Documentary in the Digital Age


Book Description

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Radical Documentary and Global Crises


Book Description

When independent filmmakers, activists, and amateurs document the struggle for rights, representation, and revolution, they instrumentalize images by advocating for a particular outcome. Ryan Watson calls this "militant evidence." In Radical Documentary and Global Crises, Watson centers the discussion on extreme conflict, such as the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and child soldier conscription in the Congo. Under these conditions, artists and activists aspire to document, archive, witness, and testify. The result is a set of practices that turn documentary media toward a commitment to feature and privilege the media made by the people living through the terror. This footage is then combined with new digitally archived images, stories, and testimonials to impact specific social and political situations. Radical Documentary and Global Crises re-orients definitions of what a documentary is, how it functions, how it circulates, and how its effect is measured, arguing that militant evidence has the power to expose, to amass, and to adjudicate.




American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age


Book 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. This book investigates the manner in which this contemporary Western "crisis" in historical narrative is produced by a larger epistemological shift in visual culture. Ricciardelli uses the theme of war as depicted in these directors’ films to focus her study and look at the model(s) of national identity that Burns, Morris, and Moore shape through their depictions of US military actions. She examines how postcolonial critiques of historicism and the advent of digitization have affected the narrative structure of documentary film and the shaping of historical consciousness through cinematic representation.




Cinema in the Digital Age


Book Description

Have digital technologies transformed cinema into a new art, or do they simply replicate and mimic analogue, film-based cinema? Newly revised and expanded to take the latest developments into account, Cinema in the Digital Age examines the fate of cinema in the wake of the digital revolution. Nicholas Rombes considers Festen (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Timecode (2000), Russian Ark (2002), and The Ring (2002), among others. Haunted by their analogue pasts, these films are interested not in digital purity but rather in imperfection and mistakes—blurry or pixilated images, shaky camera work, and other elements that remind viewers of the human behind the camera. With a new introduction and new material, this updated edition takes a fresh look at the historical and contemporary state of digital cinema. It pays special attention to the ways in which nostalgia for the look and feel of analogue disrupts the aesthetics of the digital image, as well as how recent films such as The Social Network (2010) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)—both shot digitally—have disguised and erased their digital foundations. The book also explores new possibilities for writing about and theorizing film, such as randomization.




Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age


Book Description

This book deliberates on the role of the transnational in bringing to the mainstream what were formerly marginal Japanese B movie genres.




Where Truth Lies


Book Description

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. This boldly original book traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Kris Fallon examines the emergence of several key media forms—social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization—and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing on particular moments of political rupture, Fallon argues that the ideological rifts of the period inspired the adoption and adaptation of newly available technologies to encourage social mobilization and political action, a function performed for much of the previous century by independent documentary film. Positioning documentary film and digital media side by side in the political sphere, Fallon asserts that “truth” now lies in a new set of media forms and discursive practices that implicitly shape the documentation of everything from widespread cultural spectacles like wars and presidential elections to more invisible or isolated phenomena like the Abu Ghraib torture scandal or the “fake news” debates of 2016.




Documentary in the Digital Age


Book Description

If you want to learn from the leading lights of today's revolution in documentary filmmaking Maxine Baker has written the guide you need to own. You'll discover the many different and innovative approaches to documentary form and style arising from the use of innovative new technology. A tribute to the mavericks of creativity, inside you will find interviews and advice from groundbreaking documentary makers from the UK, USA and Europe as well as extensive listings of useful worldwide contacts and organisations. Any and every fan of the documentary will experience anew the passion and wonder of the Factual Film. Published review: "This is a must-have insight into modern documentary; the principles that govern it and the conventions it often breaks. It deserves a place on the shelves of film commissioners, film students and documentary consumers as prominent as the place these documentary filmmakers have carved for themselves on our screens." - www.shootingpeople.org




Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction


Book Description

This title explores the increasing relevance of digital media in the consumption and analysis of film.







Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age


Book Description

Wag the Dog is a film that became a media event and a cultural icon because it inadvertently short-circuited the distance that is supposed to separate reality and fiction. The film's narration challenges the established boundaries between the fiction and nonfiction tradition, as Barry Levinson, the director, embeds his interest in documentary filmmaking and complicates the issue of narrative agency in the way he frames the story. The examination of the historical and social context in which it was produced, exhibited and received worldwide enables the author to illuminate a series of changes in the way a fiction film reflects and interacts with reality, urging us to reconsider some of our central and long-standing concepts or even paradigms in film theory. Eleftheria Thanouli provides new insights into a series of issues from both classical and contemporary film theory, like the conceptual and ontological stakes in the use of digital technology, the impact of mass media on public memory and the political role of cinema in a globalized and conglomerated world.