Documentary

ABSTRACT: G. D. Mumford list of 260+ dvd documentaries as supplementary aids for teaching courses/topics spanning Prehistory, historical times, and diverse cultures, societies, and regions across the globe (e.g., Ice Age; Egypt; Aegean; Anatolia; Syria-Palestine; Arabia; Persia; sub-Saharan Africa; Rome; Celts; Vikings; India; China; Japan; Easter Island; Inca; Maya; Aztecs; North America).  This list is arranged by cultures/societies, periods, and regions and is updated periodically.  Some of the listed documentaries still await viewing and instructor rating (I tend to place the best, or most appropriate, documentaries for viewing in-class [see separate pdf documentary response question sheets and web-links in my academia course folders]).  The listed documentaries also encompass various documentary producers and commercially available programs on past civilizations: Acorn Media, Allegro, Ambrose, Athena, BBC, Cinema Epoch, DeAgostini, Discovery, EVN, GoodTimes DvD, History Channel, Koch Vision, Kultur/Cromwell, Monterey, National Geographic, NOVA, PBS, TimeLife, TLC, and Washington National Gallery of Art.  In general, BBC and NOVA programs tend to represent the highest quality, but many of the other production companies have produced quite good programs as well (any/all other recommendations are very welcome).  Please note: Even the "best" documentaries contain inaccuracies/errors, especially from non-specialist narrators and/or presenters, but otherwise many undergraduate students appear to appreciate documentary viewings as a generally effective, supplemental media (either in-class or as an online assignment) for providing students with illustrations/footage of various sites, periods, issues, specialists (usually via on-screen interviews), and different view points in an otherwise static classroom/lecture setting (UPDATED: Dec. 30, 2014).

Bulletin Description: More than any other tradition of image-making, documentaries are invested in notions of truth, authenticity and objectivity. To what do they owe their capacity of persuasiveness? This course will introduce students to the history and theory of documentary cinema, examining the ways our willingness to be convinced has been shaped by different forms of institutional and discursive power. Readings will span work on moving and still documentary images, but will remain focused on the analog era.

Bất cứ việc gì nếu làm một cách hời hợt, qua loa thì đều rất dễ dàng. Điều này hiển nhiên tỷ lệ thuận với ích lợi nhận được từ việc làm đó. Việc lược khảo tài liệu cũng như vậy, nếu chúng ta không đầu tư cho việc lược khảo mà chỉ tải về hoặc sưu tầm tài liệu một cách vô tội vạ thì cái chúng ta lưu trữ không gì ngoài một mớ hổ lốn, tạp nhạp.
Lược khảo tài liệu một cách bài bản, nghiêm chỉnh sẽ giúp tiết kiệm rất nhiều thời gian và công sức. Hơn nữa, điều đó còn giúp chuyển giao dễ dàng những tài liệu đã đọc cho người khác, lưu trữ những tài liệu chưa đọc cho mục đích khác và còn rất nhiều điều ích lợi khác. Chính vì vậy, rất cần sự cẩn thận và nghiêm túc dù trong bất cứ giai đoạn nào kể cả đó chỉ là một bước tìm kiếm, lọc chọn và lưu trữ tài liệu.

If the critique of neoliberal capitalism has become a staple of leftist documentary filmmaking in France since the late 1990s, few films have gone as far in their rejection of work as those made by Pierre Carles, Stéphane Goxe and Christophe Coello. Following late nineteenth-century pamphleteer Paul Lafargue’s advocacy for “the right to be lazy” and the enjoyment of the flourishing society of leisure, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) unapologetically and uncompromisingly reject the normative legitimacy of waged employment as a warrant of individual and social productivity. Nonetheless, it would be highly reductive to see in these two films and in the filmmakers’ project a celebration of idleness. Rather, as they strive to restore the productive value of individuals unable and unwilling to enter the labor market, Attention, Danger, Travail (2003) and Volem rien foutre al païs (2007) reject what the filmmakers see as leftist politics’ complacency with capitalism’s promotion of work as an ethics of self-realization. Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s emphasis on the proletariat’s self-identification and incidental political inscription in late 19th century society, this analysis argues that the two films discussed here operate therefore a political and aesthetic shift away from twentieth-century militant cinema by replacing the figure of political consciousness commonly associated with the industrial, capitalist society, namely the worker, with the unemployed post-industrial subjects of late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, these two films disrupt dominant narratives; by giving authority to the refusal of work as a legitimate experience, they allow the sharing and debating of these experiences to produce ‘disturbances’ in such public discourse. Entertainment and didacticism are thus intricately interwoven in these films.

Briar March’s award-winning documentary There Once Was an Island chronicles the lives of the Polynesian inhabitants of Takuu, a small atoll in the Pacific, who are faced with the gradual submersion of their home due to sea level rise.  Applying Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” to the ecological and political processes shown in the film, the chapter argues that March’s documentary is a eco-cosmopolitan project reaching out to new forms of solidarity.

Qu'est-ce que le cinéma direct ? Une forme ? Un style ? Une sous-catégorie du cinéma documentaire caractérisée par l'absence de mise en scène ? Une utopie cinématographique depuis longtemps dépassée ? A l'heure où le cinéma synchrone et léger, aujourd'hui numérique, est devenu un langage commun accessible à tous, que reste-t-il de ce moment où les documentaristes aspiraient à faire des films aussi improvisés et perméables que la vie elle-même ? Alors que chacun peut filmer avec son téléphone ses enfants ou l'épicier du coin, que nous apprend cette volonté de porter à l'écran le destin de l'homme ordinaire? Et à l'heure de la « post-vérité », que retient-on de cette conviction de pouvoir dire vrai ? Si le terme « cinéma direct » embarrasse, tout comme le mot « documentaire », c'est parce que l'un comme l'autre posent le problème épineux de la mise en scène du réel ou de son hypothétique absence. Le constat de ce déni récurrent nous conduit à envisager le cinéma direct d'abord comme un retour à la trompeuse simplicité de « l'esthétique de la vue » (Tom Gunning) et aux enjeux d'une dramaturgie du regard, puis comme le prolongement du « documentaire dialectique » théorisé par John Grierson dans les années 1930. Dans les années 1960, les cinéastes et les ethnologues qui font et pensent le cinéma direct répondent aux questionnements de l'époque (le destin de l'idée communiste, la décolonisation, l'émergence de l'idée de démocratie participative au profit des minorités) par un art de la mise en scène fondé sur la participation et le feedback. Grâce à l'éclosion de la parole filmée et par le biais de dispositifs réflexifs, leurs films interrogent le potentiel politique et épistémologique du cinéma. Chacun désormais peut revendiquer le droit d'être filmé (Walter Benjamin), de se mettre en scène et de questionner la vérité des images. Ce faisant le cinéma direct, au moyen d'une dialectique qui lui est propre (le flux et la structure, le direct et le différé, la présentation et la représentation) est devenu un espace pré-politique : la mise en scène s'y conçoit comme le moyen de penser la place et la participation de l'homme du commun (filmeurs, filmés, spectateurs) dans cet espace que le film découpe dans le réel. C'est en cela que le cinéma direct constitue une matrice, plus pertinente que jamais, pour le cinéma documentaire contemporain.

American observational documentary pioneer D.A. Pennebaker traces his embrace of film-making as a ‘witnessing process’ that allows him to reach a unique understanding of his subjects in this conversation on several rarely discussed films: the highly formative early shorts Baby (1954) and Daybreak Express
(1953–1957), the Drew Associates oddity David (1961), as well as Wild 90 (1968), Eat the Document (1972) and 1 P.M. (1972) – collaborations with Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan and Jean-Luc Godard, respectively. He addresses the meaning of cinéma vérité, Godard’s ‘reckless’ approach to film-making, and the sadness behind his second, and ultimately abandoned, collaboration with Dylan.

The documentary depicts the journey of a teenage girl and her mother who move to California in 2012 because of the Syrian civil war. Together they learn to live in a different culture and face challenges to their traditions - ­all while endeavoring to build a better future.

As histórias em quadrinhos são comumente associadas à ficção, sobretudo de fantasia ou de aventura. Mas há um grande universo de HQs de não-ficção. Seus antecedentes remontam à antiguidade, como a Coluna de Trajano ou a Tapeçaria de Bayeux, passando por iluminuras, afrescos e manuais de instruções. Hoje, temos HQs de não-ficção nos documentários em quadrinhos, quadrinhos autobiográficos, quadrinhos educativos, cartilhas em quadrinhos, além de colunas de revistas, ensaios, prefácios e editoriais feitos em quadrinhos. Os preconceitos contra os quadrinhos ainda são grandes mas, como podemos perceber, seu uso já está disseminado em vários setores de nossa sociedade, mesmo sem ousar dizer seu nome.

The documentary sports film has evolved considerably since it first appeared in the 1930s. As was a feature of early documentary in the 1920s and 1930s, its first manifestations adopted a poetic approach to the subject, revelling in the possibilities that sport offered to exploit the growing range of capabilities of film in both cinematography and editing. Eventually an expository approach would come to dominate under the influence of the British school of documentary but also as the preferred televisual mode for documentary film, and it is in this mode that most television sport documentaries currently employ. In response to perceived weaknesses of the expository mode, and the advent of new technologies in the 1960s, filmmakers exploited an increasingly observational mode in their depictions, and this would also feature to a limited degree in depictions of sport. Directors of sport films have tended to prefer a participative (or interactive) mode in their approaches to the topic, exemplified in the use of the interview method as a means of exploring the subjects considered. However, increasingly, as with documentary films in general, the cinematic sport documentary employs aspects of several modes, particularly the participatory and expositional. While initially priding itself on its distinctness as a form that captured with integrity aspects of social reality, the documentary film has more and more in its cinematic form come to adopt aesthetics associated with popular fiction film. Though documentary has long being viewed as the form best placed to provide complex engagements and understandings of the social and political contexts of the subjects featured, this is increasingly no longer the case in its contemporary cinematic manifestations. Rather, the focus has moved to exploiting the dramatic possibilities of found footage or renderings of social reality rather than providing a means of understanding or engaging critically with such footage. The cinematic sport documentary film has instead focused, as in fiction film, on individualist tales of overcoming and achievement often configured within the familiar three-act-structure of popular cinema.  As such, in the post 9/11 moment, the cinematic sport documentary film has provided, in common with its fictional counterpart, a further affirmation of the American Dream ideology in individualist tales of overcoming and achievement often against the most extraordinary odds.

Charles Manson and the Subtle Art of Radicalisation:

WRITER’S NOTES

The concept for this piece originates from an unhealthy obsession with the Manson family, shared by many of my own and the previous generation, and fuelled by pop culture. I found myself googling, watching, reading everything there was to read. I leafed through a book at an airport, Coming Down Fast, by Simon Wells and was haunted by Manson’s voice. As I listened incessantly to the words of Manson, coming at me from every medium, I began to wonder how much of the blame for these crimes could be attributed to a ‘culture of exclusion’? I felt like a kindred spirit, a Mansonite because somewhere I felt like one of society’s displaced children. When we find ourselves on the fringes of society because we have been cast out and rejected from family, jobs, education, etc., sometimes dangerous ideas flourish.

I began to explore such ideas through researching the voices of social radicals such as Manson, Susan Atkins and I connected these with a past obsession with Black Panther Bobby Seale. I then collaborated with director Ezekial Day and producer Cherian Jacob in a creative process through which my own philosophical reflections were transformed into a dramatic play. Two new characters were introduced and the idea of utilising Manson to speak more generally about the phenomenon of radicalisation or current, emerging sub-cultures became the central theme. The creative process, in this instance, was a continuous evolution of ideas through conversation and communication with the director who, in this instance, also played the role of dramaturge.

The writing process involved hearing the piece read by several actors over a number of years, including the current cast. The script is in a continuous process of evolution, partly because the director and I, with the producer and ultimately the cast, have come to see the Manson phenomenon not as a mere historical or social event or phenomenon but as a medium through which we can speak about our own alienation, exclusion and even the contemporary phenomenon of radicalisation or a call to arms.

En los primeros años del siglo XXI, el documental mexicano ha incrementado sus niveles de producción, distribución y exhibición, llamando la atención de nuevos espectadores pues ha diversificado notablemente sus temas y ha aprovechado los recursos narrativos del cine de ficción. En casi todos los festivales de cine en el país hay un espacio para el documental. De hecho, algunos de los más prestigiosos están dedicados íntegramente al cine documental, y en ellos se presenta lo más destacado de la producción mundial. Se vuelve necesario dialogar desde la academia, con una mirada plural e interdisciplinaria, sobre los temas, las narrativas, los discursos, de esos documentales que en variadas formas representan las identidades, los intereses, las preocupaciones, las formas de vida en México; lo que precisamente tiene el lector en sus manos.

Enzensberger’s sustained engagement with Latin American thinkers
and literary forms was central to his attempts to shift the parameters of West German debates on literature and politics in the 1960s. Attention to Latin American exchanges and influences challenges simplistic criticisms of his Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the novel cultural constellations that underlie Enzensberger’s genre innovation engender productive inroads into transatlantic comparative projects.

The Death of Kings by Colette F Keen, is a new verbatim theatre work that relives the early 80s during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Drawing on both laughter and tears the play focuses on the experiences of gay men and the response to the epidemic by the gay community, the toll of being surrounded by constant death, stories of survival and the nobility of the individuals facing the devastation of their community. Built on interviews that took place between January and December 2012, the show tells the stories of a varied group of gay men. The Death of Kings is a moving, lively and honest display of how a community came together to face tragedy with hope, grace, courage.

The article reflects on contemporary theatre’s representational practice of victimisation, occasionally reserved for refugees and previously immigrants, and examines the ethical and political implications entailed in these practices. It argues that the representation of a vulnerable, suffering ‘other’ depoliticizes the refugee issue, confining refugees to a disempowered category that depends on our empathy and support. Without underrating the essential role of theatre – and the arts in general – to highlight and denounce instances of injustice, discrimination or violence, this article poses the question whether a victimhood-oriented repertoire manages to go beyond short-lived compassion. How can contemporary theatre produce an aesthetic of critical, politicized encounter, while simultaneously acknowledging the agency, expertise and multifaceted identities of people with a refugee experience? The article proposes a documentary theatre approach that can challenge the aforementioned representational patterns of vulnerability and trauma by turning the stage into a self-reflective, inclusive space for critical creativity and re-invented identity placements. The proposed approach is informed by the ethical inquiries and methodological tools of contemporary ethnographic practice. It was developed in the workshop series From Field to Stage: Dramaturgies of the Other, which explores the new directions that the encounter of documentary theatre with ethnography opens in regard to the dramatisation of the ‘other’.

Universidad de Granada ORCID iD: mariodelatorre@ugr.es RESUMEN: Este trabajo parte de la concepción de la narrativa transmedia por parte de Henry Jenkins como el arte de making worlds, de construir mundos de ficción, para extender los fun-damentos teóricos de esta definición al género documental. Si Bill Nichols indica que este género de no ficción tiene per se un gran poder persuasivo-por la naturaleza icónica de sus imáge-nes y sonidos y por el efecto psicológico de verosimilitud que suscita en el público-, aquí defendemos que este carácter se potencia por medio de la narrativa transmedia. La inmersión, la extrabilidad y la performatividad de este tipo de narrativa lleva a la participación activa del usuario en el mundo transmedia, que coincide con su propio mundo, el real. Por esa razón nu-merosos proyectos activistas han visto en el documental trans-media una oportunidad tanto para el ejercicio del pensamiento crítico como para el cambio social. ABSTRACT: This article discusses Henry Jenkin's concept of transmedia as the art of making worlds, in reference to the building of fictional worlds, to theoretically expand on this definition for the documentary genre. If Bill Nichols stated that non-fiction genre has a great persuasive power-because of the indexical nature of its images and sounds, and the psychological effect of verosimility created in the audience-we defend the idea that this character is increased through the transmedia storytelling. The immersion, extrability and performativity of this kind of narrative form lead to an active user role in the transmedia world, that coincides with his own world, the real one. That is why numerous activist projects have used the transmedia documentary as an opportunity for critical thinking and social change.

This article investigates the existence of different kinds of User
Generated Content (UGC) and the connection between UGC and some narrative structures of the media product itself. The corpus of the analysis is constituted by videogames and the UGC related to them, in particular Halo and Metroid series and illustrates how small differences in, for instance, character presentation may influence both player’s understanding of the character itself and the kind of production is mainly created in the subject.‎

An inquiry into the documentary debate: Is documentary photography art or journalism? What's the reason for documentary photography's existence in the 21st century? Is documentary a genre after all, or rather a mode or an attitude with which photographers and filmmakers approach the world? An essay written for Dutch Doc, an annual documentary photo award in the Netherlands operating from 2010–2014 (five awards given).

One of Art Spiegelman’s motivations for using animal forms for the characters in the two volumes of Maus was to depict the dehumanization of the Jews during the Holocaust and as well the inhuman behavior of the Nazis and people of other nations. There is another side to this dehumanization in Maus that we will explore, namely what Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) call “becoming animal,” which is a mode of social and personal transformation undergone for the sake of survival and vitality and obtained through adaptation and mutation. D&G use Spinoza’s account of bodily composition and affective alteration to explain how threatening influences can push people and their groups into a temporary state of anonymity. While under this mode of indeterminacy, new arrangements and compositions may freely form and dissipate, which allows them to effectively survive, evade, and subvert the intruding powers. D&G further elaborate these notions of “becoming-animal” and the formation of anonymous “packs” by utilizing their concept of the “machinic assemblage,” whose parts reconfigure in order to disrupt or “minorize” the machinery of the larger system. This minorization operates as well on the level of language, where the minor group works within the major language system to undermine their oppressor’s regime of signs and values. Maus for example adopts the visually metaphoric language that presented the Jewish people in rodent form, as seen for instance in the Nazi propaganda documentary The Eternal Jew (Fritz Hippler, Der Ewige Jude, 1940), which depicts the Jews as rats infesting the entire world. But by shifting to mice and by drawing the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman evades the fixed meanings of the major visual language and introduces very different connotations and interpretations. Yet, one criticism of Spiegelman’s use of animal forms is that it sanitizes the horrors of the Holocaust and falsifies them by rendering them cute and harmless. I reply by including Maus under what D&G call a “minor genre,” in this case a particular kind of minor documentary. Filmed documentaries are rarely objective and unbiased, as we have seen already with the propaganda film The Eternal Jew’s distortions and misrepresentations. And Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), instead of presenting any archival footage of the Holocaust, merely interviews survivors, witnesses and former Nazi SS officers to “document” the subjective realities internal to the events. Maus as well is based on the recorded interviews of a Holocaust survivor, but instead of providing objective depictions of the visual horrors in his experiences, it instead documents the existential experience of losing cultural and personal identity. And the horrors of this particular element of the events are more effectively and faithfully documented using animal forms.

Dorothea Lange, Documentary Photography, and Twentieth-Century America charts the life of Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), whose life was radically altered by the Depression, and whose photography helped transform the nation. The book begins with her childhood in immigrant, metropolitan New York, shifting to her young adulthood as a New Woman who apprenticed herself to Manhattan’s top photographers, then established a career as portraitist to San Francisco’s elite. When the Great Depression shook America’s economy, Lange was profoundly affected. Leaving her studio, Lange confronted citizens’ anguish with her camera, documenting their economic and social plight. This move propelled her to international renown.

This biography synthesizes recent New Deal scholarship and photographic history and probes the unique regional histories of the Pacific West, the Plains, and the South. Lange’s life illuminates critical transformations in the U.S., specifically women’s evolving social roles and the state’s growing capacity to support vulnerable citizens. The author utilizes the concept of "care work," the devalued nurturing of others, often considered women’s work, to analyze Lange’s photography and reassert its power to provoke social change. Lange’s portrayal of the Depression’s ravages is enmeshed in a deeply political project still debated today, of the nature of governmental responsibility toward citizens’ basic needs.

Students and the general reader will find this a powerful and insightful introduction to Dorothea Lange, her work, and legacy. Dorothea Lange, Documentary Photography, and Twentieth-Century America makes a compelling case for the continuing political and social significance of Lange’s work, as she recorded persistent injustices such as poverty, labor exploitation, racism, and environmental degradation.

Vivimos inmersos en lo real. Tejemos lo real a diario y así la realidad es un telar siempre inacabado. La realidad es tejido de experiencia compartida, de existencia en relación, de horizontes de mundo. La realidad está en fuga perpetua: «La reali-dad huye», dice Trinh Minh-Ha, «la realidad niega la realidad». Nosotros corremos detrás de ella. La imaginamos otra, máquina en mano. Los medios de expresión, en su sentido más amplio, son el terreno donde se de-baten los horizontes de lo real. Donde se tejen y destejen los ropajes del tiempo humano. Los medios para ser humanos, solos y acompañados, con lo otro, humano y no-humano. Los medios son materia e idea. Son vehículos de formas, agencias formativas, son in-formación, comunicación de relaciones. Cada soporte tiene su identidad espacial y temporal, sus modos de interrelación con el gran tejido me-diático. En estos patrones emergen los estándares, las convenciones, los medios normativos y los esquemas de valor, los modelos de mundo, las revoluciones, el archivo y otras tantas historias que nos dejan ser humanos. El arte es exceso de realidad. Todo arte mediático, al situarse en el desafío de los lenguajes y soportes, habita este umbral de lo real, siempre vivo, terreno fértil para imaginar otras formas de existencia en común. En lo personal, asumo mi prácti

Tough one of the primary intentions of documentary consists in Representing Reality (Nichols 2001), the nature of factual audio-visual formats may not be equated with mimetic depictions of phenomenological 'reality' nor can they be reduced to unambiguously mediatized arguments. Rather the fascination of documentary as a "creative treatment of actuality" (Grierson 1932) precisely lies in the oscillation between presumable unequivocal modes of representing reality and its potential to negotiate various perceptions. This stimulating tension that is already both challenge and potential for linear documentary is exponentized in non-linear new media-based documentaries.

The article focuses on latest evolutions in this field taking one paradigmatic case – autopoetic Korsakow documentaries – as a test stone. Based on complex algorithms and opaque linking, Korsakow simultaneously presents a multiplicity of itineraries through the database and thus interpretations of the documentary material. Emerging 'meanings' can neither be mastered by the 'author' nor unequivocally interpreted by the users. Instead, different a-causal, a-teleological documentary experiences trigger polysemic patterns of associations.

This calls for a modification of the concept of documentary audio-visual 'text' as we are dealing with only ephemeral manifestations of virtual relations. Moreover, we witness a shift from 'documentary authorship' to performative authoring instance enabling individual experiences for interactive users. And it implies that also concepts of audiences need revision from interpreting receivers to co-creative participants who self-reflexively question their relation to media practices and their agency in daily life.

Thus new media documentaries do not only have an epistemologic potential that goes beyond the options of linear formats; rather, due to their autopoetic nature, performative dynamics and ambiguities, they bear an ontological quality of their own.

Keywords:
interactive documentary – New Media Documentary – Korsakow documentary – performativity – processuality – relationality – ambiguity – non-linearity – interaction – narration – indeterminacy – autopoisis – algorithms – SNU – authorship – complexity

Ethnographic documentary is a distinct genre in the field of documentary. It began as a need for filmmakers to invent a new way to reconcile with the real and at the same time as a need for social anthropologists to find a new ethnographic tool.
The definition of the genre dates back to the early 1960s, when about two revolutionary documentaries appeared in the same period, one in America and the other in France. Direct cinema and cinema verité reacted to the film's opaque methodology of approaching the main subject while sharing the logic of a more "direct" and "true" encounter with their issues.
Chronicle of a Summer, Le joli Mai, Don't look back and Salesman, films discussed in this text, are typical examples of these pioneering currents presenting substantial differences in the logic of the approach to the subject, the type of cinematography, and the montage techniques used by their creators.