{"title":"Cinematic journalism: the political economy and ‘emotional truth’ of documentary film","authors":"Gino Canella","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2270988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2270988","url":null,"abstract":"News organizations in recent years have embraced documentary film. From streaming ventures to Academy Award nominations, newsrooms are producing documentaries to reach new audiences and maintain th...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"2 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71417730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Historicizing twenty-first century documentary: A review of Jihoon Kim’s Documentary's Expanded Fields: New Media and the Twenty-First-Century Documentary and Kate Nash’s Interactive Documentary: Theory and Debate","authors":"Daniel Rudin","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2270945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2270945","url":null,"abstract":"What counts as documentary in the twenty-first century? More importantly, is documentary studies capable of contributing to a discourse that can both define the contours of and point beyond the pas...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"11 40","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71416937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Im)possible movements. Migratory flows and digital flows in contemporary documentary cinema","authors":"Gala Hernández López","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2270964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2270964","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses some fundamental aesthetic (and thus political) questions which arise when faced with the problem of the representation of migratory flows in documentary cinema: how to represe...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"9 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71435281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Experiences of migration from Turkey to Germany: the female guest worker in contemporary documentaries","authors":"Sirin Fulya Erensoy","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2253574","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2253574","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines two documentaries that go beyond the audio-visual canon representing the guest worker from Turkey to Germany. Look, Listen Carefully (Özlem Sarıyıldız, 2021) and Gurbet is a H...","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"8 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71435297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Worrying about China: storytelling, humanitarian intervention and the global circulation of independent Chinese documentary","authors":"Luke Robinson","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2249590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2249590","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the impact of cross-border collaboration on independent Chinese documentary. Through a study of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China, I argue that the film, which passed through training events run by CNEX and the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Programme in China, bears the formal impact of the industrial-humanitarian logic central to these workshops: character-driven storytelling as the key to generating a global Anglophone public for independent Chinese documentary. Tracing this logic through the workshop mechanism, the film’s form, and audience reactions to its screening in the UK, I suggest the result is a viewer response privileging personal action over structural critique—what in this context I term “worrying about China.” This allows me to locate the documentary in relation to broader liberal arguments over China’s place in the world system and assess the limitations of this approach to “going global” for independent Chinese documentary.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"2012 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135395164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The truth of reenactments: reliving, reconstructing, and contesting history in documentaries on genocide","authors":"Juliann Koch","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2244131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2244131","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed creativity and fictionality of reenactments as opposed to the evidentiary and static archive, and instead reads reenactments as facilitating access to truth. Through four case studies of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005), Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013), and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), it contends that reenactments in documentaries on genocide problematize the associations of an image’s supposed indexical link to a past event with truth. Instead, reenactments confront us with the constructed nature of historical narrative and enable us to see affective, factual, and ethical truths of the past unavailable through the archive.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"320 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45538782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The politics of video intimacy: Julie Gustafson’s feminist documentary practice","authors":"Rachel Fabian","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2217622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2217622","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article historicizes and theorizes the feminist documentary practice of Julie Gustafson, focusing on The Politics of Intimacy: Ten Women Talk About Orgasm and Sexuality (US, 1973) and Desire (US, 2005). Employing archival research and original interviews with Gustafson, it argues that both works interrogate intimacy’s use value for navigating new modes of documentary witnessing afforded by video. It begins by contextualizing The Politics of Intimacy’s modes of ‘intimate witnessing’ in relation to 1970s guerrilla TV movements, feminist documentary filmmaking, and women’s video art, as well as in terms of Gustafson’s involvement in the Manhattan-based Global Village Video Resource Center. It then analyzes how The Politics of Intimacy utilizes a ‘voice-centered’ feminist documentary method, which foregrounds video’s intimate appeals and polyvocal modes of address to create a multilayered account of women’s sexual experiences. Finally, the article contends that The Politics of Intimacy’s voice-centered approach crucially informs the interplay of generational voices in Desire, which documents Gustafson’s long-term collaboration with the Teenage Girls’ Documentary Project. Gustafson’s documentary practice takes on added complexity in Desire, as it maps emergent solidarities across generations of women video makers to reveal feminist voicing to be a complex, at-times contradictory expression of the self-in-relation.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"304 - 319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48248072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Documentary film as memory/memento mori in Aslaug Holm’s Brothers (Brødre)","authors":"Aténé Mendelyté","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2185921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2185921","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Seeing documentary film as an object for remembering and resurrecting the past is a complex issue touching upon questions pertaining to the ontology of photographic capturing, its ways of becoming an index, means of reinventing/fabricating the past through narrative and how such shared, cultural conventions impinge on the personal sphere, i.e. the singularity and authenticity of the experience preserved. While some past and present key media theorists regard such cinematization of memory as either a reduced or falsified form of pastness, I argue, employing Edward S. Casey’s influential phenomenological study of mnemonic modes and taking Aslaug Holm’s (auto)biographical documentary Brothers (Brødre, 2015) as an outstanding example, that documentary as an object perceived by a specific (not abstracted) consciousness is multiple and functions as a virtual reservoir for potential complex acts of memory to occur – it enlivens, not reduces one’s engagement with the past. Brothers is seen as both a form of reminiscence vehicle and commemoration vehicle. I furthermore identify a new mode of memory manifest in the film, not discussed by Casey, and its related object – anterior reminding and memento mori – which preserves the past and alludes to the future, this way determining what that past shall have been.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"269 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42828503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Autopoiesis through agency in virtual reality nonfiction","authors":"Andrew Simon Tucker, M. Kiss","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2185922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2185922","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has brought forward numerous linearly structured 360° documentaries that maintain a close link to traditional documentary modes. More recently, we have observed a shift from the relatively passive 360° cinema towards more open-world, non-linear, game-like interactive experiences that challenge traditional definitions of the documentary genre. Volumetric world-building techniques provide nonfiction creators with additional tools that afford ‘viewer-users’ spatial and interactive agency, leading to a heightened autopoietic realisation of the storyworld. VRNF creators have the potential to allow their viewer-users enhanced control over framing, temporal ordering of the plot and spatial unfolding of the diegetic world, thus inviting them to become actual co-creators of a deeply personal and personalized experience. This article addresses how VRNF may go beyond the mere ‘documentation’ of people, places or past events that existed in a pre-filmic reality and provide viewer-users through augmented agency a unique present-tense autopoietic experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional 2D documentary.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"285 - 303"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45935635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From homonationalism to shame in the Israeli documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life","authors":"R. Yosef","doi":"10.1080/17503280.2023.2178609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2023.2178609","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the role of the affective experience of shame in Tomer Heymann’s documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life (2018) about internationally successful Israeli gay porn star Jonathan Agassi. It argues that by emphasizing shame as constitutive of Agassi’s queer identity, the film subverts the hypermasculine, Israeli, militarized image of his star persona. The film thus refuses to support the conservative trend of Israel’s LGBT community that aims to remove stigmas from gay identities within a logic of homonormative and homonational sexual politics of ‘pride.’ In this film, shame becomes a refuge, a site of solidarity and belonging for Agassi as well as for Heymann, the filmmaker. Both resist mainstream Israeli gay politics and refuse to adopt the sexual and national identity that this normative logic demands. The question of queer identity in the film is organized around the formative experience of shame and based on the relation to others. Thus, the film, in effect, produces a queer sociability and ethics in shame.","PeriodicalId":43545,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Documentary Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"255 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42479870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}