Documentary films Books

Book SynopsisTrade ReviewMuch of the available commentary on the films of Bela Tarr is often confused and confusing. Andras Balint Kovacs cuts through this Gordian Knot with a comprehensive but detailed and precise analysis; this is film-writing at its very best. -- John Cunningham, author of Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to MultiplexTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. The Persona 2. Style in the Early Years 3. The Tarr style 4. The Tarr style in Evolution 5. Narration in the Tarr Films 6. The Characters Conclusion Filmography Select Bibliography Index of Names

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA wonderfully rich collection of essays; thought-provoking, insightful, and poetic in equal measure. Gilliam emerges as an auteur of magic and melancholy, a trickster of the night, a genius of the moving image. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the power of the directorial vision. -- Sean Redmond, Deakin University A lively set of informed and informative essays that offers an array of new perspectives. This collection adds materially to the critical understanding of one of modern cinema's most intriguing and challenging directors -- Peter Marks, University of Sydney A superb examination of a maverick artist... Highly recommended. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction, by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell Terry Gilliam Interview, by Karen Randell 1. Steampunked: The Animated Aesthetics of Terry Gilliam in Jabberwocky and Beyond, by Anna Froula 2. Grail Tales: The Preoccupations of Terry Gilliam, by Tony Hood 3. 'And Now for Something Completely Different': Pythonic Arthuriana and the Matter of Britain, by Jim Holte 4. The Baron, the King and Terry Gilliam's Approach to 'the Fantastic', by Keith James Hamel 5. The Subversion of Happy Endings in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, by Jeffrey Melton and Eric Sterling 6. The Fissure King: Terry Gilliam's Psychotic Fantasy Worlds, by Jacqueline Furby 7. 'You can't change anything': Freedom and Control in Twelve Monkeys, by Gerry Canavan 8. 'It shall be a nation': Terry Gilliam's Exploration of National Identity, Between Rationalism and Imagination, by Ofir Haivry 9. 'Won't somebody please think of the children?': The Case for Terry Gilliam's Tidelands, by Kathryn A. Laity 10. Divorced from Reality: Time Bandits in Search of Fulfilment, by Jeff Birkenstein 11. Celebrity Trauma: The Death of Heath Ledger and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, by Karen Randell Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsForeword Introduction Ego Love and Melodrama Categories of Film Love Making Sense The Ontology of Love Eros in History The Social Paradigm American Cinema of Choice French Cinema of Place Hitchcock and Lang Love in the World Conclusion: On Method Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe epic narratives of modern Chinese fiction feature graphic depictions of sex and violence and dark, raunchy comedy, and these novels deeply reflect China’s turbulent recent historyTrade ReviewA lucid, thought-provoking, and substantial study of several of China's most important creative writers: one that poses crucial questions about the links between fiction, history, and politics in the contemporary People's Republic. -- Julia Lovell, University of London Kinkley's study offers a refreshing comparative perspective on recent works of Chinese historical fiction by classifying them as global dystopian novels with 'Chinese characteristics.' -- Robin Visser, University of North Carolina From his masterful literary biography of Shen Congwen to more recent studies of Chinese political fiction and legal fiction, the interrelation between history and literature has always been an important subtext of Jeffery Kinkley's work. With Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels, Kinkley dives directly into the complex and sometimes murky intersection between history and literature in contemporary China. Along the way, we are introduced to the leading voices in Chinese literature today, including Mo Yan, Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Wang Anyi, and offered nuanced readings of the dystopian undercurrent in their major works. For those interested in delving deeper into the most important Chinese novels of the past quarter century, this is where to start. -- Michael Berry, author of History of Pain and Speaking in Images Following on from his path-breaking studies of contemporary Chinese legal fiction and political novels, Jeffrey Kinkley in his new book. Visions of Dystopia once again displays impressive mastery of a body of Chinese writing that provides us with a unique perspective on the country's turbulent recent history. Engaging with dystopian traditions in literature from South America and elsewhere, Kinkley expertly brings out the uniqueness of the Chinese authors' handling of the past to comment on the present and the future. Identifying himself as a historian, Kinkley at the same time has been and continues to be one of the world's leading scholars of Chinese literataure. -- Michel Hockx, SOAS, University of London In yet another impressive work with impeccable research, Kinkley displays his nuanced understanding of modern and contemporary China through highly readable prose and broad reference to similar works in world literature. A must-read! -- Sylvia Lin, author of Representing Atrocity in Taiwan Jeffrey C. Kinkley has done magnificent work in rethinking the meaning and function of historical dynamics and spatial imaginary in the context of dystopia. He looks into sources drawn from PRC fiction since the New Era, identifies generic and conceptual contestations, and teases out the radical elements in the debate about civil society. Both historically engaged and theoretically provocative, Kinkley's book is a most important source for anyone interested in Chinese and comparative literature and cultural studies. -- David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University This is the best treatment yet of the contemporary PRC historical novel... Highly recommended. Choice An original and penetrating book... [Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels] is an excellent resource for both students and advanced scholars of modern Chinese literature and history. -- Nathaniel Isaacson H-Asia [Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels] is an articulate, thought-provoking, and important contribution to the study of contemporary PRC literature, useful for research and classroom teaching. -- Christopher N. Payne The China Quarterly This is a masterful study of a major genre in recent Chinese literature; it is erudite but readable, strongly comparative, and with both historical and literary perspective. -- Richard King Pacific Affairs By virtue of his knowledge, keen comparative insights, and detailed close readings, Kinkley delivers more than his modest title promises... China scholars in other disciplines will find much of value in this far-reaching magnum opus. Scholars of contemporary Chinese literature will find it indispensable. -- Sabina Knight The China JournalTable of ContentsPreface 1. Introduction: Chinese Visions of History and Dystopia 2. Discomforts of Temporal Anomie 3. Projections of Historical Repetition 4. Alienation from the Group 5. Anarchy: Social, Moral, and Cosmic 6. Conclusion: The End of History, Dystopia, and "New" Historical Novels? List of Chinese Characters Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExamines late modernism’s decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.Trade ReviewThe Extinct Scene encourages us to see how British intellectuals, metropolitan and colonial, registered the impact of world-historical events-especially the Second World War and the collapse of the British Empire-through depictions of the everyday. With fresh readings of canonical writers and suggestive interpretations of less widely studied figures, this book offers a smart and timely contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of midcentury modernism. -- Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky The Extinct Scene is a superb conceptual and historical contribution to twentieth-century literary studies, treating the period of geopolitical crisis between World War I and World War II. Thomas S. Davis rethinks the legacies of avant-gardism and modernism in Britain in the wake of World War I, tracing an 'outward turn' that enfolds modernist techniques into realist forms. With astute readings of texts and films that focus on everyday scenes and objects-amid bombed landscapes and under the specter of another war-Davis also considers how these aesthetics reflect authors' investments in state-rebuilding projects or in nationalist sentiment. Drawing deftly on critical theory, The Extinct Scene also develops an exemplary method for interpreting literature and authorship in its geopolitical context. -- Laura Doyle, University of Massachusetts The Extinct Scene opens up a new trove of modernist genres that gave literary form to the world-systemic transitions of the mid-twentieth century. Davis's insistence on the geopolitical rather than the global as the frame of reference for experimental writing makes this book more conceptually rigorous and politically current than other works in transnational modernisms. An entirely convincing account of the period, as deft in its fine-grained readings as it is inspiring in its theoretical ambition. -- Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development [An] impressive study... [Davis] provides fresh insights into a period already intensely studied, offering new and wide-ranging interpretations... Recommended. Choice A brilliant and timely book... [The Extinct Scene] combines theoretical sophistication with historical detail to produce finely grained readings. -- Allan Hepburn Modernism / modernity [A] brilliant book... Davis brings a new level of archival density and diversity - from Mass-Observation to the Windrush generation - to bear on conversations about Modernism and the way we relate global events to the developing variety and social agility of aesthetic form throughout this convulsive era. -- David James Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Late Modernism and the Outward Turn 1. The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia: Documentary, Mass-Observation, and the Fate of the Liberal Avant-Garde 2. The Historical Novel at History's End 3. Late Modernism's Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones 4. War Gothic 5. "It is de age of colonial concern": Vernacular Fictions and Political Belonging Epilogue: "Appointments to keep in the past" Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder. The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire.Trade ReviewThe Extinct Scene encourages us to see how British intellectuals, metropolitan and colonial, registered the impact of world-historical events—especially the Second World War and the collapse of the British Empire—through depictions of the everyday. With fresh readings of canonical writers and suggestive interpretations of less widely studied figures, this book offers a smart and timely contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of midcentury modernism. -- Peter Kalliney, University of KentuckyThe Extinct Scene is a superb conceptual and historical contribution to twentieth-century literary studies, treating the period of geopolitical crisis between World War I and World War II. Thomas S. Davis rethinks the legacies of avant-gardism and modernism in Britain in the wake of World War I, tracing an 'outward turn' that enfolds modernist techniques into realist forms. With astute readings of texts and films that focus on everyday scenes and objects—amid bombed landscapes and under the specter of another war—Davis also considers how these aesthetics reflect authors' investments in state-rebuilding projects or in nationalist sentiment. Drawing deftly on critical theory, The Extinct Scene also develops an exemplary method for interpreting literature and authorship in its geopolitical context. -- Laura Doyle, University of MassachusettsThe Extinct Scene opens up a new trove of modernist genres that gave literary form to the world-systemic transitions of the mid-twentieth century. Davis's insistence on the geopolitical rather than the global as the frame of reference for experimental writing makes this book more conceptually rigorous and politically current than other works in transnational modernisms. An entirely convincing account of the period, as deft in its fine-grained readings as it is inspiring in its theoretical ambition. -- Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development[An] impressive study.... [Davis] provides fresh insights into a period already intensely studied, offering new and wide-ranging interpretations.... Recommended. * Choice *A brilliant and timely book.... [The Extinct Scene] combines theoretical sophistication with historical detail to produce finely grained readings. -- Allan Hepburn * Modernism / modernity *[A] brilliant book.... Davis brings a new level of archival density and diversity – from Mass-Observation to the Windrush generation – to bear on conversations about Modernism and the way we relate global events to the developing variety and social agility of aesthetic form throughout this convulsive era. -- David James * Times Literary Supplement *A valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on late modernism, to which it adds a compelling interpretive frame. . . . its theoretical reflections on 'everyday life' will benefit those seeking to develop a better understanding of how art mediates larger world-historical forces. -- Matthew Eatough * Modern Language Quarterly *There's a lot to admire in this wide-ranging study, which will certainly sharpen scholars' understanding of the ways late modernism rings the changes on what are arguably key themes for modernism tout court: the quotidian and the global. -- Len Gutkin * MFS: Modern Fiction Studies *A new and noteworthy account of the complicated aesthetic networks of interwar Britain. * Novel: A Forum on Fiction *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Late Modernism and the Outward Turn1. The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia: Documentary, Mass-Observation, and the Fate of the Liberal Avant-Garde2. The Historical Novel at History's End3. Late Modernism's Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones4. War Gothic5. "It is de age of colonial concern": Vernacular Fictions and Political BelongingEpilogue: "Appointments to keep in the past"NotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe first English-language study of all Szabó's feature films and uses material from interviews with him and his collaboratorsTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Beginnings 1. Born into the Storm 2. Growing Up, Film School and 1956 3. The Early Films: The Age of Daydreaming (Almodozasok kora); Father (Apa--egy hit naploja); Lovefilm (Szerelmesfilm) 4. The 'Budapest' Films: Films: Budapest, Why I Love It (Budapest, amiert szeretem); 25 Fireman's Street (Tuzolto utca 25); Budapest Tales (Budapesti mesek); City Map (Varosterkep) and Confidence (Bizalom) 5. Tales from Mitteleuropa: Mephisto; Colonel Redl; Hanussen 6. New Europe, New Hungary, New Problems: Meeting Venus and Sweet Emma, Dear Bobe (Edes Emma, draga Bobe) 7. 'The man who comes from somewhere else is always suspect': Sunshine 8. To Go or Stay? Taking Sides 9. Adaptations: Being Julia; Relatives; and The Door 10. The Controversy Surrounding the Events of 1957 and After 11. Szabo, Hungarian Cinema and the Question of Censorship--a Note 12. Some Conclusions Notes Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisDescribes how post-9/11 cinema, from Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), relates to different, and competing, versions of US national identity in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacksTrade ReviewParallel Lines is the definitive statement on American cinema's responses to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Countless writers have weighed in on the effects of the 9/11 attacks, often reflexively perceiving them as wholly transformative of American culture, including virtually all activity in US screen industries. Guy Westwell does an end-run around the lazy shorthand that accompanies much of the discursive claims about 9/11 and cinema. Parallel Lines shows us how politicians, filmmakers, and cultural commentators perceived the events of September 11 and how screen texts distilled these attitudes into a narrow set of textual articulations involving unity, vengeance and victimisation. Ranging across mainstream Hollywood film, independent cinema, television documentary, and output from the fringes of the ideological spectrum, Westwell's book rigorously investigates the many cycles of films that appeared in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq War. With sustained close readings, sure-footed argumentation, and meticulous attention to print news and commentary, Westwell's coverage give us an essential account of how cultural productions respond to monumental disasters and disruptions. -- Mark Gallagher, University of Nottingham, UK; author of Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives Lucid and compelling, Parallel Lines views American cinema of the post-9/11 period as a charged engagement with fundamental issues of national identity. Exploring a wide range of films, Westwell provides the most articulate and textually detailed analysis of this wrenching period that I have read. This important book will shape arguments about the post 9/11 cinema for many years to come. -- Robert Burgoyne, University of St. Andrews, UK; author of The Hollywood Historical Film and Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History With thoroughness, clarity and good sense, Westwell's Parallel Lines provides an authoritative route through the jingoism and contradictions characterising post-9/11 US cinema. Delineating the various stages and themes of post-9/11 US film, this highly informative book will prove a godsend to those trying to make sense of the period. In its keen understanding of social-historical events and skilful but nuanced film analyses, the book achieves that rare thing for Film Studies - properly contextualised, and politically astute, work. -- Michele Aaron, University of Birmingham, UK; author of Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I This volume provides a compelling and comprehensive tour d'horizon of the post-9/11 cinematic landscape. It blends thematic analysis with filmic vignette and in so doing will ensure that academic staff, students and the general reader will profit from reading this account. Strongly recommended. -- Klaus Dodds, Royal Holloway, University of London; co-author of International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power Anyone wishing to understand the cultural politics of post-9/11 America should read this book. It clearly shows the role that cinema has played in the "national conversation" that has taken place in the United States over the course of the "war on terror", and perhaps more importantly, does so without reducing film to simplistic pro-war/anti-war binaries. This book deserves to be read widely both within and beyond film studies. -- Sean Carter, University of Exeter, UK; co-author of International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power Comprehensive in its materials, nuanced in its analysis - the definitive account of American cinema after 9/11. -- Astrid Erll, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main [A] cogent examination of post-9/11 American cinema... Recommended. Choice Well written, comprehensive and accessible. ScreenTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Uncertainty Unity Conspiracy The Return to Ground Zero The End of the World The September 11 Syndrome Torture The Iraq War History Notes Filmography Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTraces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and videoTrade Review[A] wild ride of a book... Elwes has made an admirable assault on the field and I am sure this book will influence generations of students. Art Monthly Fascinating. Cinema TechnologyTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. Architecture 2. Painting 3. Sculpture 4. Performance 5. Film History 6. Film as Film 7. Structural Film: Detractions and Revisions 8. The Dialectics of Spectatorship 9. Expanded Cinema 10. Sound 11. Video Installation 12. Closing Thoughts Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTaking a broad view of interactive documentary as any work which engages with âthe realâ by employing digital interactive technology, this volume addresses a range of platforms and environments, from web-docs and virtual reality to mobile media and live performance.Trade Reviewi-Docs, web docs, interactive docs, database docs, nonlinear stories, procedural narratives; the sheer variety of neologisms in circulation right now is indicative of an exciting, if turbulent, economy of documentary-oriented new media forms. This timely, original collection captures much of this uncertainty and excitement, with contributions from some of the key thinkers in what we might call 'new documentary studies.' -- Professor Matt Soar, Concordia UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Contributors Foreword, by Brian Winston Introduction, by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, Mandy Rose Part 1. Co-Creation Preface, by Mandy Rose 1. I-docs and the documentary tradition: exploring questions of engagement, by Kate Nash 2. Co-creation as talkback: using the collaborative and interactive docu-forms to (re)imagine the 'rape-city', by Anandana Kapur 3. Documentary as co-creative practice: From Challenge for Change to Highrise - Kat Cizek in conversation with Mandy Rose, edited by Anna Wiehl 4. Not media about, but media with: co-creation for activism, by Mandy Rose 5. Living collaborations in Los Sures, Brooklyn: 1984 and today, by Christopher Allen 6. Software as co-creator in interactive documentary, by Craig Hight Part 2. Methods Preface, by Sandra Gaudenzi 7. Evaluating users' experiences: a case study approach to improving i-doc UX Design, by Samuel Gantier and Michel Labour 8. User experience versus author experience: lessons learned from the UX Series, by Sandra Gaudenzi 9. Pushing the craft forward: the POV Hackathon as a collaborative approach to making an interactive documentary, by Jess Linington 10. The Learn Do Share design methodology: Lance Weiler in conversation, by Sandra Gaudenzi 11. Testing and evaluating design prototypes: the case study of Avatar Secrets, by Ramona Pringle 12. Look who's watching: what storytellers can learn from privacy and personalisation, by Ben Moskowitz Part 3. Horizons Preface, by Judith Aston 13. Things to come: the possible futures of documentary ... from a historical perspective, by William Uricchio 14. Towards behavioural realism: experiments in immersive journalism, by Nonny de la Pena 15. Interactive documentary and live performance: from embodied to emplaced interaction, by Judith Aston 16. The travelling i-doc: reflections on the meaning of interactive documentary-based image-making practices in contemporary India, by Paolo Favero 17. Interactive documentary aqui y ahora - here & now: themes and directions in South America, by Arnau Gifreu-Castells 18. Who wants to become banal?: the i-doc from experiment to industry, by Jon Dovey Index

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Book SynopsisTaking a broad view of interactive documentary as any work which engages with the real' by employing digital interactive technology, this volume addresses a range of platforms and environments, from web-docs and virtual reality to mobile media and live performance.Trade Reviewi-Docs, web docs, interactive docs, database docs, nonlinear stories, procedural narratives; the sheer variety of neologisms in circulation right now is indicative of an exciting, if turbulent, economy of documentary-oriented new media forms. This timely, original collection captures much of this uncertainty and excitement, with contributions from some of the key thinkers in what we might call 'new documentary studies.' -- Professor Matt Soar, Concordia UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Contributors Foreword, by Brian Winston Introduction, by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, Mandy Rose Part 1. Co-Creation Preface, by Mandy Rose 1. I-docs and the documentary tradition: exploring questions of engagement, by Kate Nash 2. Co-creation as talkback: using the collaborative and interactive docu-forms to (re)imagine the 'rape-city', by Anandana Kapur 3. Documentary as co-creative practice: From Challenge for Change to Highrise - Kat Cizek in conversation with Mandy Rose, edited by Anna Wiehl 4. Not media about, but media with: co-creation for activism, by Mandy Rose 5. Living collaborations in Los Sures, Brooklyn: 1984 and today, by Christopher Allen 6. Software as co-creator in interactive documentary, by Craig Hight Part 2. Methods Preface, by Sandra Gaudenzi 7. Evaluating users' experiences: a case study approach to improving i-doc UX Design, by Samuel Gantier and Michel Labour 8. User experience versus author experience: lessons learned from the UX Series, by Sandra Gaudenzi 9. Pushing the craft forward: the POV Hackathon as a collaborative approach to making an interactive documentary, by Jess Linington 10. The Learn Do Share design methodology: Lance Weiler in conversation, by Sandra Gaudenzi 11. Testing and evaluating design prototypes: the case study of Avatar Secrets, by Ramona Pringle 12. Look who's watching: what storytellers can learn from privacy and personalisation, by Ben Moskowitz Part 3. Horizons Preface, by Judith Aston 13. Things to come: the possible futures of documentary ... from a historical perspective, by William Uricchio 14. Towards behavioural realism: experiments in immersive journalism, by Nonny de la Pena 15. Interactive documentary and live performance: from embodied to emplaced interaction, by Judith Aston 16. The travelling i-doc: reflections on the meaning of interactive documentary-based image-making practices in contemporary India, by Paolo Favero 17. Interactive documentary aqui y ahora - here & now: themes and directions in South America, by Arnau Gifreu-Castells 18. Who wants to become banal?: the i-doc from experiment to industry, by Jon Dovey Index

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Book SynopsisPerpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Raya Morag analyzes how Post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide.Trade ReviewThis compelling book will matter as long as mass atrocities persist. Focused on the Cambodian genocide, Morag addresses a new phase in how we confront such events: films where survivors confront perpetrators face-to-face. These confrontations bring the visceral truth borne directly of human encounter to the fore with consequences both intensely personal and profoundly political. -- Bill Nichols, author of Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in DocumentaryThis book is far more than an illuminating analysis of Cambodian postgenocide cinema, valuable as that is, given the Pol Pot regime’s destruction of the country’s film industry, its artists, and its entire film archive, along with 1.7 million Cambodian lives. Morag ushers us forward to view unique interactions and confrontations between first-generation survivors and top- and lower-level Khmer Rouge perpetrators, made possible by the regime’s overthrow in 1979, its remnants’ defeat and surrender in 1999, and the establishment of the UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal in 2006. The book offers front-row seats to a new genre of post-Holocaust global documentary film, with innovative approaches to the study of genocide, trauma, and gender. -- Ben Kiernan, author of The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79In Perpetrator Cinema, Raya Morag brings her superb intellect and expertise in trauma and Holocaust cinema to this study of groundbreaking films inspired by Cambodia's Year Zero. Morag brilliantly explores why an ethics of moral resentment undergirds the survivor-perpetrator duels in the cinema of Rithy Panh, Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin, and Guillaume P. Suon, among others, and aptly considers films about sexual violence, among the Khmer Rouge's worst human rights abuses. Documentary scholars and South Asian cinema specialists will find much to praise in this theoretically rich, engrossing work. -- Deirdre Boyle, The New SchoolA must resource for students of documentary film and politics . . . Essential. * Choice *Table of ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsAbbreviations1. Defining Perpetrator Cinema2. Post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian Cinema and the Big Perpetrators: Reconciliation or Resentment?3. Perpetratorhood Paradigms: The Duel and Moral Resentment4. Gendered Genocide: The Female Perpetrator, Forced Marriage, and RapeEpilogue: The Era of Perpetrator EthicsNotesFilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisVoyages of Discovery is the definitive account of Frederick Wiseman’s career, offering a comprehensive analysis of the work of the leading documentary filmmaker in the United States. In this updated edition, Barry Keith Grant adds new material exploring the documentarian’s works since the 1990s.Trade ReviewBarry Keith Grant provides an updated version of his own singularly authoritative study of documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s astonishing range of films—from the controversial Titicutt Follies through such diverse examples as Meat, Missile, Model, Deaf, Blind, Public Housing, Ballet, and Belfast, Maine, to name a few. In his deeply informed study, Grant creates his own meticulous, yet accessible, “tapestry” of inquiry worthy of the same approach he credits Wiseman with adopting. Grant’s insightful readings of Wiseman’s carefully wrought compositions—and the happy accidents that sometimes occur—highlight colorful thematic threads woven to create the “reality fictions” Wiseman, in his own words, is producing. At the same time, Grant presents a capacious “mosaic,” placing Wiseman’s films in textured dialogue, not only with each other, but also with works of literature, art, theater, music, and dance, along with other films and Hollywood genres, that inform them. Grant explores Wiseman’s penetrating vision of institutional operations—the human interactions that sustain them and the ideological underpinnings beneath the “rules” that govern them. As Grant compellingly claims, Wiseman avoids providing viewers with easy answers. Voyages of Discovery powerfully uncovers the ambiguities inviting viewers to democratically, actively, and reflexively assess their own participation in, contributions to, and complicity within the cultural conditions Frederick Wiseman so evocatively observes. -- Cynthia Lucia, Rider UniversityVoyages of Discovery is one of the very best books of film analysis and scholarship that I've ever read. It is certainly the essential work about a major film-maker, whose films require special tools and sensitivities to discuss, which Grant possesses in abundance. This is a most useful work both for those just discovering Wiseman and those who think they know him. Great ideas abound on every page, and Grant's organization of the films is original and helpful. Exemplary as well are the carefully selected frame enlargements, which nicely support his close analysis of visual issues. Grant's ability to bring in relevant ideas from both film study and beyond it is the mark of an eminent scholar. That Grant discusses the entirety of Wiseman's prodigious output, in depth and entertainingly, is also quite an accomplishment. -- Stephen Mamber, author of Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled DocumentaryThis is the new edition we have been waiting for. Barry Keith Grant provides an essential companion to Frederick Wiseman, one of the most distinctive and prominent voices in US documentary. Voyages of Discovery offers perceptive and in-depth analyses of Wiseman's vast catalogue, ranging from the 1960s to his most recent work. Grant foregrounds the ways Wiseman's films have not only documented institutions but have challenged their established practices, encouraging audiences to meaningfully engage with and question the hierarchies and fraught political dynamics encountered in everyday life. This study matches the subtlety and resistance to reductive narratives found in Wiseman's own films, revealing why his work remains compelling and necessary viewing that continues to speak to the present day. -- Jeffrey Geiger, author of American Documentary Film: Projecting the NationThis revised edition of Voyages of Discovery is updated and expanded to cover Wiseman’s prodigious output over the decades since the original appeared. Supplemented and supported by a range of secondary sources from diverse fields spanning film studies, sociology, art history, and political science (among so many others), Grant develops a portrait of a working filmmaker that is informed and definitive. -- Michael Baker, Sheridan CollegeThe time is right for a second edition, and this year's 'revised and expanded' version rises to the occasion. * Journal of American Culture *Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPrefaceIntroduction1. Man with a Movie Camera2. American Madness: Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970), Juvenile Court (1974), Welfare (1975)3. The Big Parade: Basic Training (1971), Manoeuvre (1979), Missile (1988)4. Blood of the Beasts: Primate (1974), Meat (1976), Racetrack (1985), Zoo (1993)5. When Worlds Collide: Canal Zone (1977), Sinai Field Mission (1978), Model (1980), The Store (1983)6. The Bad and the Beautiful: The Cool World (1963), Seraphita’s Diary (1982)7. You and Me: Essene (1972), Blind (1987), Deaf (1987), Adjustment and Work (1987), Multi-Handicapped (1987), Aspen (1991)8. Love and Death: Near Death (1989)9. The Never-Ending Story: High School II (1994), Public Housing (1997), Domestic Violence (2001), Domestic Violence 2 (2002)10. Playtime: Ballet (1995), La Comédie-Française, ou L’amour joué (1996), The Last Letter (2002), La Danse—Le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris (2009), Boxing Gym (2010), Crazy Horse (2011), National Gallery (2014), A Couple (2022)11. Our Town: Central Park (1989), Belfast, Maine (1999), State Legislature (2007), At Berkeley (2013), In Jackson Heights (2015), EX-LIBRIS: The New York Public Library (2017), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), City Hall (2020)FilmographyIndividual AwardsRetrospective ScreeningsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as documentary and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world.Trade ReviewZimmermann's anthology envisions documentary as a set of practices that investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. This collection of essays, a culmination of her scholarship over the past twenty years, is a testament to her groundbreaking work and contribution to the field of documentary studies. -- The 2019-2020 Park School Faculty Writing AwardPatricia Zimmermannn's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics casts a wide net, capturing media ecologies as varied as museum installations, film festival showings, photography, and multiple varieties of internet sharing. . . . Her book is bound to create new paths for exploration and to open up a new awareness of the richness and complexity of the global media landscape. -- Inez Hedges * Jump Cut *Exploring a wonderfully diverse range of documentary projects that includes installation pieces, archives, still photography, community-based collaborative media, experimental shorts and video art, the essays analyze how work is done, by whom, for whom, to what end, and why these questions matter. -- Richard Shpuntoff * Documentary *Patricia Zimmermann's book Documentary Across Platforms provides a knowledgeable insight into the ever-evolving practices beyond conventional non-fiction cinema. It is an important contribution to contemporary documentary studies and also a must-read for all filmmakers and audiences who consider the genre a conceptual practice to think about themselves and the world – how it is and how it might be. -- Melita Zajc * Modern Times Review *Zimmermann's invitations to reassess and engage in her own work have taken several forms over the past twenty-five years. They include essays for journals or exhibition catalogs, books, magazine articles, public presentations, handouts for public screenings, and postulates to arouse further conversation. They incorporate personal accounts, deep dives into the archival record, theoretical musings, and the occasional call to arms. Now one can read a thematically arranged selection of this remarkable career in a new collection. -- Melissa Dollman * The Moving Image *Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. . . . Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering, Media, Place and Politics is a vital textual resource for confronting the many changes that have taken place in writing about documentary and practicing documentary that has evolved into such new areas of scholarship in recent years. To remain abreast of these advances is important. It means keeping in touch with an ever-evolving world, something that Zimmerman is well able to do. Here's hoping she can keep doing it well into the future. -- Dara Waldron * Alphaville *Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. Zimmerman, best known for her pioneering scholarship in the area of home movies (considered as a subset of the documentary film), demonstrates a real intellectual zest when moving across the terrain of documentary film practices and their extension into certain areas of contemporary art. -- Dara Waldron * alphaville / Journal of Film and Media *Table of ContentsForeword / Gina MarchettiIntroduction: Documentary Across PlatformsPart I: Platforms1. Reverse Engineering: Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology2. Ardent Spaces, Formidable Environments3. Precious Places, Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia4. The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves5. Cartographies of Impossible and Possible Worlds: The Photography of Michael Kienitz6. Black Soil: Chernozem and Tusit in UkrainePart II: Reversals7. Matrices of War8. Blasting War9. Digital Deployments10. Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Digitalities11. Cambodian Digital Imaginary Archive: Genocide, Lara Croft, and CraftsPart III: Histories12. The Home Movie Archive Live13. Throbs and Pulsations: Les LeVeque and the Digitizing of Desire14. Just Say No: Negativland's No Business15. Remixed and Revisited Black Cinema: Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates Live Project16. Live!: Reconnecting the Histories of Live Multimedia Performance17. Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media DocumentaryPart IV: Speculative Engineering18. Home Movie Axioms19. Speculations on Environmental Sensualities and Eco-Documentaries20. Speculations on Reverse Engineering: Algorithms for Recombinant Documentaries Across PlatformsAcknowledgementsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Trade ReviewZimmermann's anthology envisions documentary as a set of practices that investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. This collection of essays, a culmination of her scholarship over the past twenty years, is a testament to her groundbreaking work and contribution to the field of documentary studies. -- The 2019-2020 Park School Faculty Writing AwardPatricia Zimmermannn's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics casts a wide net, capturing media ecologies as varied as museum installations, film festival showings, photography, and multiple varieties of internet sharing. . . . Her book is bound to create new paths for exploration and to open up a new awareness of the richness and complexity of the global media landscape. -- Inez Hedges * Jump Cut *Exploring a wonderfully diverse range of documentary projects that includes installation pieces, archives, still photography, community-based collaborative media, experimental shorts and video art, the essays analyze how work is done, by whom, for whom, to what end, and why these questions matter. -- Richard Shpuntoff * Documentary *Patricia Zimmermann's book Documentary Across Platforms provides a knowledgeable insight into the ever-evolving practices beyond conventional non-fiction cinema. It is an important contribution to contemporary documentary studies and also a must-read for all filmmakers and audiences who consider the genre a conceptual practice to think about themselves and the world – how it is and how it might be. -- Melita Zajc * Modern Times Review *Zimmermann's invitations to reassess and engage in her own work have taken several forms over the past twenty-five years. They include essays for journals or exhibition catalogs, books, magazine articles, public presentations, handouts for public screenings, and postulates to arouse further conversation. They incorporate personal accounts, deep dives into the archival record, theoretical musings, and the occasional call to arms. Now one can read a thematically arranged selection of this remarkable career in a new collection. -- Melissa Dollman * The Moving Image *Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. . . . Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering, Media, Place and Politics is a vital textual resource for confronting the many changes that have taken place in writing about documentary and practicing documentary that has evolved into such new areas of scholarship in recent years. To remain abreast of these advances is important. It means keeping in touch with an ever-evolving world, something that Zimmerman is well able to do. Here's hoping she can keep doing it well into the future. -- Dara Waldron * Alphaville *Patricia R. Zimmerman's Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics is a rich and diverse compendium of texts spanning decades and covering a myriad of topics related to the expanded nature of documentary platforms. Zimmerman, best known for her pioneering scholarship in the area of home movies (considered as a subset of the documentary film), demonstrates a real intellectual zest when moving across the terrain of documentary film practices and their extension into certain areas of contemporary art. -- Dara Waldron * alphaville / Journal of Film and Media *Table of ContentsForeword / Gina MarchettiIntroduction: Documentary Across PlatformsPart I: Platforms1. Reverse Engineering: Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology2. Ardent Spaces, Formidable Environments3. Precious Places, Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia4. The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves5. Cartographies of Impossible and Possible Worlds: The Photography of Michael Kienitz6. Black Soil: Chernozem and Tusit in UkrainePart II: Reversals7. Matrices of War8. Blasting War9. Digital Deployments10. Public Domains: Engaging Iraq through Experimental Digitalities11. Cambodian Digital Imaginary Archive: Genocide, Lara Croft, and CraftsPart III: Histories12. The Home Movie Archive Live13. Throbs and Pulsations: Les LeVeque and the Digitizing of Desire14. Just Say No: Negativland's No Business15. Remixed and Revisited Black Cinema: Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates Live Project16. Live!: Reconnecting the Histories of Live Multimedia Performance17. Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media DocumentaryPart IV: Speculative Engineering18. Home Movie Axioms19. Speculations on Environmental Sensualities and Eco-Documentaries20. Speculations on Reverse Engineering: Algorithms for Recombinant Documentaries Across PlatformsAcknowledgementsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAnderson and Milliken's book is no less than a groundbreaking study. Its exclusive focus on popular documentaries digs an alternative route next to the lane of popular fiction. -- Ohad Landesman, Tel Aviv UniversityMilliken and Anderson's excellent volume on "popular" documentary is both a long time coming and absolutely rooted in this moment in the history of documentary media. The volume fills an almost shocking gap in scholarly writing on popular documentary—especially given the value documentary studies places on its connection with the political—and it does so as the stakes of shared knowledge of the world have never been higher. Together, the chapters in this volume compellingly explore a range of documentary media forms while always interrogating what the "popular" actually entails. -- Josh Malitsky, author of A Companion to Documentary Film HistoryMore and more often I encounter first-year students who arrive at college and tell me right away that they love documentaries—thanks, I believe, to the rising popularity of the form on streaming sites like Netflix. . . . They and many, many viewers are consuming just the kinds of popular documentary texts that this collection addresses. -- Jennifer Malkowski, author of Dying in Full Detail: Morality and Digital DocumentaryTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPart I: Popular Documentary Today1. Pop Docs: The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts, by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson2. Reclaiming the Popular for Public Interest Documentary, by Ezra WintonPart II: Documentary Ecologies3. Public Television's Role in the U.S. Documentary Ecology, by Patricia Aufderheide4. On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre, by Zoë Druick5. Accelerating Deceleration: Slow Violence and Time-Lapse Cinematography, by Devon CouttsPart III: Short Forms and Web Practices6. From Elegy to Kitsch: Spectacles of Epistephelia in Food, Inc. and Early Food Documentaries, by Sabiha Ahmad Khan7. Errol Morris, The New York Times, Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs, by Anthony Kinik8. Popular Music & Short Form Nonfiction: Is the Web a Forum for Documentary Innovation?, by Michael Brendan BakerPart IV: Auteurs, Politics and Popularity9. From the Essay Film to the Video Essay: Between the Critical and the Popular, by Allison de Fren10. Errol Morris and the Ends of Irony, by Jonathan Kahana11. Vérite: Lauren Greenfield and the Challenge of Feminist Documentary, by Shilyh WarrenPart V: Documentary Genres12. Citizenfour and the Anti-Representational Turn: Aesthetics of Failure in the Information Age, by S. Topiary Landberg13. Of Kids and Sharks: Victims, Heroes and the Politics of Melodrama in Popular Documentary, by Christie Milliken14. Strategies of the Popular Music Documentary's Recovery Mode, by Landon PalmerPart VI: Engaging Audiences15. Assembling Nanking: Archival Filmmaking in the Popular Historical Documentary, by Dylan Nelson16. Virality is Virility: Viral Media, Popularity and Violence, by Alexandra Juhasz17. Populism, Participation and Perpetual Incompletion: Performing an Urban History Commons, by Rick Prelinger18. The Armchair Juror: Audience Engagement in True Crime Documentaries, by George S. Larke-Walsh19. New (Old) Ontologies of Documentary, by Steve F. AndersonIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAnderson and Milliken's book is no less than a groundbreaking study. Its exclusive focus on popular documentaries digs an alternative route next to the lane of popular fiction. -- Ohad Landesman, Tel Aviv UniversityMilliken and Anderson's excellent volume on "popular" documentary is both a long time coming and absolutely rooted in this moment in the history of documentary media. The volume fills an almost shocking gap in scholarly writing on popular documentary—especially given the value documentary studies places on its connection with the political—and it does so as the stakes of shared knowledge of the world have never been higher. Together, the chapters in this volume compellingly explore a range of documentary media forms while always interrogating what the "popular" actually entails. -- Josh Malitsky, author of A Companion to Documentary Film HistoryMore and more often I encounter first-year students who arrive at college and tell me right away that they love documentaries—thanks, I believe, to the rising popularity of the form on streaming sites like Netflix. . . . They and many, many viewers are consuming just the kinds of popular documentary texts that this collection addresses. -- Jennifer Malkowski, author of Dying in Full Detail: Morality and Digital DocumentaryTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPart I: Popular Documentary Today1. Pop Docs: The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts, by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson2. Reclaiming the Popular for Public Interest Documentary, by Ezra WintonPart II: Documentary Ecologies3. Public Television's Role in the U.S. Documentary Ecology, by Patricia Aufderheide4. On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre, by Zoë Druick5. Accelerating Deceleration: Slow Violence and Time-Lapse Cinematography, by Devon CouttsPart III: Short Forms and Web Practices6. From Elegy to Kitsch: Spectacles of Epistephelia in Food, Inc. and Early Food Documentaries, by Sabiha Ahmad Khan7. Errol Morris, The New York Times, Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs, by Anthony Kinik8. Popular Music & Short Form Nonfiction: Is the Web a Forum for Documentary Innovation?, by Michael Brendan BakerPart IV: Auteurs, Politics and Popularity9. From the Essay Film to the Video Essay: Between the Critical and the Popular, by Allison de Fren10. Errol Morris and the Ends of Irony, by Jonathan Kahana11. Vérite: Lauren Greenfield and the Challenge of Feminist Documentary, by Shilyh WarrenPart V: Documentary Genres12. Citizenfour and the Anti-Representational Turn: Aesthetics of Failure in the Information Age, by S. Topiary Landberg13. Of Kids and Sharks: Victims, Heroes and the Politics of Melodrama in Popular Documentary, by Christie Milliken14. Strategies of the Popular Music Documentary's Recovery Mode, by Landon PalmerPart VI: Engaging Audiences15. Assembling Nanking: Archival Filmmaking in the Popular Historical Documentary, by Dylan Nelson16. Virality is Virility: Viral Media, Popularity and Violence, by Alexandra Juhasz17. Populism, Participation and Perpetual Incompletion: Performing an Urban History Commons, by Rick Prelinger18. The Armchair Juror: Audience Engagement in True Crime Documentaries, by George S. Larke-Walsh19. New (Old) Ontologies of Documentary, by Steve F. AndersonIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAn innovative contribution to media studies that explores the embodied experiences of both performers and camerapersons filming war reenactments, military training simulations, and an annual lynching reenactment. -- Wendy Kozol, author of Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of WitnessingTable of ContentsIntroduction: Reflecting on "Moments of Truth"1. Being There Again: Reenacting Camerawork in In Country (2014)2. Weaponizing Affect: A Film Phenomenology of 3D Military Training Simulations During the Iraq War3. 'Do You Want to Play a Klansman?': Lynching Photography, Civil Rights Camerawork, and the Moore's Ford Lynching Reenactment in Georgia4. Establishing a Black Affective Infrastructure: From Lynching Performance in the Hollywood of the South to Always in Season (2019)Conclusion: Toward an Embodied Social Cinema, or From Point of View to Social SenseFilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAn innovative contribution to media studies that explores the embodied experiences of both performers and camerapersons filming war reenactments, military training simulations, and an annual lynching reenactment. -- Wendy Kozol, author of Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of WitnessingTable of ContentsIntroduction: Reflecting on "Moments of Truth"1. Being There Again: Reenacting Camerawork in In Country (2014)2. Weaponizing Affect: A Film Phenomenology of 3D Military Training Simulations During the Iraq War3. 'Do You Want to Play a Klansman?': Lynching Photography, Civil Rights Camerawork, and the Moore's Ford Lynching Reenactment in Georgia4. Establishing a Black Affective Infrastructure: From Lynching Performance in the Hollywood of the South to Always in Season (2019)Conclusion: Toward an Embodied Social Cinema, or From Point of View to Social SenseFilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisHow do issues of form and content shape the documentary film? In what ways do documentaries abide by or subvert ethical expectations? Are mockumentaries a form of subversion? The author investigates the ways documentaries strive for accuracy and truthfulness and simultaneously fabricate a form that shapes reality.Trade Review"There is a fluidity in Nichols’ writing that gently forces us to see the 'blurred boundaries' . . . between all forms of visual expression. In reading these essays, one is often struck by how much is illuminated, not only within the boundaries of documentary film but into the historical, political, social and cultural world that provides the fertile ground where ideas take root." * Documentary *"Nichols’s marvelous volume of essays . . . spans forty years of his contribution to contemporary film theory. It offers lucid, articulate, and illuminating studies of both general issues in documentary theory and of individual films. Readers familiar with his books will find fascinating essays here, both supplementing his published volumes and adding new perspectives on his work." * European Legacy *Table of ContentsPREFACE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION PART I. DOCUMENTARY MEETS THE NEIGHBORS: THE AVANT-GARDE AND FICTION FILM PART II. THE AUDIO IN AUDIOVISUAL PART III. BEYOND "JUST THE FACTS": EVIDENCE, INTERPRETATION, AND SOCIAL CONTEXT PART IV. ETHICS AND IRONY IN DOCUMENTARY PART V. POLITICS AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM NOTES INDEX

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Book SynopsisLos Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977 explores how documentarians working between the election of John F. Kennedy and the Bicentennial created conflicting visions of the recent and more distant American past. Drawing on a wide range of primary documents, Joshua Glick analyzes the films of Hollywood documentarians such as David Wolper and Mel Stuart, along with lesser-known independents and activists such as Kent Mackenzie, Lynne Littman, and Jesus Salvador Trevino. While the former group reinvigorated a Cold War cultural liberalism, the latter group advocated for social justice in a city plagued by severe class stratification and racial segregation. Glick examines how mainstream and alternative filmmakers turned to the archives, civic institutions, and production facilities of Los Angeles in order to both change popular understandings of the city and shape the social consciousness of the nation.Trade Review"Documentary makers who value the opportunity to understand how films of that era got made, and how the production and distribution practices established then continue to influence the market today, will profit greatly from reading this book." * Documentary *"The book is an encouragement to engage, now, with documentaries being made at the grassroots level by activist filmmakers and collectives, rather than waiting for the glossy, neutered account of the struggle." * Los Angeles Review of Books *"[This book] sheds a renovated and original light on the history of the twentieth century media culture(s) of L.A., and in the same way it reveals the potentialities of meticulous discursive excavations into the non-fiction realm, reversing film canons and stressing social and cultural functions that make this book be a relevant one in the field of film history, certainly, but in the field of contemporary history at large too: it is a passionate interrogation of moving image as a source of historiography and a productive factor of history. . . . Los Angeles Documentary deserves great attention not only as a deeply researched cinema-history book, but as a nuanced and sharp cultural and political study as well." * Synoptique *"An essential contribution to an emerging field of documentary research that seeks to synthesize connections among otherwise coterminous yet parallel strands of documentary histories. . . . Above all, the book makes a point about the value of avoiding the binary cliché of an independent documentarian as an atomized private individual in opposition to government, while shedding light on Cold War documentary culture in general." * Film Quarterly *"Joshua Glick’s book is an exemplary investigation into and deconstruction of the varying visions set forth through documentary practice." * Film Matters *"Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 proves there is still much to be investigated in the timeline of America’s film production past. The acute specificity of Glick’s historical narrative makes his book a unique and necessary resource for understanding the evolution of Los Angeles documentary production, the works that were produced, and their impact on the formation of American identity." * Journal of Film and Video *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Beyond Fiction: Institutions of the Real Los Angeles Part One. New Frontier Visions in the Light and Shadow of Hollywood, 1958–1964 1. Studio Documentary in the Kennedy Era: Wolper Productions Begins 2. Downtown Development and the Endeavors of Filmmaker Kent Mackenzie Part Two. After theWatts Uprising: Community Media from the Top Down and the Bottom Up, 1965–1973 3. The Rise of Minority Storytelling: Network News, Public Television, and Independent Collectives 4. Hard Lessons in Hollywood Civics: Managing the Crisis of the Liberal Consensus 5. Wattstax and the Transmedia Soul Economy Part Three. Bicentennial Screens, 1974–1977 6. Roots/Routes of American Identity 7. Numbering Our Days in Los Angeles, USA Conclusion: The 1984 Olympics and the Neoliberalization of Culture Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn a new edition of this popular guidebook, filmmakers Alan Rosenthal and Ned Eckhardt show readers how to utilize the latest innovations in equipment, technologies, and production techniques for success in the digital, webbased world of documentary film. All twentyfour chapters of the volume have been revised to reflect the latest advances in documentary filmmaking.

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Book SynopsisThirty-five years of nonfiction films offer a unique lens on twentieth-century French social issues.Trade Review"Brimming with as many fruitful insights as remarkable discoveries, Critical Mass amounts to a Declaration of Social Purpose for early French documentary film. Steven Ungar yokes the daring-do of the avant-garde to the political goals of the left over the course of some forty years of filmmaking. It is a triumph of critical analysis."—Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary, Third Edition"A powerhouse crowning the career of a distinguished scholar of twentieth-century studies, Critical Mass will be an enduring point of reference for the history of both documentary cinema in France and of the genre tout court. Wide-ranging, meticulously researched, and incisive, Steven Ungar’s readings recover the contexts that shape documentary style, form, and process. Had André Breton read Critical Mass, he would have concluded, rightly, that cinema will be documentary or it will not be."—Tom Conley, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Establishing Shots1. A First Wave: Documentary Paris in the Shadow of the Talkies2. Moving In, Moving OutÉtudes sur Paris Transition I: 1929–19303. “All the World’s Misery”A Propos de Nice to AubervilliersTransition II: Popular Front—Vichy—Postwar4. Colonial Cinema and Its DiscontentsRené Vautier, Afrique 50Alain Resnais/Chris Marker, Les Statues meurent aussiJean Rouch, Moi, un NoirTransition III: The Group of Thirty5. Two Takes on Postwar Paris: Scenes in a Library and Paris Springtime ZeroAlain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du mondeChris Marker, Le Joli MaiAfterthoughts: A Radical LyricismAcknowledgmentsAppendix A. Declaration of the Group of ThirtyAppendix B. Quality Subsidy Study: Short-Subject AdvantagesNotesFilmographyIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Screening Social Justice, award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner presents an ethnographic study of Brave New Films, a nonprofit film production company that makes documentaries intended to mobilize progressive grassroots activism. Ortner positions the work of the company within a tradition of activist documentary filmmaking and within the larger field of “alternative media” that is committed to challenging the mainstream media and telling the truth about the world today. The company’s films cover a range of social justice issues, with particular focus on the hidden workings of capitalism, racism, and right-wing extremism. Beyond the films themselves, Brave New Films is also famous for its creative distribution strategies. All of the films are available for free on YouTube. Central to the intention of promoting political activism, the films circulate through networks of other activist and social justice organizations and are shown almost entirely in liTrade Review"[A] fascinating ethnographic study of a nonprofit production company. . . . Ortner provides extensive research on the history of activist documentary filmmaking. The book’s compelling exploration of the documentary Suppressed: The Fight To Vote reveals how it evokes various emotions during a film screening and examines its call to action. Ortner’s deep dive is so effective in describing the film’s storytelling method that it may inspire readers to seek out Suppressed and other Brave New Films works." -- Anjelica Rufus-Barnes * Library Journal *"Ortner’s analysis encourages readers to critically assess media accounts and consider the ethical implications of documentary activity. Focusing on bold new films, the book offers valuable insight into the production process, the challenges faced by activist filmmakers, and the strategies they use to effectively convey their message." -- Kaniphnath Malhari Kudale * Social Identities *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Brave New Films in the Mediascape 19 2. Critical Agency: The Power of Truth 31 3. Networked Agency: The Power of the Social 52 4. Affective Agency: The Power of the Film 73 5. The Impact Question, and Conclusions 97 Notes 113 Filmography 121 References 127 Index

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Book SynopsisWayward Feeling asks what contemporary audio-visual culture and aesthetic activisms might tell us about the affective afterlives of historical injustice in post-rainbow South Africa.Table of ContentsIntroduction Bewildering Times (An)aesthetics Wayward Feeling 1. Troubling the Rainbow Promise Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment Quotidian Aesthetics in Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi Wayward Politics 2. Moody, Expectant Teens Visual Youth Autobiography Mood Expectation and Social (Im)mobility: Sarah Chu’s Made in China and Evelyn Maruping’s Where is the Love Surviving Disappointment 3. Managing Public Feeling The Marikana Massacre Pre-emptive Securitisation Accelerated Mourning Counter-affective Lingering in Rehad Desai’s Miners Shot Down Creative Activism 4. Feeling the Fall Feeling Thought, Thinking Feeling Affective Cartographies Towards a Wayward Aesthetics of Commemoration 5. Feminist Resonance Resonant Rage Feminist Acoustics in Gabrielle Goliath’s Personal Accounts, Elegy, and This song is for… Listen Conclusion: Shutting Down Breathe

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Book SynopsisFor over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organized crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilized citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiographyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Italy’s Extraterritorialities: Tracing the History of Ransom Kidnapping 2. The Kidnapping of the Golden Hippy 3. The Day Cristina’s Body Was Found 4. Troubling the Rule of Law 5. Trauma and Language in the Kidnapping Victim Memoir 6. The Anatomy of Captivity Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisSporting Realities is a collection that explores the sports documentary's cultural meanings, aesthetic practices, industrial and commercial dimensions, and political contours across historical, social, medium-specific, and geographic contexts.Trade Review"With its broad look at different examples from creative, aesthetic, industrial and geographical points of view, Sporting Realities aims to be a reference point in sports and television studies more generally by offering an anthology on the cultural dynamics of memory and sport’s representation within contemporary audiovisual systems."—Paolo Carelli, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies“The contributions to this anthology offer a critical and methodologically varied take on sport documentaries’ industrial, aesthetic, and ideological potentials. They combine detailed textual analysis with pertinent theoretical and historical reflection. Thus, they give a convincing account of both the specific formal procedures of sports documentaries and their strong entanglement with much broader dynamics, be it memorial culture, intersectionality, or branding strategies.”—Markus Stauff, coeditor of Filmgenres: Sportfilm“This collection fills a void in sports studies and film studies. It represents a bridge between these two important fields at a moment when sports documentaries are taking up more and more cultural space. It represents an important scholarly intervention that will propel conversations about these specific films, about the broader genre, and about the narratives that circulate in and around these representations. At the same time, this book will be useful for classes, providing critical tools for discussing a diversity of sports documentary films.”—David J. Leonard, author of Playing While White: Privilege and Power on and off the FieldTable of ContentsIntroduction Samantha N. Sheppard and Travis Vogan 1. The Documentary as “Quality” Sports Television Branden Buehler 2. Intersectionality in Venus Vs. Aaron Baker 3. No Girls Allowed! Documenting Female Reporters as Threats in Let Them Wear Towels Korryn D. Mozisek 4. Documenting Difference: Gay Athletes of Color, Binary Representation, and the Sports Documentary Evan Brody 5. To the (Black) Athlete Dying Young: Documenting and Mythologizing Len Bias and Ben Wilson Justin Hudson 6. Protest and Public Memory: Documenting the 1968 Summer Olympic Games Emily Plec and Shaun M. Anderson 7. Of Friends and Foes: Remembering Yugoslavia in Sport Documentaries Dario Brentin and David Brown 8. “Measuring Up”: Fathers, Sons, and the Economy of Death in Mountain Film Documentaries Ray Gamache 9. Sports Album’s Replay: Newsreel Compilations, Early Television, and the Recirculation of Sport History Alex Kupfer 10. HBO Sports: Docu-Branding Boxing’s Past and Present Travis Vogan Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisDespite the increasing number of popular and celebrated sports documentaries in contemporary culture, such as ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, there has been little scholarly engagement with this genre. Sports documentaries, like all films, do not merely showcase objective reality but rather construct specific versions of sporting culture that serve distinct economic, industrial, institutional, historical, and sociopolitical ends ripe for criticism, contextualization, and exploration.Sporting Realities brings together a diverse group of scholars to probe the sports documentary’s cultural meanings, aesthetic practices, industrial and commercial dimensions, and political contours across historical, social, medium-specific, and geographic contexts. It considers and critiques the sports documentary’s visible and powerful position in contemporary culture and forges novel connections between the study of nonfiction media and sport. <Trade Review"With its broad look at different examples from creative, aesthetic, industrial and geographical points of view, Sporting Realities aims to be a reference point in sports and television studies more generally by offering an anthology on the cultural dynamics of memory and sport’s representation within contemporary audiovisual systems."—Paolo Carelli, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies“The contributions to this anthology offer a critical and methodologically varied take on sport documentaries’ industrial, aesthetic, and ideological potentials. They combine detailed textual analysis with pertinent theoretical and historical reflection. Thus, they give a convincing account of both the specific formal procedures of sports documentaries and their strong entanglement with much broader dynamics, be it memorial culture, intersectionality, or branding strategies.”—Markus Stauff, coeditor of Filmgenres: Sportfilm“This collection fills a void in sports studies and film studies. It represents a bridge between these two important fields at a moment when sports documentaries are taking up more and more cultural space. It represents an important scholarly intervention that will propel conversations about these specific films, about the broader genre, and about the narratives that circulate in and around these representations. At the same time, this book will be useful for classes, providing critical tools for discussing a diversity of sports documentary films.”—David J. Leonard, author of Playing While White: Privilege and Power on and off the FieldTable of ContentsIntroduction Samantha N. Sheppard and Travis Vogan 1. The Documentary as “Quality” Sports Television Branden Buehler 2. Intersectionality in Venus Vs. Aaron Baker 3. No Girls Allowed! Documenting Female Reporters as Threats in Let Them Wear Towels Korryn D. Mozisek 4. Documenting Difference: Gay Athletes of Color, Binary Representation, and the Sports Documentary Evan Brody 5. To the (Black) Athlete Dying Young: Documenting and Mythologizing Len Bias and Ben Wilson Justin Hudson 6. Protest and Public Memory: Documenting the 1968 Summer Olympic Games Emily Plec and Shaun M. Anderson 7. Of Friends and Foes: Remembering Yugoslavia in Sport Documentaries Dario Brentin and David Brown 8. “Measuring Up”: Fathers, Sons, and the Economy of Death in Mountain Film Documentaries Ray Gamache 9. Sports Album’s Replay: Newsreel Compilations, Early Television, and the Recirculation of Sport History Alex Kupfer 10. HBO Sports: Docu-Branding Boxing’s Past and Present Travis Vogan Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAn 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 New Left. Enduring Images details how student, labor, anti-imperialist, Black Power, and second-wave feminist movements broke with auteur cinema and sought to forge local and international solidarities by producing political essay films, generating new ways of being and thinking in common. Adamson produces a comparative and theoretical account of New Left cinema that engages with discussions of work, debt, information, and resistance. Enduring Images argues that the cinemas of the New Left are sites to examine, through the lens of struggle, the reshaping of global capitalism during the pivotal moment in which they were made, while at the same time exploring how these movements endure in contemporary culture and politics. Including in-depth discussions of Third Cinema in Argentina, feminist cinema in Italy, Newsreel movements in the United States, and cybernetics in early video, Enduring Images is an essential examination of the political films of the 1960s and ’70s.Trade Review"Enduring Images is a powerful and nuanced re-reading of the New Left, viewed through the triptych of critical theory, radical politics, and documentary film."—Jonathan Kahana, author of Intelligence Work and editor of The Documentary Film Reader"Morgan Adamson’s elegant and fascinating study shows how the cinematic image was an important weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Despite the effects of the counter-revolution that followed, the legacy of those cinematic experiments is still alive today, a resource for generating new ways of knowing the world and, perhaps, transforming it."—Michael Hardt, Duke University"Adamson's book is the best overall history to date of this important subject."—CHOICE"The interventions of Enduring Images, taken together, “seek resistance to the present,” as Deleuze would have it, and in so doing remain, productively, fascinatingly, unfinished."—Film Quarterly"Adamson conveys a hope that cinema, especially at the fringes, will continue to play an important role in radicalizing its viewers."—HyperallergicTable of ContentsIntroduction1. The New Left’s Essay Film: From Subjective Expression to Collective Insurgency2. Toward a New Mode of Study: The Student New Left and the Occupation of Cinema3. Finally Got the News at the End of the Short American Century4. Italian Feminist Collectives and the “Unexpected Subject”5. Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare: Early Video and the Ambivalence of Information6. Inflation of the Image; or, The Image of Revolution in the 1970sEpilogue: A Future History?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn 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 New Left. Enduring Images details how student, labor, anti-imperialist, Black Power, and second-wave feminist movements broke with auteur cinema and sought to forge local and international solidarities by producing political essay films, generating new ways of being and thinking in common. Adamson produces a comparative and theoretical account of New Left cinema that engages with discussions of work, debt, information, and resistance. Enduring Images argues that the cinemas of the New Left are sites to examine, through the lens of struggle, the reshaping of global capitalism during the pivotal moment in which they were made, while at the same time exploring how these movements endure in contemporary culture and politics. Including in-depth discussions of Third Cinema in Argentina, feminist cinema in Italy, Newsreel movements in the United States, and cybernetics in early video, Enduring Images is an essential examination of the political films of the 1960s and ’70s.Trade Review"Enduring Images is a powerful and nuanced re-reading of the New Left, viewed through the triptych of critical theory, radical politics, and documentary film."—Jonathan Kahana, author of Intelligence Work and editor of The Documentary Film Reader"Morgan Adamson’s elegant and fascinating study shows how the cinematic image was an important weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Despite the effects of the counter-revolution that followed, the legacy of those cinematic experiments is still alive today, a resource for generating new ways of knowing the world and, perhaps, transforming it."—Michael Hardt, Duke University"Adamson's book is the best overall history to date of this important subject."—CHOICE"The interventions of Enduring Images, taken together, “seek resistance to the present,” as Deleuze would have it, and in so doing remain, productively, fascinatingly, unfinished."—Film Quarterly"Adamson conveys a hope that cinema, especially at the fringes, will continue to play an important role in radicalizing its viewers."—HyperallergicTable of ContentsIntroduction1. The New Left’s Essay Film: From Subjective Expression to Collective Insurgency2. Toward a New Mode of Study: The Student New Left and the Occupation of Cinema3. Finally Got the News at the End of the Short American Century4. Italian Feminist Collectives and the “Unexpected Subject”5. Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare: Early Video and the Ambivalence of Information6. Inflation of the Image; or, The Image of Revolution in the 1970sEpilogue: A Future History?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisShows that while the GDR is generally seen as - and mostly was - an oppressive and unfree country, from late 1989 until autumn 1990 it was the "freest country in the world": the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. Stephen Brockmann's new book explores the year 1989/1990 in East Germany, arguing that while the GDR is generally seen as - and was for most of its forty years - an oppressive and unfree country, from autumn 1989 until the autumn of 1990 it was the "freest country in the world," since the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. That such freedom existed in the last months of the GDR and was a result of the actions of East Germans themselves has been obscured, Brockmann shows, by the now-standard description of the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany as a triumph of Western democracy and capitalism. Brockmann first addresses the culture of 1989/1990 by looking at various media from that final year, particularly film documentaries. He emphasizes punk culture and the growth of neo-Nazism and the Antifa movement - factors often ignored in accounts of the period. He then analyzes three later semiautobiographical novels about the period. He devotes chapters to dramatic films dealing with German reunification made relatively soon after the event and to more recent film and television depictions of the period, respectively. The final chapter looks at monuments and memorials of the 1989/1990 period, and a conclusion considers the implications of the book's findings for the present day.Trade ReviewThe Freest Country in the World is a richly detailed and analytically acute book about 1989-1990 at the time in the GDR and in the memory of that time among both East and West Germans. I learned so much from every chapter: about novels, films, punks, neo-Nazis, the sausage-making of memorials. -- Donna Harsch, Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon UniversityIt is hard not to get quite dark in reflecting both on the missed opportunities of the 1989 revolutions, and on the way in which Western nations in a way exploited that moment to further impose a narrative of Western triumphalism. But instead of getting dark, I am inspired by this book to continue to think about promises and hope, and to use works of art and literature to inform how we recover possibilities rather than abandon them to the graveyard of history. -- Andreea Ritivoi, William S. Dietrich Professor of English and Department Head, Carnegie Mellon UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Memory of Freedom 1: Protocols of History: Reunification Documentaries from 1989/1990 2: Anarchy in the GDR 3: The National Liberation Zone 4: Coming of Age as the State Dies: Three Novels and Their Heroes 5: Provincial Theater: Fiction Film Struggles to Address German Reunification in the Early 1990s 6: The Grand Theater of the East and the Imaginary Stasi: The Emergence of the Standard Depiction of German Reunification in Film and on Television 7: Ritual, Repetition, and Memory: Commemorating and Memorializing 1989/1990 Conclusion: The Last GDR Selected Works Cited Filmography Index

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Book SynopsisThe documentaries produced by the National Film Board of Canada, an institution profoundly woven into Canada’s cultural fabric, not only influenced cinematic language, but their stunning portrayals of the landscape shaped our perception of the environment and our place in it. Screening Nature and Nation examines how Canadians have engaged with these films and how the depictions of the land and its people have reflected the prevailing attitudes of the times. In the years following the establishment of the NFB in 1939, author Michael Clemens demonstrates how production practices often supported the views of the government regarding the uses and limits of the environment. But, like most institutions, the films evolved, and by the beginning of the 1960s NFB documentaries began to express much broader social concerns. Certain filmmakers began to use their cameras as a means of challenging the dominant modes of thinking about the environment—not as a resource to be exploited but as a dynamic ecosystem. Films were produced that privileged Indigenous perspectives by focusing on the physical, cultural, and spiritual lives of the nation’s first people, offering audiences a glimpse into a social history they may have known little about. Many of the seminal films created in the 1960s and 1970s by the National Film Board of Canada would go on to be adored by audiences world-wide for their portrayal of the landscape and indigenous culture, as well as inspiring a burgeoning environmental activist movement.

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Book SynopsisVivre Ici invites the reader on a journey through the vast viewing landscape of contemporary French documentary film, a genre that has experienced a renaissance in the past twenty years. The films explored are connected not just by a general interest in engaging the “real,” but by a particular attention to French space and place. From farms and wild places to roads, schools, and urban edgelands, these films explore the spaces of the everyday and the human and non-human experiences that unfold within them. Through a critical approach that integrates phenomenology, film theory, eco-criticism and cultural history, Levine investigates the notion of documentary as experience. She asks how and why, in the contemporary media landscape, these films seek to avoid argumentation and instead, give the viewer a feeling of “being there.” As a diverse collection of filmmakers, both well-known and lesser-known, explore the limits and possibilities of these places, a collage-like, incomplete, and fragmented vision of France as seen and felt through documentary cameras comes into view. Venturing beyond film analysis to examine the production climate for these films and their circulation in contemporary France, Levine explores the social and political consequences of these “films that matter” for the viewers who come into contact with them.Trade Review'This is an excellent study of issues of space and place in recent French documentary, offering rich and evocative readings of individual films and detailed engagement with the material specificities of documentary production in France. It will be of major interest to researchers and students.'Laura McMahon, Cambridge'Vivre Ici marks a major advance in thinking about contemporary documentary in France and about documentary in general. It does this by mobilizing aesthetic, cultural, and institutional approaches.'Steven Ungar, University of Iowa'Vivre Ici represents a useful curation of French documentary and a worthy addition to an expanding subfield of Film Studies that will be of much interest to film scholars, researchers, and students of French documentary.'Matthew Gibson, Modern Language Review‘One of the impressive strengths of Levine’s study is the further comparative aesthetic and ethical questioning the analysis triggers. Her attention to the extra-textual context surrounding each film, with a focus on audience response, combined with her meticulous attention to the multisensory experience of film space, brilliantly underlines the impossibility of separating the social and political role (and responsibility) of documentary film, from its equally important status as an art form that affects and moves the spectator in more ways than one…Scholars and students of French history, cinema and cultural studies, and of documentary film studies more generally, will find the book an inspiring and informative pedagogical resource to draw on.'Albertine Fox, H-France Review‘Alison J. Murray Levine’s latest book Vivre Ici is a refreshing, accessible read that invites readers to appreciate the unique ability documentary, and more specifically French documentary, has to connect us to the world around us.’ Audrey Evrard, Modern & Contemporary France'The balance between theory and its application in Levine’s book makes for a very accessible and pleasing read [...] It will be of appeal to academics and students alike, particularly those working in French studies, and film and media studies.' Oliver Brett, French History'Levine’s book fills in an important gap in French film studies in that it moves away from the topic of a small set of films to focus on what matters the most—that documentaries can transmit a sensual experience to the audience. Levine examines films produced over the last twenty years in metropolitan France. However, her analysis can apply to general documentaries, past or future, French or not.' Martine Guyot-Bender, French ReviewReviews 'This monograph is pertinent for scholars of film or contemporary French history. Furthermore, its readability lends it to being a useful addition to bibliographies for film and culture studies courses as well as an enjoyable book for cinephiles or Francophiles outside of academia.' Tessa Ashlin Nunn, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

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Book SynopsisWeaving together critical analysis and a filmic conversation, this book journeys through the multiple layers of Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno's thematically and aesthetically challenging body of work, framed here as a form of decolonial cinematic resistance. Co-winner African Literature Association Book of the Year - Scholarship Both a monograph and a critical dialogue between academic Melissa Thackway, author of Africa Shoots Back, and the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno, this collaborative work takes the reader on a journey through Teno's multifaceted on-going filmic reflection on Cameroon and the wider African continent, its socio-political systems, history, memory and cultures. Presenting and contextualizing Teno's cinema, it addresses the notion of political commitment in art and of cinema as a form of resistance. It also considers Teno's filmmaking both in relation to the theoretical and aesthetic debates to have animated West and Central African filmmakers since the 1960s and 1970s, and n relation to documentary filmmaking practices on the continent and beyond. In so doing, the book offers an analysis of the predominant stylistic and thematic traits of Teno's work, examines the individual films and the collective oeuvre, and highlights the evolutions of his film language and concerns. It identifies and explores the committed socio-political and historical themes at play, such as violence, power, history, memory, gender, trauma and exile. It also considers Teno's unwavering focus, both thematically and in his filmmaking choices, on forms and instances of resistance, framing his cinema as a form of decolonial aesthetics.Trade ReviewReel Resistance is an exceptionally fruitful and reciprocally beneficial meeting of minds, a critical and aesthetic dialogue which is singular in tone; one in which the artist and his oeuvre continue to exist, fully and clearly, in themselves, rather that serving as pretexts and prime materials for scholarly investigation and performance of knowledge. Thackway's generous stance and critical analysis heightens the reader's grasp of the place and value of Teno's cinema in the international cultural arena, whilst Teno's bold and brilliant understanding of history and politics makes this work a must for readers, be they scholars or the general public. Reel Resistance is a treasure trove for understanding how the colonial past impacts the cultural present and future, in film and society, eliciting a wealth of creative resistance. * AFRICINE *The book makes an important contribution to the research of film history and the decolonization of Southern Africa. * MEDIENwissenschaft *The scope of their [Thackway and Teno's] exchange is extensive, while also focusing on specific aspects of image, sound, and the conceptualization of history. The tone is candid, with the kind of comfort and frankness that can exist between close intellectual friends. * African Studies Review *There are few monographs on an African filmmaker and even less on a documentary filmmaker, which is fundamentally what Jean-Marie Teno is apart from his only feature film, Clando. This more widely illustrated book therefore deserves to be a milestone. It is all the more so as it is fascinating from start to finish, summoning both the deep erudition of the academic Melissa Thackway in the first part and in the second the detailed answers provided by the filmmaker on his journey, its aspirations and its choices. It is through him a history of African cinema is being written, so much has his commitment never wavered. * Africultures *[I]t is a prime exemplar of solid scholarly research, a bona fide auteur study, not another eclectic digest or mishmash of festivalistic chatter and drawing-room speculations on African film and culture. [...] Reel Resistance is a timely addition to the growing body of critical studies of African filmmakers published over the last three decades. * Framework The Journal of Cinema and Media *This book is testimony to the long-standing collaborative relationship between Melissa Thackway and Jean-Marie Teno, as well as revealing a tremendous relationship even between Teno and the consistency of the message process of his cinema. The mutual assemblage of an incredibly unique text by a stellar scholar and remarkable filmmaker of global repute is a sufficiently complete book of history on documentary filmmaking on the continent. In addition, it equally shows how much further the scholarship and intellectual knowledge productions of African filmmaking can travel. -- African Studies QuarterlyModels an ethical and politically engaged partnership between filmmaker and film critic, revealing the potential such synergy produces. -- Carmela Garritano * Africa is a Country *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I Documentary Filmmaking in Africa: An Introduction. Defining Documentary - Documentary in Africa - Early African Cinema and the Documentary - Early African Documentary Practices - Into the Eighties... Critical Insights: Reading the Films of Jean-Marie Teno. Committed Cinema: A Poetics of Resistance - The Cinematic I: Subjectivity, Voice - (Hi)stories, Memory: Decolonial Readings of the Past - Spanning Borders: Transnationality, Circulations and Exile Conclusion: For a Decolonial Aesthetics? Part II In Conversation Appendix 1 - The Writings of Jean-Marie Teno Appendix 2 - The Films of Jean-Marie Teno: List of Works, their Technical Details and Synopses

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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