Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video - Tapa blanda

Documenting the Documentary features essays by twenty-seven film scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay focuses on one or two important documentaries, engaging in questions surrounding ethics, ideology, politics, power, race, gender, and representation -- but always in terms of how they arise out of or are involved in the reading of specific documentaries as particular textual constructions. By closely reading documentaries as rich visual works, this anthology fills a void in the critical writing on documentaries, which tends to privilege production over aesthetic pleasure. As we perceive and comprehend the world through visual media increasingly, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Together, the essays cover the significant developments in the history of the documentary, from the first commercially released feature, Nanook of the North (1922), to modern independent productions, such as An American Family (1973), Tongues Untied (1989), and Finding Christa (1991), and including important national and stylistic movements and various production contexts from the mainstream to the avant-garde. Seth Feldman places Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) within the context of constructivism and futurism; Vivian Sobchack discusses the strategies of Bunuel's Las Hurdas (Land without Bread, 1931) in relation to surrealism; and Joanne Hershfield explores Que viva Mexico! (1932) as the presentation of an exotic culture by a European director. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balancebetween theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

Barry Keith Grant is a professor of film studies at Brock University and is an adjunct faculty member of the graduate program in film and video at York University in Toronto. He is the editor of The Dread of Difference (University of Texas Press,1996) and Film Genre Reader (University of Texas Press, 1995), and is the author of Voyages of Discovery (University of Illinois Press, 1992). Jeannette Sloniowski is the director of the communication studies program and assistant professor of film at Brock University.