Author: Dave SaundersPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
'Direct Cinema' is a comprehensive study of the seminal 'direct cinema' movement of 1960s America.
The Documentary Film Book
Author: Brian WinstonPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838718753
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Book Description
Powerfully posing questions of ethics, ideology, authorship and form, documentary film has never been more popular than it is today. Edited by one of the leading British authorities in the field, The Documentary Film Book is an essential guide to current thinking on documentary film. In a series of fascinating essays, key international experts discuss the theory of documentary, outline current understandings of its history (from pre-Flaherty to the post-Griersonian world of digital 'i-Docs'), survey documentary production (from Africa to Europe, and from the Americas to Asia), consider documentaries by marginalised minority communities, and assess its contribution to other disciplines and arts. Brought together here in one volume, these scholars offer compelling evidence as to why, over the last few decades, documentary has come to the centre of screen studies.
Story Movements
Author: Caty Borum ChattooPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190943440
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
Only a few years after the 2013 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Blackfish - an independent documentary film that critiqued the treatment of orcas in captivity - visits to SeaWorld declined, major corporate sponsors pulled their support, and performing acts canceled appearances. The steady drumbeat of public criticism, negative media coverage, and unrelenting activism became known as the "Blackfish Effect." In 2016, SeaWorld announced a stunning corporate policy change - the end of its profitable orca shows. In an evolving networked era, social-issue documentaries like Blackfish are art for civic imagination and social critique. Today's documentaries interrogate topics like sexual assault in the U.S. military (The Invisible War), racial injustice (13th), government surveillance (Citizenfour), and more. Artistic nonfiction films are changing public conversations, influencing media agendas, mobilizing communities, and capturing the attention of policymakers - accessed by expanding audiences in a transforming media marketplace. In Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change, producer and scholar Caty Borum Chattoo explores how documentaries disrupt dominant cultural narratives through complex, creative, often investigative storytelling. Featuring original interviews with award-winning documentary filmmakers and field leaders, the book reveals the influence and motivations behind the vibrant, eye-opening stories of the contemporary documentary age.
A Philosophical History of Documentary, 1895–1959
Author: Dan GevaPublisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030794660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Book Description
This book presents a chronology of thirty definitions attributed to the word, term, phrase, and concept of “documentary” between the years 1895 and 1959. The book dedicates one chapter to each of the thirty definitions, scrutinizing their idiosyncratic language games from close range while focusing on their historical roots and concealed philosophical sources of inspiration. Dan Geva's principal argument is twofold: first, that each definition is an original ethical premise of documentary; and second, that only the structured assemblage of the entire set of definitions successfully depicts the true ethical nature of documentary insofar as we agree to consider its philosophical history as a reflective object of thought in a perpetual state of being-self-defined: an ethics sui generis.
Voyages of Discovery
Author: Barry Keith GrantPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556373
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 570
Book Description
Frederick Wiseman is America’s foremost chronicler of public institutions. His films have focused on city, state, and local governments; hospitals; asylums; creative organizations and museums; schools; libraries; and more. In recent years, Wiseman’s work has reached a new level of popularity, with films such as In Jackson Heights (2015), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), and City Hall (2020) all earning widespread acclaim. Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of 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, discussing every film in Wiseman’s remarkable sixty-year career. He examines the core concerns running across Wiseman’s work from the early films, which focus on documenting institutional failure, through an expanding interest in cultural institutions and ideology, to a blossoming embrace of democracy in later films. He pays particular attention to Wiseman’s strategies for involving and implicating the spectator in the institutional processes the films document. Grant also places Wiseman within the history of the documentary and other traditions of American art and considers the relationship between documentary film and authorship. Voyages of Discovery is an important book for anyone interested in Wiseman’s work or how documentary film can reveal the fabric of our shared civic life.
Claiming the Real
Author: Brian WinstonPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838715118
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
Claiming the Real II describes the origins, development and current state of documentary cinema, and the social, political, industrial and ethical factors that determine its production. This new edition addresses the ethical quagmires, digital technologies and proliferating forms that have transformed documentary cinema.
Rock Star/Movie Star
Author: Landon PalmerPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190888423
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock stars for film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media industries and practices. From Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book examines the casting rock stars in films. In so doing, Rock Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to screen, the timing of rock's emergence and its staying power within popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. This book uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring this terrain of platforms old and new - ideal media laborers whose power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such. Combining star studies with media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for writing media history that combines the actions of individuals and the practices of industries. It demonstrates how stars have operated as both the gravitational center of media production as well as social actors who have taken on a decisive role in the purposes to which their images are used.
Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition
Author: Bill NicholsPublisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253070171
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
The fourth edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text, Introduction to Documentary, has been vastly altered in its entirety to bring this indispensable textbook up to date and reconceptualize aspects of its treatment of documentaries past and present. Here Nichols, with Jaimie Baron, has edited each chapter for clarity and ease of use and expanded the book with updates and new ideas. Featuring abundant examples and images, Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition is designed to facilitate a rich understanding of how cinema can be used to document the historical world as it is seen by a wide variety of filmmakers. Subjectivity, expressivity, persuasiveness, and credibility are crucial factors that move documentary film away from objective documentation and toward the thought-provoking realm of arguments, perceptions, and perspectives that draw from a filmmaker's unique sensibility to help us see the world as we have not seen it before. Exploring ethics, history, different modes of documentary, key social issues addressed, and both the origins and evolution of this form, this updated volume also offers guidance on how to write about documentaries and how to begin the process of making one. Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition will be of use not only to film students but also those in adjacent fields where visual representations of reality play an important role: journalism, sociology, anthropology, feminist and ethnic studies, among others.
Salesman
Author: J.M. TyreePublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838717919
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 124
Book Description
Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant American films ever made, Salesman (1966–9) is a landmark in non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The film follows a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan. Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the 'direct cinema' movement, this ruefully comic and quietly devastating film was the first masterpiece of Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the trio who would go on to produce The Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970). Based on the premise that films drawn from ordinary life could compete with Hollywood extravaganzas, Salesman was critical in shaping 'the documentary feature'. A novel cinema-going experience for its time, the film was independently produced, designed for theatrical release and presented without voiceover narration, interviews, or talking heads. Working with innovative handheld equipment, and experimenting with eclectic methods and a collaborative ethos, the Maysles brothers and Zwerin produced a carefully-orchestrated narrative drama fashioned from unexpected episodes. J. M. Tyree suggests that Salesman can be understood as a case study of non-fiction cinema, raising perennial questions about reality and performance. His analysis provides an historical and cultural context for the film, considering its place in world cinema and its critical representations of dearly-held national myths. The style of Salesman still makes other documentaries look static and immobile, while the film's allegiances to everyday subjects and working people indelibly marked the cinema. Tyree's insightful study also includes an exclusive exchange with Albert Maysles about the film.
Independent Chinese Documentary
Author: L. RobinsonPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137271221
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
The rise of independent documentary film production is the most radical development in the contemporary Chinese mediascape. This book is a sustained examination of Chinese independent documentary in relation to one of its central principles: xianchang, or being 'on the scene'.
