Informationen zum Autor Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of Santa Cruz. He is the author of Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung 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. While documentary has long been a mainstay of universities and cinematheques, its popularity of late has grown tenfold as reality television has flourished and as the ranks of novice filmmakers have swelled. There are nowdozens of film festivals dedicated exclusively to documentaries. This reader presents an international perspective on the most significant developments and debates from several decades of critical writing about documentary. It integrates historical and theoretical approaches, offering a collection that isparticularly well suited to meet the needs of large undergraduate survey courses on nonfiction film, as well as providing sufficient depth for graduate classes.

The volume offers a rich and varied corpus of works that includes scholarly essays, film criticism, manifestos, interviews, letters, and personal recollections ... [the editors] have performed tremendous acts of scholarly service ... [presenting] a rich mosaic of writing on film form, politics, and practice that order the discursive field while still allowing the unruly documentary construct room to breathe.

Autorentext
Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of Santa Cruz. He is the author of Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary.

Klappentext

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.

Zusammenfassung
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.

Inhalt

• Foreword by Charles Musser

• Introduction

• I. Early Documentary: From the Illustrated Lecture to the Factual Film

• Jonathan Kahana, Introduction to Section I

• Rick Altman, "From Lecturer's Prop to Industrial Product: The Early History of Travel Films" (2006)

• Anonymous, "Burton Holmes Pleases a Large Audience at the Columbia" (1905)

• Kristen Whissel, "Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: Modern Warfare and the Battle Reenactment at the Turn of the Century" (2008)

• Dai Vaughan, "Let There Be Lumière" (1999)

• Boleslas Matuszewski, "A New Source of History" (1898)

• Tom Gunning, "Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the 'View' Aesthetic" (1997)

• Edward Curtis et al., "The Continental Film Company" (1912)

• W. Stephen Bush, "In The Land of the Head Hunters" (1914)

• Catherine Russell, "Playing Primitive" (1999)

• Anonymous, "Movies of Eskimo Life Win Much Appreciation" (1915)

• Anonymous, "Nanook of the North" (1922)

• John Grierson, "Flaherty's Poetic Moana" (1926)

• John Grierson, "Flaherty" (1931-32)

• Hamid Naficy, "Lured by the East: Ethnographic and Expedition Films about Nomadic Tribes; The Case of Grass" (2006)

• Béla Balázs, "Compulsive Cameramen" (1925)

• Anonymous, "New Films Make War Seem More Personal" (1916)

• Nicholas Reeves, "Cinema, Spectatorship, and Propaganda: Battle of the Somme (1916) and Its Contemporary Audience" (1997)

• II. Modernisms: State, Left, and Avant-Garde Documentary Between the Wars

• Jonathan Kahana, Introduction to Section II

• Robert Allerton Parker, "The Art of the Camera: An Experimental 'Movie'" (1921)

• Siegfried Kracauer, "Montage" (1947)

• Annette Michelson, "The Man with the Movie Camera: From Magician to Epistemologist" (1972)

• Seth Feldman, "Cinema Weekly and Cinema Truth: Dziga Vertov and the Leninist Proportion" (1973)

• Dziga Vertov, "WE: Variant of a Manifesto" (1922)

• Jay Leyda, "Bridge" (1964)

• Mikhail Iampolsky, "Reality at Second Hand" (1991)

• Joris Ivens, "The Making of Rain" (1969)

• Joris Ivens, "Reflections on the Avant-Garde Documentary" (1931)

• Tom Conley, "Documentary Surrealism: On Land Without Bread" (1986)

• John Grierson, "The Documentary Producer" (1933)

• John Grierson, "First Principles of Documentary" (1932-34)

• Otis Ferguson, "Home Truths from Abroad" (1937)

• Charles Wolfe, "Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social Documentary and the Avant-Garde in the 1930s" (1995)

• Samuel Brody, "The Revolutionary Film: Problem of Form" (1934)

• Leo T. Hurwitz, "The Revolutionary Film: Next Step" (1934)

• Ralph Steiner and Leo T. Hurwitz, "A New Approach to Filmmaking" (1935)

• Willard Van Dyke, Letter from Knoxville (1936)

• Ralph Steiner, Letter to Jay Leyda (1935)

• John T. McManus, "Down to Earth in Spain" (1937)

• Charles Wolfe, "Historicizing the 'Voice of God': The Place of Voice-Over Commentary in Classical Documentary" (1997)

• Steve Neale, "Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary and Spectacle" (1979)

• Richard Griffith, "Films at the Fair" (1939)

• III: Documentary Propaganda: World War II and the Post-War Citizen

• Jonathan Kahana, Introduction to Section III

• James Agee, Review of Iwo Jima newsreels (1945)

• James Agee, Review of San Pietro (1945)

• Thomas Cripps and David Culbert, "The Negro Soldier (1944): Film Propaganda in Black and White" (1979)

• André Bazin, "On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel" (1946)

• Jim Leach, "The Poetics of Propaganda: Humphrey Jennings and Listen to Britain" (1998)

• George C. Stoney, "Documentary in the United States in the Immediate Post-World War II Years" (1989)

• Zoë Druick, "Documenting Citizenship: Reexamining the 1950s National Film Board Films about Citizenship" (2000)

• Srirupa Roy, "Moving Pictures: The Films Division of India and the Visual Practices of the Nation-State" (2007)

• Jennifer Horne, "Experiments in Propaganda: Reintroducing James Blue's Colombian Trilogy" (2009)

• Peter Watkins with James Blue and Michael Gill, "Peter Watkins Discusses His Suppressed Nuclear Film The War Game" (1965)

• IV. Aesthetics of Liberation: Free, Direct, and Vérité Cinemas

• Jonathan Kahana, Introduction to Section IV

• Jean Painlevé, "The Castration of Documentary" (1953)

• Jean Cocteau, "On Blood of the Beasts" (1963)

• Lindsay Anderson, "Free Cinema" (1957)

• Tom Whiteside, "The One-Ton Pencil" (1962)

• Edgar Morin, "Chronicle of a Film" (1962)

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Radical Humanism and the Coexistence of Film and Poetry in…