Product Description: Using cultural theory, author R. Bruce Brasell investigates issues surrounding the discursive presentation of the American South as biracial and explores its manifestation in documentary films, including such works as Tell about the South, bro•ken/ground, and Family Name...read more

Product Description: American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age examines the recent challenges to the conventions of realist documentary through the lens of war documentary films by Ken Burns, Michael Moore, and Errol Morris. During the twentieth century, the invention of new technologies of audiovisual representation such as cinema, television, video, and digital media have transformed the modes of historical narration and with it forced historians to assess the impact of new visual technologies on the construction of history...read more

By exploring the use of film in mid-twentieth-century institutions, including libraries, museums, classrooms, and professional organizations, the essays in Useful Cinema show how moving images became an ordinary feature of American life. In venues such as factories and community halls, people encountered industrial, educational, training, advertising, and other types of “useful cinema.” Screening these films transformed unlikely spaces, conveyed ideas, and produced subjects in the service of public and private aims. Such functional motion pictures helped to shape common sense about cinema’s place in contemporary life. Whether measured in terms of the number of films shown, the size of audiences, or the economic activity generated, the “non-theatrical sector” was a substantial and enduring parallel to the more spectacular realm of commercial film. In Useful Cinema, scholars examine organizations such as UNESCO, the YMCA, the Amateur Cinema League, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They also consider film exhibition sites in schools, businesses, and industries. As they expand understanding of this other American cinema, the contributors challenge preconceived notions about what cinema is. Contributors. Charles R. Acland, Joseph Clark, Zoë Druick, Ronald Walter Greene, Alison Griffiths, Stephen Groening, Jennifer Horne, Kirsten Ostherr, Eric Smoodin, Charles Tepperman, Gregory A. Waller, Haidee Wasson. Michael Zryd

Product Description: Richard Wall Memorial Award 2012 - Finalist. What key concerns are reflected in documentaries produced in and about the United States? How have documentaries engaged with competing visions of US history, culture, politics, and national identity? This book examines how documentary films have contributed to the American public sphere - creating a kind of public space, serving as sites for community-building, public expression, and social innovation...read more

Product Description: Author P. J. O’Connell traces Robert Drew’s influence on cinema verite through extensive interviews with Drew and with some of the founding fathers of American cinema verite filmmaking—Donn Alan Pennebaker, Gregory Shuker, and Richard Leacock...read more

Product Description: Chapters by Thomas W. Benson, Ronald V. Bettig, Jennifer L. Borda, Jeanne Lynne Hall, Susan Mackey-Kallis, Martin J. Medhurst, Shawn Parry-Giles, Trevor Parry-Giles, Brian J. Snee, Roger Stahl, Robert E. Terrill.The Rhetoric of the New Political Documentary was awarded the Bruce E...read more

Provides interviews with thirteen documentary filmmakers, including Albert Maysles, Susan Foremke, Chris Hegedus, and Ken Burns. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Since the late 1960s, American film and video makers of all genres have been fascinated with themes of self and identity. Though the documentary form is most often used to capture the lives of others, Jim Lane turns his lens on those media makers who document their own lives and identities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: "Struggles for Representation" examines over 300 non-fiction films by more than 150 African American film/videomakers and includes an extensive filmography, bibliography, and excerpts from interviews with film/videomakers. In eleven original essays, contributors explore the extraordinary scope of these aesthetic and social documents and chart a previously undiscovered territory: documentaries that examine the aesthetic, economic, historical, political, and social forces that shape the lives of black Americans, as seen from their perspectives...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Public television's original mandate required it to address issues of controversy and facilitate the inclusion of voices and perspectives from outside the established consensus. Through detailed chronology, the author of this text traces how far this obligation has been met. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Lorentz, Pare (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The author recounts how he was hired by the federal government to make documentaries on national problems, and describes the films' production

Interviews with politically committed filmmakers of the thirties recount their backgrounds, causes, and work in documentary films

In light of English and Canadian trends, the author analyzes the cinematic characteristics and propagandistic functions of government documentaries