How does the introduction of modern media influence a community? How does technology coexist with tradition? How do reality and imagination converge in the creation of documentary? Jennifer Deger addresses these questions in her compelling study of one Aboriginal community's relationship with media. Deger spent several years working with the Yolngu community in Gapuwiyak, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, both as an ethnographic researcher and as a collaborator in the production of media. Shimmering Screens explores the place of technology in Gapuwiyak through discussions about the...
How does the introduction of modern media influence a community? How does technology coexist with tradition? How do reality and imagination converge i...
Documentaries have increasingly used the first person, with a number of prominent filmmakers finding critical and commercial success with this intimate approach. Jewish filmmakers have particularly thrived in this genre, using it to explore disparate definitions of the self in relation to the larger groups of family and community.
In First Person Jewish, Alisa S. Lebow examines more than a dozen films from Jewish artists to reveal how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively (and at times unwittingly) with historical tropes and stereotypes...
Documentaries have increasingly used the first person, with a number of prominent filmmakers finding critical and commercial success with this inti...
The Right to Play Oneself collects for the first time Thomas Waugh's essays on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, written between 1974 and 2008. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin's and Joris Ivens's manifestos of "committed" documentary from the 19 0s, reflects the book's theme of the political potential of documentary for representing the democratic performance of citizens and artists. Waugh analyzes an eclectic international selection of films and issues from the 1920s to the present day. The essays provide a transcultural focus, moving from...
The Right to Play Oneself collects for the first time Thomas Waugh's essays on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, writt...
Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. In Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, Elizabeth Cowie looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms, showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political, addressing the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating. Cowie claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to...
Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. In...
Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.
Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the last one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce...
Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying lea...
Francois Truffaut called Night and Fog "the greatest film ever made." But when Alain Resnais finished his documentary, with its depiction of Nazi atrocities, the resistance of the French censors was fierce. A mere decade had passed since the end of the war, and the French public was unprepared to confront the horrors shown in the film--let alone the possibility of French complicity. In fact it would be through Night and Fog that many viewers first learned, as film critic Serge Daney put it, "that the worst had only just taken place."
An engrossing account of the...
Francois Truffaut called Night and Fog "the greatest film ever made." But when Alain Resnais finished his documentary, with its depictio...
