Product Description: Contemporary Documentary offers a rich survey of the rapidly expanding landscape of documentary film, television, video, and new media. The collection of original essays addresses the emerging forms, popular genres, and innovative approaches of the digital era...read more

Product Description: This timely volume discusses the experimental documentary projects of some of the most significant artists working in the world today: Hito Steyerl, Joachim Koester, Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, and Anri Sala...read more

Product Description: A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film presents a collection of original essays that explore major issues surrounding the state of current documentary films and their capacity to inspire and effect change.  Presents a comprehensive collection of essays relating to all aspects of contemporary documentary films Includes nearly 30 original essays by top documentary film scholars and makers, with each thematic grouping of essays sub-edited by major figures in the field Explores a variety of themes central to contemporary documentary filmmakers and the study of documentary film – the planet, migration, work, sex, virus, religion, war, torture, and surveillance Considers a wide diversity of documentary films that fall outside typical canons, including international and avant-garde documentaries presented in a variety of media...read more

Product Description: After the Fact studies the terrain of Holocaust documentaries subsequent to the turn of the twenty-first century. Until now most studies have centered primarily on canonical films such as Shoah and Night and Fog, but over the course of the last ten years filmmaking practices have altered dramatically...read more

Documentary students and fans revel in stories about filmmakers conquering extraordinary challenges trying to bring their work to the screen. This book brings vividly to life the sometimes humorous, sometimes excruciating-and always inspiring-stories behind the making of some of the greatest documentaries of our time. All of the filmmakers and films profiled are Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning. Documentary Case Studies walks readers through the fixes and missteps that today's documentary leaders worked through at all stages to create their masterworks-from development, fundraising and pre-production, through production and then post. There are plenty of "how to" documentary filmmaking books in circulation, but this book will instead deploy a personal, intimate, and candid approach to unlocking the secrets of the craft and the business by meeting filmmakers who tackle production challenges in the most resourceful and unconventional ways.

MacDonald explores the cinematic territory between the traditional categories of "documentary" and "avant-garde" film, through candid, in-depth conversations with filmmakers whose work has challenged these categories. Arranged in an imaginative chronology and written to be accessible to any film-interested reader, the interviews in Avant-Doc chart half a century of thinking by inventive filmmakers such as Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Leonard Retel Helmrich, Michael Glawogger, Susana de Sousa Dias, Jonathan Caouette, Pawel Wojtasik, and Todd Haynes. Recent breakthroughs by Amie Siegel, Jane Gillooly, Jennifer Proctor, Betzy Bromberg, and Godfrey Reggio are discussed; and considerable attention is paid to Harvard's innovative Sensory Ethnography Lab, producer of Sweetgrass, Leviathan, and Manakamana. A rare interview with pioneering scholar Annette Michelson begins Avant-Doc's meta-conversation.

Product Description: This collection of fourteen essays provides a rich and detailed history of the relationship between and music and image in documentary films, exploring the often overlooked role of music in the genre and its subsequent impact on an audience’s perception of reality and fiction...read more

Product Description:  This spirited volume explores the history and diversity of improvisation in the cinema, including works by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nobuhiro Suwa. Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as instigators of unprecedented forms of expression...read more

Product Description: With the advent of digital filmmaking and critical recognition of the relevance of self expression, first-person narratives, and personal practices of memorialization, interest in the amateur moving image has never been stronger. Bringing together key scholars in the field, and revealing the rich variety of amateur filmmaking―from home movies of Imperial India and film diaries of life in contemporary China, to the work of leading auteurs such as Joseph Morder and Péter Forgács―Amateur Filmmaking highlights the importance of amateur cinema as a core object of critical interest across an array of disciplines...read more

Product Description: Despite the prominence of "awkwardness" as cultural buzzword and descriptor of a sub-genre of contemporary film and television comedy, it has yet to be adequately theorized in academic film and media studies. Documentary’s Awkward Turn contributes a new critical paradigm to the field by presenting an analysis of awkward moments in documentary film and other reality-based media formats...read more

Product Description: Cinema is a mosaic of memorable food scenes. Detectives drink alone. Gangsters talk with their mouths full. Families around the world argue at dinner. Food documentaries challenge popular consumption-centered visions. In Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation, authors Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, and Mark Bernard use a foodways paradigm, drawn from the fields of folklore and cultural anthropology, to illuminate film's cultural and material politics...read more

Product Description: Animated Documentary, the first book to be published on this fascinating topic, considers how animation is used as a representational strategy in nonfiction film and television and explores the ways animation expands the range and depth of what documentary can show us about the world...read more

Product Description:  This spirited volume explores the history and diversity of improvisation in the cinema, including works by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nobuhiro Suwa. Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as instigators of unprecedented forms of expression...read more

Product Description: The Music Documentary offers a wide-range of approaches, across key moments in the history of popular music, in order to define and interrogate this prominent genre of film-making. The writers in this volume argue persuasively that the music documentary must be considered as an essential cultural artefact in documenting stars and icons, and musicians and their times – particularly for those figures whose fame was achieved posthumously...read more

Product Description: Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp...read more

Product Description: Over the course of his career Werner Herzog, known for such visionary masterpieces as Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), has directed almost sixty films, roughly half of which are documentaries...read more

Product Description: Documentary film is cinema’s oldest form, dating back to the medium’s invention at the turn of twentieth century. From cinema’s earliest days, important documentary films and film-makers have emerged continuously and, today, interest in documentary film remains substantial, and is rapidly growing...read more

Major new history of a film genre that has recently been breaking box office records. This is a thorough and definitive survey/history of documentary films. Concentrating mainly on the output of the US, the UK, and Canada, the authors outline the origins of the form and then show its development over the next several decades. The book is completely up-to-date in discussing films like "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer", and in its coverage of IMAX movies and the development of cable and satellite television outlets. Written in a simple, chronological format, the text is straightforward and full of content, information, and historical perspective. (There is hardly any academic jargon or high-level theory.) Each chapter concludes with a list of the key documentaries in that particular time period or genre, and there are helpful appendices listing all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary, as well as the winners of the Grierson Award.