureichik, and the Kupalautsy Theatre, it demonstrates how documentary theatre, adaptation, and digital theatre have enabled displaced, dissident artists to...

This cutting-edge book examines the rapidly developing scene of Chinese independent documentary, arguably the most courageous player in contemporary Chinese visual culture. The authors explore two areas that are of special interest to China studies and film studies, respectively: (1) filming the everyday in twenty-first-century China to foreground contestation and diversity and (2) exploring the aesthetic of remembering in an embodied documentary practice, which turns the gaze on artists themsel...

Nearly three decades after the end of the dictatorship of General Pinochet, the documentary cinema of Chile has confronted with sophisticated and incisive approaches the memory of this nation’s historical catastrophe. More than any other medium amidst a diverse and active political memory culture, documentary films have exposed state-sponsored atrocities and their perpetrators, recovered survivors’ memories of loss, suffering, and resilience, and posed decisive questions that continue to unsettl...

The Cinema of Bela Tarr is a critical analysis of the work of Hungary's most prominent and internationally best known film director, written by a scholar who has followed Bela Tarr's career through a close personal and professional relationship for more than twenty-five years. Andras Balint Kovacs traces the development of Tarr's themes, characters, and style, showing that almost all of his major stylistic and narrative innovations were already present in his early films and that through a consc...

Projections of Dakar studies the audiovisual creations and practices of twenty-first-century Senegalese filmmakers living, working, and distributing their films in urban Senegal. Although some observers have described contemporary Senegalese cinema as a dying industry, this book shows that it retains great potential. Senegalese cinematic practitioners are forging unique, dynamic responses to social challenges and producing content in innovative forms. Like contemporary Senegalese cinema, African...

A study of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture, drawing on recent memorials, documentaries, and prose narratives that engage with the material legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime...

Most documentaries deal with men, but what do they actually say about masculinity? In this groundbreaking volume Sara Martín analyses more than forty 21st-century documentaries to explore how they represent American men and masculinity. From Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Mask You Live In to Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, this volume explores sixteen different faces of American masculinity: the good man, the activist, the politician, the whistleblower, the criminal, the sexual abuser, the wro...

Istvan Szabo is one of Hungary's most celebrated and best-known film directors, and the only Hungarian to have won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for Mephisto (1981). In a career spanning over five decades Szabo has relentlessly examined the place of the individual in European history, particularly those caught up in the turbulent events of Central Europe and his own native Hungary. His protagonists struggle to find a place for themselves, some meaning in their lives, security...

An engaging read that explores independent documentary film in India as a site of resistance. This book looks at how independent Indian documentary film reworks the relationship between film-makers, their narratives, their subjects and their audience, challenging the dominant idea of documentary as a discourse of the real. Based on close textual analysis, conversations with film-makers and drawing on Breitrose’s cinéma-vérité film-maker as a ‘fly in the soup’, this work explores the place of do...