Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film (Routledge Focus on Film Studies)
by Elizabeth Daggett Matar
Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film introduces the reader to this east-German filmmaker who, despite having made 40 films from the east side of the Berlin Wall, is practically unknown. Through the comparison of films made in the same year, one by an American and one by Böttcher, the author places him as ahead of his time in regards to technology, content, and style, and neck-and-neck with contemporary American filmmakers in cinéma vérité/direct cinema.The book moves beyond Böttcher’s dramatic...
A Place at the Table; A Story of Homecoming for Thanksgiving
by Uloma Kama and Lula Lafayette
What key concerns are reflected in documentaries produced in and about the United States? How have documentaries engaged with competing visions of US history, culture, politics, and national identity? This book examines how documentary films have contributed to the American public sphere - creating a kind of public space, serving as sites for community-building, public expression, and social innovation. Geiger focuses on how documentaries have been significant in forming ideas of the nation, bot...
David Fincher's Zodiac (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities)
David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), written by producer James Vanderbilt and adapted from the true crime works of James Graysmith, remains one of the most respected films of the early 21st century. As the second film featuring a serial killer (and the first based on fact) by Fincher, Zodiac remains a standout in a varied but stylistically unified career. It similarly stands out among a new wave of crime cinema in the early 2000s, including the modern classics Inside Man, Michael Clayton, and Academy...
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...
Screen Production Research
Aimed at students and educators across all levels of Higher Education, this agenda-setting book defines what screen production research is and looks like—and by doing so celebrates creative practice as an important pursuit in the contemporary academic landscape. Drawing on the work of international experts as well as case studies from a range of forms and genres—including screenwriting, fiction filmmaking, documentary production and mobile media practice—the book is an essential guide for those...
Lucid Dreaming is an unprecedented global collection of discussions with documentary and experimental filmmakers, giving film and video its rightful place alongside the written word as an essential medium for conveying the most urgent concerns in contemporary arts and politics. In these long-form conversations, film curator and arts journalist Cohn draws out the thinking of some of the most intriguing creators behind the rapidly developing movement of moving-image nonfiction. The collection fe...
Flash Flaherty
Flash Flaherty, the much-anticipated follow-up volume to The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema, offers a people's history of the world-renowned Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, an annual event where participants confront and reimagine the creative process surrounding multiple document/documentary forms and modes of the moving image. This collection, which includes a mosaic of personal recollections from attendees of the Flaherty Seminar over a span of more than 60 years, highlig...
Negotiating Dissidence traces the very beginnings of Arab women making documentaries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from the 1970s and 1980s in Egypt and Lebanon, to the 1990s and 2000s in Morocco and Syria. Supporting a historical overview of the documentary form in the Arab world with a series of in-depth case studies, Stefanie Van de Peer looks at the work of pioneering figures like Ateyyat El Abnoudy, the 'mother of Egyptian documentary', Tunisia's Selma Baccar and the Palestini...
Based on rare archival documents and films, this anthology is the first to focus primarily on the use of official and colonial documentary films in the South and South-East Asian regions. Drawing together a range of international scholars, the book sheds new light on historical, theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the documentary film, in order to better comprehend the significant transformations of the form in the colonial, late colonial and immediate post-colonial period. Covering d...
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...
Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition
by Bill Nichols and Jaimie Baron
The fourth edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text, Introduction to Documentary, has been vastly altered in its entirety to bring this indispensable textbook up to date and reconceptualize aspects of its treatment of documentaries past and present. Here Nichols, with Jaimie Baron, has edited each chapter for clarity and ease of use and expanded the book with updates and new ideas.Featuring abundant examples and images, Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition is designed to facilitate a r...
Sinophone Cinemas
Sinophone Cinemas considers a range of multilingual, multidialect and multi-accented cinemas produced in Chinese-language locations outside mainland China. Showcasing a variety of new and fascinating case studies from Britain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia, and canvassing a range of formats including commercial co-productions, short films, documentaries and independent films, the book highlights the contemporary screen cultures of Chinese-language communities situated on the margins...
The Practical Guide to Documentary Editing sets out the techniques, the systems and the craft required to edit compelling professional documentary television and film. Working stage by stage through the postproduction process, author Sam Billinge explores project organization, assembling rushes, sequence editing, story structure, music and sound design, and the defining relationship between editor and director. Written by a working documentary editor with over a decade’s worth of experience cut...
The Art of the Observer (Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography)
by David MacDougall
The art of the observer is a personal guide to documentary filmmaking, based on the author’s years of pioneering work in the fields of ethnographic and documentary cinema. It stands in sharp contrast to books of academic film criticism and handbooks on visual research methods, being based extensively on concrete examples from the author’s own filmmaking experience. The book places particular emphasis on observational filmmaking and the ways in which this approach is distinct from other forms of...
Beyond Observation (Racism, Resistance and Social Change) (Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography)
by Paul Henley
Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the ci...