Call for Manuscripts for Documentary Film Cultures book series

Cinema Journal, 2006

Rethinking Documentary In the Digital Age by Faye Ginsburg In March 2005 the United Nations inaugurAted a long-awaited program. the Digital SoUdarity Fund. meant to underwrite initiatives that address "the uneven distribution and use of new infonnation and communication technologies' and "enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the infonnation society: What this might mean in practice-which digital technologies might make a Significant difference and for whom and with what resources-is still an open and contentious question. Debates about the fund at the first meeting of the World Summit on the Infonnation Society (WSIS) In December 2003 are symptomatic of the complexity of "digital divide" issues that have also been central to the second phase of the infonnation summit held in November 2005 in Tunisia. In this essay I consider the relationship of indigenous people to new media technologies that people in these communities have started to take up-with both ambivalence and enthusiasm-<>ver the last decade. Why are their concerns barely audible in discussions of new media? I would Uke to suggest that part of the problem has to do with the rise of the tenn the "Digital Age" over the last decade and the assumptions that support it. While it initially had the shock of the new. it now 128 Cinema Joumal46. No.1. FaY 2006 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7. http://www.usmob.(..Om.llu. Uct'essed August 22. 2006. 8. Ibid. Wu Wenguang: An Introduction by Chris Berry "DV: Individual Filmmaking" was written at a watershed moment in the history of recent Chinese documentary. Its author, Wu Wenguang. is one of the most prominent and proUfic independents in the country.' It gives inSights not only into some

Oxford University Press, 2022

Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary offers a theoretical mapping of contemporary non-standard documentary practices enabled by the proliferation of new digital imaging, lightweight and non-operator digital cameras, multiscreen and interactive interfaces, and web 2.0 platforms. These emergent practices encompass digital data visualizations, digital films that experiment with the deliberate manipulation of photographic records, documentaries based on drone cameras, GoPros, and virtual reality (VR) interfaces, documentary installations in the gallery, interactive documentary (i-doc), citizens' vernacular online videos that document scenes of the protests such as the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong Protests, and the Black Lives Matter Movements, and new activist films, videos, and archiving projects that respond to those political upheavals. Building on the interdisciplinary framework of documentary studies, digital media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Jihoon Kim investigates the ways in which these practices both challenge and update the aesthetic, epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions of traditional film-based documentary. Providing a diverse range of case studies that classify and examine these practices, the book argues that the new media technologies and the experiential platforms outside the movie theater, such as the gallery, the world wide web, and social media services, expand five horizons of documentary cinema: image, vision, dispositif, archive, and activism. This reconfiguration of these five horizons demonstrates that documentary cinema in the age of new media and platforms, which Kim labels as the 'twenty-first-century documentary,' dynamically changes its boundaries while also exploring new experiences of reality and history in times of the contemporary crises across the globe, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Collegium antropologicum, 2013

This paper seeks to explain the reasons for the rising popularity of the ethnological documentary genre in all its forms, emphasizing its correlation with contemporary social events or trends. The paper presents the origins and the development of the ethnological documentary film in the anthropological domain. Special attention is given to the most influential documentaries of the last decade, dealing with politics: (Fahrenheit 9/1, Bush&#39;s Brain), gun control (Bowling for Columbine), health (Sicko), the economy (Capitalism: A Love Story), ecology An Inconvenient Truth) and food (Super Size Me). The paper further analyzes the popularization of the documentary film in Croatia, the most watched Croatian documentaries in theatres, and the most controversial Croatian documentaries. It determines the structure and methods in the making of a documentary film, presents the basic types of scripts for a documentary film, and points out the differences between scripts for a documentary and...

Dastavezi. The Audio-Visual South Asia (1), 2019

This is the first edition of Dastavezi, a journal for scholars and filmmakers, filmmakers as scholars, and filmmaking scholars working on regional and transregional South Asia. Dastavezi aims to be a platform for the dialogue between textual and audiovisual productions in current research. In the introduction we address some common difficulties and convergences of-as well as differences between filmic and academic practices.

This article analyzes the documentary strategies followed in the transnational documentary projects Why Democracy (2007) and Why Poverty (2012), both initiated by the BBC and DR, the main British and Danish public service broadcasters, in collaboration with the NGO organisation Steps International. The two projects relate to and reflect the role and function of media and documentary in a globalized world. The analysis is based on theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism and takes up issues in documentary theory connected to the social, cultural and political forms and functions of documentary in a global context. Two strong forces have had a clear impact on contemporary documentary film and television, as well as our societies and cultures in general especially since the 1990s: mediatization through digital technologies and globalization. Mediatization refers to a situation in which media systems have been imbedded so deeply in our society, culture and everyday life that they create a new logic of communication and interaction. The media become important and powerful institutions in themselves, but as a consequence of this the media also influence the way institutions and social, cultural and political spheres function and communicate (Hjarvard 2013: 17). Mediatization gained prominence in the analogue era within national contexts, in which news, documentaries, and fiction were instrumental in nation-building and the creation of an imagined community (Anderson 1983). Even with their origins within national contexts, media and documentary forms dealt with transnational issues and circulated within a global media culture. The combination, however, of mediatization on a larger scale, the rise of digital networks and platforms, and the intensified structures of globalization have profoundly influenced contemporary documentary culture.

SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society, 2020

This is the entry for "Documentary Media" in the SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society, published in December 2019. Focusing on documentary cinema, it deploys five contextual frames, considers academic fields and scholarly contributions, the genre's particular textual qualities, and three future-looking concepts for studies in documentary.

2013

Recent scholarship treats the transition to the digital format in documentary film as a straightforward change in production practices or distribution channels, ignoring the deeper implications of digital technology for non-fiction moving image media. Far from a simple transition in the technology used to shoot and produce these films, however, digital technology has altered, and been altered by, documentary film to a far greater extent than any previous period in its history. The first decade of the twenty first century gave rise to dramatic technological, aesthetic and political revolutions around the globe, dramatic events mirrored in the rapid evolution of documentary form across the same time period. This project focuses on the emergence of digital documentary in the context of the ideological shifts and social conflicts of the early 21st century. As blogs, social networks and mobile technologies became the connective tissue of political dissent and social mobilization over thi...

Journal of contemporary ethnography, 2014

Academic ethnographers have been utilizing film, and more recently video, for a variety of research purposes including the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data. But ethnographic film and video are not the exclusive domain of university-based ethnographers or professionally trained ethnographic researchers. More and more ethnographic films and video documentaries are nowadays produced by filmmakers who aren’t necessarily interested in utilizing their work to advance anthropological, sociological, or other disciplines’ theoretical or substantive agendas. Interestingly, these documentaries often garner wider distribution and larger audiences than ethnographic films and videos made by academics, leading us to question the identity of ethnographic documentary and the potential of this genre to both advance ethnological knowledge and the sociocultural imagination. In this article, I examine this phenomenon focusing on nonacademic wide-distribution ethnographic documentaries available on cable and satellite TV, Netflix, and iTunes, reflecting on their content, style, distribution strategies, and their status as social scientific ethnographic representations

Documentary, Culture and the Mind, 2020

This book present some of my most important articles on documentary film and television between 1994-2020. During this period I developed a theory of documentary genres inspired by cognitive theory, a theory that put the basic narrative, emotional, and cognitive dimensions of media production and media use in focus. However, even though a basic, theoretical dimension runs through all the articles defining the main genres of documentary and the way audiences relate to and interact with this, they also try to illustrate how documentary genres interact with history, society and culture, and how they speak to and influence our individual mind and the collective public debate. Documentary is a very central genre in our highly mediated and global world: the stories they tell, can potentially create mediated cultural encounters between people belonging to different societies and culture. The case studies presented deal with our historical past and heritage, with the global climate change and with war and social crisis.