Documentaries

Download or read book Kill the Documentary written by Jill Godmilow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? In Kill the Documentary, the award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking. She critiques documentary films from Nanook of the North to the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War. Tethered to what Godmilow calls the “pedigree of the real” and the “pornography of the real,” they fail to activate their viewers’ engagement with historical or present-day problems. Whether depicting the hardships of poverty or the horrors of war, conventional documentaries produce an “us-watching-them” mode that ultimately reinforces self-satisfaction and self-absorption. In place of the conventional documentary, Godmilow advocates for a “postrealist” cinema. Instead of offering the faux empathy and sentimental spectacle of mainstream documentaries, postrealist nonfiction films are acts of resistance. They are experimental, interventionist, performative, and transformative. Godmilow demonstrates how a film can produce meaningful, useful experience by forcefully challenging ways of knowing and how viewers come to understand the world. She considers her own career as a filmmaker as well as the formal and political strategies of artists such as Luis Buñuel, Georges Franju, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Rithy Panh, and other directors. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.

Download or read book Into Thin Air written by Jon Krakauer and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1998-11-12 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The epic account of the storm on the summit of Mt. Everest that claimed five lives and left countless more—including Krakauer's—in guilt-ridden disarray. "A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism." —PEOPLE A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong. By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons and lay to rest some of the painful questions that still surround the event. He takes great pains to provide a balanced picture of the people and events he witnessed and gives due credit to the tireless and dedicated Sherpas. He also avoids blasting easy targets such as Sandy Pittman, the wealthy socialite who brought an espresso maker along on the expedition. Krakauer's highly personal inquiry into the catastrophe provides a great deal of insight into what went wrong. But for Krakauer himself, further interviews and investigations only lead him to the conclusion that his perceived failures were directly responsible for a fellow climber's death. Clearly, Krakauer remains haunted by the disaster, and although he relates a number of incidents in which he acted selflessly and even heroically, he seems unable to view those instances objectively. In the end, despite his evenhanded and even generous assessment of others' actions, he reserves a full measure of vitriol for himself. This updated trade paperback edition of Into Thin Air includes an extensive new postscript that sheds fascinating light on the acrimonious debate that flared between Krakauer and Everest guide Anatoli Boukreev in the wake of the tragedy. "I have no doubt that Boukreev's intentions were good on summit day," writes Krakauer in the postscript, dated August 1999. "What disturbs me, though, was Boukreev's refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision. Never did he indicate that perhaps it wasn't the best choice to climb without gas or go down ahead of his clients." As usual, Krakauer supports his points with dogged research and a good dose of humility. But rather than continue the heated discourse that has raged since Into Thin Air's denouncement of guide Boukreev, Krakauer's tone is conciliatory; he points most of his criticism at G. Weston De Walt, who coauthored The Climb, Boukreev's version of events. And in a touching conclusion, Krakauer recounts his last conversation with the late Boukreev, in which the two weathered climbers agreed to disagree about certain points. Krakauer had great hopes to patch things up with Boukreev, but the Russian later died in an avalanche on another Himalayan peak, Annapurna I. In 1999, Krakauer received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a prestigious prize intended "to honor writers of exceptional accomplishment." According to the Academy's citation, "Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport; while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind."

Download or read book I-Docs written by Judith Aston and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of documentary has been one of adaptation and change, as docu-mentarists have harnessed the affordances of emerging technology. In the last decade interactive documentaries (i-docs) have become established as a new field of practice within non-fiction storytelling. Their various incarnations are now a focus at leading film festivals (IDFA DocLab, Tribeca Storyscapes, Sheffield DocFest), major international awards have been won, and they are increasingly the subject of academic study. This anthology looks at the creative practices, purposes and ethics that lie behind these emergent forms. Expert contributions, case studies and interviews with major figures in the field address the production processes that lie behind interactive documentary, as well as the political, cultural and geographic contexts in which they are emerging and the media ecology that supports them. Taking a broad view of interactive documentary as any work which engages with 'the real' by employing digital interactive technology, this volume addresses a range of platforms and environments, from web-docs and virtual reality to mobile media and live performance. It thus explores the challenges that face interactive documentary practitioners and scholars, and proposes new ways of producing and engaging with interactive factual content.

Download or read book There's A Tale To This City written by Jay Khan and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jay, the restless wanderer, rocks the lives of two strangers by introducing them to the strange world he has stumbled across-the streets of Melbourne. Rick, the bookworm, is torn away from his mundane academic life. Johnny, the paranoid poet, is released from his small-town worries. When they hit the streets together, twisted tales rise from the gutters. The bathing man. The cardboard preacher. The mute who isn't a mute. The trio cast aside everything they know, embarking on a journey to meet the city's neglected souls. There's a Tale to This City is an offbeat portrait of Melbourne that combines poetry, narrative prose and toilet paper diary entries, recollecting the strange experiences of three writers, who came together to learn the art of listening.

Download or read book Making Documentary Films and Videos written by Barry Hampe and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-12-10 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outlines each step in creating documentaries, from conception to final film, and offers advice on capturing human behavior and recreating past events, with advice on how to get started in the field, a section on researching and developing a project, and current resources.

Download or read book Green Documentary written by Helen Hughes and published by Intellect (UK). This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of environmental documentary filmmaking, offering an analysis of controversial and high-profile documentary films. With analyses that include the wider context of this filmmaking about local rural communities in Britain and Europe, this book also contributes to the ongoing debate on representing the crisis.

Download or read book Story Movements written by Caty Borum Chattoo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only a few years after the 2013 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Blackfish - an independent documentary film that critiqued the treatment of orcas in captivity - visits to SeaWorld declined, major corporate sponsors pulled their support, and performing acts canceled appearances. The steady drumbeat of public criticism, negative media coverage, and unrelenting activism became known as the "Blackfish Effect." In 2016, SeaWorld announced a stunning corporate policy change - the end of its profitable orca shows. In an evolving networked era, social-issue documentaries like Blackfish are art for civic imagination and social critique. Today's documentaries interrogate topics like sexual assault in the U.S. military (The Invisible War), racial injustice (13th), government surveillance (Citizenfour), and more. Artistic nonfiction films are changing public conversations, influencing media agendas, mobilizing communities, and capturing the attention of policymakers - accessed by expanding audiences in a transforming media marketplace. In Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change, producer and scholar Caty Borum Chattoo explores how documentaries disrupt dominant cultural narratives through complex, creative, often investigative storytelling. Featuring original interviews with award-winning documentary filmmakers and field leaders, the book reveals the influence and motivations behind the vibrant, eye-opening stories of the contemporary documentary age.