Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video

Author Jim Leach, Barry K. Grant

Wayne State University Press, 1998 - Performing Arts - 488 pages

Documenting the Documentary features essays by twenty-seven 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 perceive and comprehend the world through visual media increasingly, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Together, the essays cover the significant developments in the history of the documentary, from the first commercially released feature, Nanook of the North (1922), to modern independent productions, such as An American Family (1973), Tongues Untied (1989), and Finding Christa (1991), and including important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts from the mainstream to the avant-garde. Seth Feldman places Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) within the context of constructivism and futurism; Vivian Sobchack discusses the strategies of Bunuel's Las Hurdas (Land without Bread, 1931) in relation to surrealism; and Joanne Hershfield explores Que viva Mexico! (1932) as the presentation of an exotic culture by a European director. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balancebetween theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

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Contents

• Foreword by Bill Nichols: 11
• The Filmmaker as Global Circumnavigator: 17
• Peace between Man and Machine: 40
• Paradise Regained: 55
• Synthetic Vision: 70
• The Art of National Projection: 83
• The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema: 99
• American Documentary Finds Its Voice: 119
• Men Cannot Act before the Camera in the Presence: 136
• The Poetics of Propaganda: 154
• It Was an Atrocious Film: 171
• The Dialogic Imagination of Jean Rouch: 188
• Terror and Memory in Alain Resnaiss Night and: 204
• Dont You Ever Just Watch?: 223
• Ethnography in the First Person: 238
• The Two Avantgardes: 254
• Seeing with Experimental Eyes: 269
• A Bastard Union of Several Forms: 286
• The Documentary of Displaced Persona: 302
• Gender Power and a Cucumber: 318
• Documentary Film and the Discourse of Hysterical: 333
• Mirrors without Memories: 379
• Silence and Its Opposite: 416
• Containing Fire: 429
• Contested Territory: 446
• General Bibliography: 463
• Sources for Films and Videos: 469
• Index: 477

About the author

Barry Keith Grant is a professor of film studies at Brock University and is an adjunct faculty member of the graduate program in film and video at York University in Toronto. He is the editor of The Dread of Difference (University of Texas Press,1996) and Film Genre Reader (University of Texas Press, 1995), and is the author of Voyages of Discovery (University of Illinois Press, 1992).

Jeannette Sloniowski is the director of the communication studies program and assistant professor of film at Brock University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video; CONTEMPORARY APPROCHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION; Contemporary film and television series; Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, Jeannette Sloniowski
• Authors: Author Jim Leach, Barry K. Grant
• Editors: Barry Keith Grant, Jeannette Sloniowski, Jeannette Marie Sloniowski
• Contributors: Author William Rothman, Virginia Bonner, Author Frank P Tomasulo, John R. Cook, Bill Nichols, David T. Johnson, Reviewer Charlie Keil, Paula J. Massood, Professor Thomas Waugh, Matthew Bernstein, Leshu Torchin, Robert Stam, Professor of Film and Media Carl Plantinga, Reviewer Series Editor Lucy Fischer, Linda Williams, Author Sheila Petty, Julia Lesage, Professor Caryl Flinn, Book Review Editor Liz Czach, Joan Nicks, Jeffrey K Ruoff, Bart Testa, Jeanne Hall, Professor Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Diane Scheinman, William Guynn, Vivian Sobchack, Dr Joanne Hershfield, Book Review Editor Noah Isenberg
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press, 1998
• ISBN: 0814326390, 9780814326398
• Length: 488 pages
• Subjects: Performing Arts / Film / History & Criticism