Documenting The Documentary: Close Readings Of Documentary Film And Video (Contemporary Film And Television Series)

Documenting the Documentary" features essays by 27 film scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay focuses on one or two important documentaries, engaging in questions surrounding ethics, ideology, politics, power, race, gender, and representation but always in terms of how they arise out of or are involved in the reading of specific documentaries as particular textual constructions. By closely reading documentaries as rich visual works, this anthology fills a void in the critical writing on documentaries, which tends to privilege production over aesthetic pleasure. As we increasingly perceive and comprehend the world through visual media , understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. "Documenting the Documentary" offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

Table Of Contents:

Foreword11Preface15Acknowledgments17Introduction191The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North232"Peace between Man and Machine": Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera403Paradise Regained: Sergei Eisenstein's Que viva Mexico! as Ethnography554Synthetic Vision: The Dialectical Imperative of Luis Bunuel's Las Hurdes705The Art of National Projection: Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon836The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema: Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will997American Documentary Finds Its Voice: Persuasion and Expression in The Plow That Broke the Plains and The City1198"Men Cannot Act before the Camera in the Presence of Death": Joris Ivens's The Spanish Earth1369The Poetics of Propaganda: Humphrey Jennings and Listen to Britain15410"It Was an Atrocious Film": Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts17111The "Dialogic Imagination" of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Les maitres fous18812Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog20413"Don't You Ever Just Watch?": American Cinema Verite and Dont Look Back22314"Ethnography in the First Person": Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies23815The Two Avant-gardes: Solanas and Getino's The Hour of the Furnaces25416Seeing with Experimental Eyes: Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes26917"A Bastard Union of Several Forms": Style and Narrative in An American Family28618The Documentary of Displaced Persona: Michael Rubbo's Daisy: The Story of a Facelift30219Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This Is Spinal Tap31820Documentary Film and the Discourse of Hysterical/Historical Narrative: Ross McElwee's Sherman's March33321Subjectivity Lost and Found: Bill Viola's I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like34422The Filmmaker as Global Circumnavigator: Peter Watkins's The Journey and Media Critique36023Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line37924Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore's Roger & Me39725Silence and Its Opposite: Expressions of Race in Tongues Untied41626Containing Fire: Performance in Paris Is Burning42927Contested Territory: Camille Billops and James Hatch's Finding Christa446General Bibliography463Sources for Films and Videos469Film and Video Distributors471Contributors473Index477