Description
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 University
Milliken 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 History
More 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 Documentary
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Part I: Popular Documentary Today
1. Pop Docs: The Work of Popular Documentary in the Age of Alternate Facts, by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson
2. Reclaiming the Popular for Public Interest Documentary, by Ezra Winton
Part II: Documentary Ecologies
3. Public Television's Role in the U.S. Documentary Ecology, by Patricia Aufderheide
4. On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre, by Zoë Druick
5. Accelerating Deceleration: Slow Violence and Time-Lapse Cinematography, by Devon Coutts
Part III: Short Forms and Web Practices
6. From Elegy to Kitsch: Spectacles of Epistephelia in Food, Inc. and Early Food Documentaries, by Sabiha Ahmad Khan
7. Errol Morris, The New York Times, Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs, by Anthony Kinik
8. Popular Music & Short Form Nonfiction: Is the Web a Forum for Documentary Innovation?, by Michael Brendan Baker
Part IV: Auteurs, Politics and Popularity
9. From the Essay Film to the Video Essay: Between the Critical and the Popular, by Allison de Fren
10. Errol Morris and the Ends of Irony, by Jonathan Kahana
11. Vérite: Lauren Greenfield and the Challenge of Feminist Documentary, by Shilyh Warren
Part V: Documentary Genres
12. Citizenfour and the Anti-Representational Turn: Aesthetics of Failure in the Information Age, by S. Topiary Landberg
13. Of Kids and Sharks: Victims, Heroes and the Politics of Melodrama in Popular Documentary, by Christie Milliken
14. Strategies of the Popular Music Documentary's Recovery Mode, by Landon Palmer
Part VI: Engaging Audiences
15. Assembling Nanking: Archival Filmmaking in the Popular Historical Documentary, by Dylan Nelson
16. Virality is Virility: Viral Media, Popularity and Violence, by Alexandra Juhasz
17. Populism, Participation and Perpetual Incompletion: Performing an Urban History Commons, by Rick Prelinger
18. The Armchair Juror: Audience Engagement in True Crime Documentaries, by George S. Larke-Walsh
19. New (Old) Ontologies of Documentary, by Steve F. Anderson
Index
