The Documentary Film Reader

Bringing together an expansive range of writing by scholars, critics, historians, and filmmakers, The Documentary Film Reader presents an international perspective on the most significant developments and debates from several decades of critical writing about documentary. Each of the book's seven sections covers a distinct period in the history of documentary, collecting both contemporary and retrospective views of filmmaking in the era. And each section is prefaced by an introductory essay that explains its design and provides critical context. Painstakingly selected from the archives of more than a hundred years of cinema practice and theory, the essays, reviews, interviews, manifestos, and ephemera gathered in this volume suit the needs and interests of the beginning student, the advanced scholar, the casual reader, and the working documentarian.

Bringing together an expansive range of writing by scholars, critics, historians, and filmmakers, The Documentary Film Reader presents an international perspective on the most significant developments and debates from several decades of critical writing about documentary. Each of the book's seven sections covers a distinct period in the history of documentary, collecting both contemporary and retrospective views of filmmaking in the era. And each section is prefaced by an introductory essay that explains its design and provides critical context. Painstakingly selected from the archives of more than a hundred years of cinema practice and theory, the essays, reviews, interviews, manifestos, and ephemera gathered in this volume suit the needs and interests of the beginning student, the advanced scholar, the casual reader, and the working documentarian.

The Documentary Film Reader brings together an expansive range of writing by scholars, critics, historians, and filmmakers to provide a stimulating foundational text for students and others who want to undertake study of nonfiction film.

This reader brings together a wide range of writings to examine the role of music in cinema. Articles by leading critics including Theodor Adorno, Lawrence Grossberg and Lisa A. Lewis explore the function of the soundtrack, the place of song in film, andlook at how cinema has represented music and the music industry.

Brings together key writings on American avant-garde cinema to explore the long tradition of underground filmmaking from its origins in the 1920s to the work of contemporary film and video artists.

This book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where and how such strategies operate. Against the backdrop of Adorno's discussion of the essay form's anachronistic, anti-systematic and disjunctive mode of resistance, and capitalizing on the centrality of the interstice in Deleuze's understanding of the cinema as image of thought, the book discusses the essay film as future philosophy-as a contrarian, political cinema whose argumentation engages with us in a space beyond the verbal. A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay film can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film's disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as interstitial spaces of intelligence that illustrate how essayistic meaning can be sustained, often in contexts of political, historical or cultural extremity. The essayistic urge is not to be identified with a fixed generic form, but is rather situated within processes of filmic thinking that thrive in gaps.

In Imaging Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, Oscar-winning documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald ( One Day in September, Touching the Void) and leading broadcaster/historian Mark Cousins ( The Story of Film) offer an expanded, revised edition of their 'definitive, inspirational' ( Independent) compendium on the roots and history of the documentary film. Imagining Reality takes the reader on a tour of the evolution of documentary film as an increasingly vibrant, polemical, experimental and entertaining form. It gathers a wide-ranging collection of writings by and about such groundbreaking documentary-makers as Vertov, Flaherty, Marcel Ophuls, Chris Marker, Kieslowski, Claude Lanzmann, and Nick Broomfield. The story is carried up to date by attention to the success documentaries have had among mainstream movie audiences in recent years, including Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, The Buena Vista Social Club, Spellbound, Capturing The Friedmans, Être Et Avoir, and The Fog Of War.

Michael Rabiger guides the reader through the stages required to conceive, edit and produce a documentary. He also provides advice on the law, ethics and authorship as well as career possibilities and finding work.

This core teaching text provides a thorough overview of the recently emerged field of transnational film studies. Covering a range of approaches to analysing films about migrant, cross-cultural and cross-border experience, Steven Rawle demonstrates how film production has moved beyond clear national boundaries to become a product of border crossing finance and creative personnel. This comprehensive introduction brings together the key concepts and theories of transnational cinema, including genre, remakes, diasporic and exilic cinema, and the limits of thinking about cinema as a particularly national cultural artefact. It is an excellent course companion for undergraduate students of film, cinema, media and cultural studies studying transnational and global cinema, and provides both students and lovers of film alike with a strong grounding in this timely field of film studies.

"A realist with a sense of humor, Chasse is both stringent and encouraging as she covers every aspect of creating a successful production." —Booklist starred review How to Make and Distribute a Documentary without Losing Your Mind or Going Broke Documentary filmmaking requires more than just a passion for the subject, whether it be one’s personal story or that of someone else, a historical event or a startling discovery, a political movement or a heinous crime. Making a documentary and getting it in front of an audience requires determination, careful planning, money, and a strong production team. With over thirty years of experience in filmmaking, author Betsy Chasse mentors readers every step of the way with a down-to-earth approach and invaluable advice. Chapters cover topics such as: Choosing a Subject Developing a Business Plan Securing Financial Backing Assembling a Production Team Nailing Interviews and Shooting B-Roll Getting through Post-Production Distributing and Marketing the Film Both novices and experienced filmmakers will benefit from this all-inclusive guide. With the right knowledge, persistence, and The Documentary Filmmaking Master Class in their camera bags, readers will not only turn their visions into reality, they’ll be able to share the results with others and navigate the process with confidence.