Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

3.56(72 readers)

Documenting the Documentary features essays by 27 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 increasingly perceive and comprehend the world through visual media, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

Publisher

Wayne State University Press

Publication Date

12/16/2013

ISBN

9780814339718

Pages

240

Categories

Literature

About the Author

Lucy Fischer

Lucy Fischer is a Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies and directed the Film Studies Program at Pitt for three decades. Beyond teaching she has also had film curatorial experience at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Her interests in film studies are wide ranging and include international cinema of both the silent and sound era as well as narrative and experimental film.

Her particular fields include cultural and feminist studies, film theory, film aesthetics, women and film, film and literature, and the relationships between film, consciousness and desire. Aside from publishing 9 books, her articles have appeared in many journals, including: Screen, Film History, Sight and Sound, Camera Obscura, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Women and Performance, Frauen und Film, and Film Quarterly.

Her essays have been anthologized 30 times in volumes of film history, criticism, and theory. She has lectured internationally in Israel, Switzerland, Holland, Austria, Scotland, Great Britain, Portugal, and Australia and has taught abroad in Germany, Sweden, and on the Semester at Sea program of the University of Pittsburgh (which traveled around the world). She recently completed editing an issue of the Portuguese journal, Anglo-Saxonia, and her latest book, Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History.