Search results for ""author jeffrey geiger""

What key concerns are reflected in documentaries produced in and about the United States? How have documentaries engaged with competing visions of US history, culture, politics, and national identity? This book examines how documentary films have contributed to the American public sphere - creating a kind of public space, serving as sites for community-building, public expression, and social innovation. Geiger focuses on how documentaries have been significant in forming ideas of the nation, both as an imagined space and a real place. Moving from the dawn of cinema to the present day, this is the first full-length study to focus on the extensive range and history of American non-fiction filmmaking. Combining comprehensive overviews with in-depth case studies, Geiger maps American documentary's intricate histories, examining the impact of pre- and early cinema, travelogues, the avant-garde, 1930s social documentary, propaganda, direct cinema, postmodernism, and 'new' documentary. Offering detailed close analyses and fresh insights, this book provides students and scholars with a stimulating guide to American documentary, reminding us of its important place in cinema history. Key Features * Historical overview of major documentary forms and practices in the USA * Case studies, including Nanook of the North, The Plow that Broke the Plains, Grey Gardens, and Fahrenheit 9/11 * Analysis of critical debates relating to filmic representations of reality

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What key concerns are reflected in documentaries produced in and about the United States? How have documentaries engaged with competing visions of US history, culture, politics, and national identity? This book examines how documentary films have contributed to the American public sphere - creating a kind of public space, serving as sites for community-building, public expression, and social innovation. Geiger focuses on how documentaries have been significant in forming ideas of the nation, both as an imagined space and a real place. Moving from the dawn of cinema to the present day, this is the first full-length study to focus on the extensive range and history of American non-fiction filmmaking. Combining comprehensive overviews with in-depth case studies, Geiger maps American documentary's intricate histories, examining the impact of pre- and early cinema, travelogues, the avant-garde, 1930s social documentary, propaganda, direct cinema, postmodernism, and 'new' documentary. Offering detailed close analyses and fresh insights, this book provides students and scholars with a stimulating guide to American documentary, reminding us of its important place in cinema history. Key Features * Historical overview of major documentary forms and practices in the USA * Case studies, including Nanook of the North, The Plow that Broke the Plains, Grey Gardens, and Fahrenheit 9/11 * Analysis of critical debates relating to filmic representations of reality

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This book examines how 'filmic' ways of experiencing and representing the world affected different eras, art forms, and media. In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, relate both to previous or outmoded media and to what we now refer to as New Media? This collection sets out to examine these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions and diverse forms of entertainment, demarcating their sometimes parallel and sometimes more closely conjoined histories. Cinematicity in Media History makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing and thinking both before and after the 'birth' of cinema. The examination of the interrelations between cinema, literature, photography and other modes of representation, not only to each other but amid a host of other minor and major media - the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick book, the iPhone and the computer - provides crucial insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics. Cinematicity in Media History is therefore an essential resource for students and scholars in Film and Media Studies. Demonstrates the breadth and influences of cinematic ways of perceiving the world; covers a range of cinematic texts and genres in comparative contexts; examines key developments in pre cinema and cinema history and provides new scholarship on cinematic perception across different media.

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