What Is Non-fiction Cinema?

What Is Non-fiction Cinema? PDF

Author: Trevor Ponech

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-28

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1000010066

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Trevor Ponech has written a serious and pathbreaking study of how to define non-fiction cinema. Working from the position that no cinematic representation is wholly factual, Ponech argues that what determines whether a film is fiction or non-fiction is the filmmakers intention. Persuasively defending this unique position, the author provides a philosophically rigorous analysis of the communicative practices of filmmakers. In What Is Non-Fiction Cinema? Trevor Ponech has written a serious and pathbreaking study of how to define non-fiction cinema. Working from the position that no cinematic representation is wholly factual, Ponech argues that what determines whether a film is fiction or non-fiction is the filmmakers intention. Persuasively defending this unique position, the author provides a philosophically rigorous analysis of the communicative practices of filmmakers. In making his case, Ponech cogently presents the other major theoretical positions regarding documentary cinema and shows why each is incomplete. The result is a cutting-edge philosophical inquiry into purposiveness in film.

Beyond Document

Beyond Document PDF

Author: Charles Warren

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 1996-05-31

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780819562906

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Critics and writers consider nonfiction film both as document and as creative work with strong artistic, political, and moral implications. In essays by eleven of America's foremost writers, critics, and filmmakers, Beyond Document explores the full spectrum of nonfiction film and its creative possibilities. In addition to Charles Warren's broad introductory history of the genre, the book takes a close look at ethnographic films, cinema-verité, memoir and autobiography, docudramas, essay films, and newsreels, from classics like Night and Fog and Nanook of the North to more recent important work like Film about a Woman Who. . ., Harlan County, U.S.A., Sans Soleil, and Forest of Bliss. Representations of reality are increasingly contested, in courtrooms and in Congress, as well as in art. Asking what the art of film can achieve, Helene Keyssar considers the history of nonfiction films by women; Jay Cantor discusses film investigations of the Holocaust; Patricia Hampl looks at how autobiographical films render experience into narrative; Robert Gardner questions the filmmaker's "impulse to preserve" ; and poet Susan Howe explores structures of mourning in several filmmakers. All the book's essays provide deeply felt understanding of documentary film, and of how we live with, an d within, images. CONTRIBUTORS: Jay Cantor, Robert Gardener, Patricia Hampl, Maureen Howard, Susan Howe, Helene Keyssar, Phillip Lopatte, Vlada Petric, William Rothman, Charles Warren, Eliot Weinberger.

Documentary Screens

Documentary Screens PDF

Author: Keith Beattie

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-04-29

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0230628036

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Documentary productions encompass remarkable representations of surprising realities. How do documentaries achieve their ends? What types of documentaries are there? What factors are implicated in their production? Such questions animate this engaging study. Documentary Screens is a comprehensive and critical study of the formal features and histories of central categories of documentary film and television. Among the categories examined are autobiographical, indigenous and ethnographic documentary, compilation films, direct cinema and cinema verite and television documentary journalism. The book also considers recent so-called popular factual entertainment and the future of documentary film, television and new media. This provocative and accessible analysis situates wide-ranging examples from each category within the larger material forces which impact on documentary form and content. The important connection between form, content and context explored in the book constitutes a new and lively 'documentary studies' approach to documentary representation.

Documentary

Documentary PDF

Author: Erik Barnouw

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780195078985

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Presents a history of the documentary film

Documenting Cityscapes

Documenting Cityscapes PDF

Author: Iván Villarmea Álvarez

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-05-12

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0231850786

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While film studies has traditionally treated the presence of the city in film as an urban text operating inside of a cinematic one, this approach has recently evolved into the study of cinema as a technology of place. From this perspective, Documenting Cityscapes explores the way the city has been depicted by nonfiction filmmakers since the late 1970s, paying particular attention to three aesthetic tendencies: documentary landscaping, urban self-portraits, and metafilmic strategies. Through the formal analysis of fifteen works from six different countries, this volume investigates how the rise of subjectivity has helped to develop a kind of gaze that is closer to citizens than to the institutions and corporations responsible for recent major transformations. Documenting Cityscapes therefore reveals the extent to which cinema has become an agent of urban change, in which certain films not only challenge the most controversial policies of late capitalism but also are able to produce spatiality themselves.

Literary Fiction

Literary Fiction PDF

Author: Geir Farner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-01-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1623564263

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Insofar as literary theory has addressed the issue of literature as a means of communication and the function of literary fiction, opinions have been sharply divided, indicating that the elementary foundations of literary theory and criticism still need clarifying. Many of the "classical" problems that literary theory has been grappling with from Aristotle to our time are still waiting for a satisfactory solution. Based on a new cognitive model of literature as communication, Farner systematically explains how literary fiction works, providing new solutions to a wide range of literary issues, like intention, function, evaluation, delimitation of the literary work as such, fictionality, suspense, and the roles of author and narrator, along with such narratological problems as voice, point of view and duration. Covering a wide range of literary issues central to literary theory, offering new theories while also summarising the field as it stands, Literary Fiction will be a valuable guide and resource for students and scholars of the theory of literature.

A Companion to Documentary Film History

A Companion to Documentary Film History PDF

Author: Joshua Malitsky

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-04-28

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1119116309

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This volume offers a new and expanded history of the documentary form across a range of times and contexts, featuring original essays by leading historians in the field In a contemporary media culture suffused with competing truth claims, documentary media have become one of the most significant means through which we think in depth about the past. The most rigorous collection of essays on nonfiction film and media history and historiography currently available, A Companion to Documentary Film History offers an in-depth, global examination of central historical issues and approaches in documentary, and of documentary's engagement with historical and contemporary topics, debates, and themes. The Companion's twenty original essays by prominent nonfiction film and media historians challenge prevalent conceptions of what documentary is and was, and explore its growth, development, and function over time. The authors provide fresh insights on the mode's reception, geographies, authorship, multimedia contexts, and movements, and address documentary's many aesthetic, industrial, historiographical, and social dimensions. This authoritative volume: Offers both historical specificity and conceptual flexibility in approaching nonfiction and documentary media Explores documentary's multiple, complex geographic and geopolitical frameworks Covers a diversity of national and historical contexts, including Revolution-era Soviet Union, post-World War Two Canada and Europe, and contemporary China Establishes new connections and interpretive contexts for key individual films and film movements, using new primary sources Interrogates established assumptions about documentary authorship, audiences, and documentary's historical connection to other media practices. A Companion to Documentary Film History is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses covering documentary or nonfiction film and media, an excellent supplement for courses on national or regional media histories, and an important new resource for all film and media studies scholars, particularly those in nonfiction media.

In Every Moment We Are Still Alive

In Every Moment We Are Still Alive PDF

Author: Tom Malmquist

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2017-06-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1473640032

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Chosen by the New York Times as one of the "Notable Books of 2018" Chosen by El País as one of this past decade's nine best novels about life and death The prize-winning, bestselling tale of love, loss, family and the lives we live moment by moment, from a stunning new voice in European fiction. Tom's heavily pregnant girlfriend Karin is rushed to hospital with severe flu. While the doctors are able to save the baby, they are helpless in the face of what transpires to be acute Leukemia, and in a moment as fleeting as it is cruel Tom gains a daughter but loses his soul-mate. In Every Moment is the story of a year that changes everything, as Tom must reconcile the fury of bereavement with the overwhelming responsibility of raising his daughter, Livia, alone. By turns tragic and redemptive, meditative and breathless, achingly poignant and darkly funny, this heavily autobiographical novel has been described in its native Sweden as 'hypnotic', 'impossible to resist' and 'one of the most powerful books about grief ever written'.

New Nonfiction Film

New Nonfiction Film PDF

Author: Dara Waldron

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-08-09

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1501322524

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New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is the first book to offer a lengthy examination of the relationship between fiction and documentary from the perspective of art and poetics. The premise of the book is to propose a new category of nonfiction film that is distinguished from – as opposed to being conflated with – the documentary film in its multiple historical guises; a premise explored in case-studies of films by distinguished artists and filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Ben Rivers, Chantal Akerman, Ben Russell Pat Collins and Gideon Koppel). The book builds a case for this new category of film, calling it the 'new nonfiction film,' and argues, in the process, that this kind of film works to dismantle the old distinctions between fiction and documentary film and therefore the axioms of Film and Cinema Studies as a discipline of study.