From Contextualisation to Categorisation of Animated Documentaries

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Pascal Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Production ◽  
New Journalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
Artificial Nature ◽  
Live Action

This chapter provides a wide-ranging account of animated documentary cinema’s evolution, one which relates that ongoing history to analogous developments in related fields including live-action documentary, painting, photography and New Journalism. By their overt artificial nature animated documentaries seem to challenge the traditional documentary epistemology. Lefèvre considers the extent to which established Film Studies conceptual and analytical paradigms offer pre-existing tools that contemporary scholars can readily transpose to the study of animated documentary. This essay questions if the animated documentaries still fit in the six categories or modes of documentary film production that Bill Nichols defined: the poetic, the expository, the observational, the participatory, the reflexive, and the performative mode. This chapter highlights many of the critical and conceptual questions which that partially obscured history raises, laying out ten distinct sets of logistical, aesthetic and ideological issues that repeatedly manifest themselves across the history of animated documentary filmmaking.

VR technologies in docudrama

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-80
Author(s):  
Natalia G. Stezhko
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Music Score ◽  
Museum Guide ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
Artistic Image

The essay explores the implementation of VR technologies in film production, a development due to which audio-visual content, which is in high demand both in television and on the Internet, has taken a new direction, and which is a topical issue in contemporary film studies. VR technologies allow the viewer who sits on a swivel chair and wears a VR-helmet incorporating 360-degree rotating LCD monitors to watch different areas of action. A characteristic feature of VR content is a multi-sensory experience including sight, hearing, smell and touch. VR creates a digital reality with maximum sensory immersion. VR is different from cinema, theatre and 3D technologies: here the deception takes place not only at eye level but also at cerebral level. The essay argues that the use of VR technology is particularly successful in the genre of docudrama. A vivid confirmation of this argument is The Hermitage VR. An Immersion Into History (Russia,18 minutes). In this film, the dual nature of docudrama, which combines various elements of documentary and fiction cinema, allows to recreate historical eras, with the viewer becoming a witness to unique historic events. The films director Mikhail Antykov tells the history of the Hermitage Museum in a spectacular form, making the viewer empathize with the events they see through their VR glasses. The powerful artistic image is enhanced by the excellent acting of Konstantin Khabensky in the role of a mystical museum guide. Via facial expressions, gestures and gait, the actor conveys the emotions of a person walking through museum halls. Thoughtful re-enactment scenes representing various historical epochs, augmented by unusual camera angles, inventive lighting and music score, create a metaphor for time and give the viewer an illusion of participation in the unfolding events. Identifying the latest trends in film production, the essay demonstrates that VR technologies continue the evolution of screen arts which possess the potential to transform into an independent and profitable industry similar to traditional cinema. The author concludes that an increased interest in a national culture, little-known facts of history and the general historical heritage of a nation is a fertile source of content for the producers of VR-docudramas.

Forever Her Chinatown

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-167
Author(s):  
Danielle Seid
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Film History ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Film

This essay adopts and adapts memory work, as developed by Annette Kuhn, as a method to search for the author's grandmother in Chinese American feminist film history. Foregrounding a trans-feminist perspective that moves across and between nations and film cultures, it introduces readers to a relatively unknown “orphan” documentary film, Forever Chinatown (1960). For the author and her family, the film carries with it a history of trauma that shapes what is remembered about it. Drawing on work in feminist film studies, particularly the notion of an archive of feelings, the essay blends life writing, theory, and visual-textual analysis to both allow the author to write her way into the film and trace her grandmother's presence in and labor on the film.

The ‘impure’ auteur

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben McCann
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Film Production ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Historical Range

This opening chapter will contextualise the ‘Duvivier style’. It will look at his chief formative influence, André Antoine, whose influential theories on cinematic naturalism, location shooting, and performance authenticity was cultivated and developed by Duvivier throughout his career. The chapter will examine what makes a Duvivier film. Historians often make reference to Duvivier’s love of ‘work well done’ as his signature legacy and enduring film-making ethos. The chapter will introduce the key recognisable Duvivier traits: an expressive mise en scène, fluid camera movement and a complex negotiation of décor, strong central performances by stars and new actors, pessimistic narratives, incorporation of melodramatic elements (music, production design), and a film-by-film reliability. This analysis of Duvivier, beyond its historical range, also proposes to engage with key debates in film studies: notably auteurism, stardom and audience reception. The chapter will also look at how Duvivier fits into a history of both French national cinema and international film production. Duvivier’s genre eclecticism and lack of a coherent corpus should not be seen as a negative; instead, it is necessary to read Duvivier’s wide-ranging approach to genre and subject matter as a response to and engagement with important development in French and international film praxis.

“What Happens in the Historian's Head?”

2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Weiler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Artificial Nature ◽  
Cultural Turn

Over two hundred years ago Rousseau commented, “The facts described in history never give an exact picture of what actually happened. They change form in the historian's head. They get molded by his interests and take on the hue of his prejudices.” This insight—that history is a human creation molded by the interests and prejudices of the historian—is one that is easy to forget, particularly in times enamored by the claims of empirical science. But in the past three decades, historians, like other scholars across the humanities and social sciences, have faced a number of theoretical challenges to the empiricism that had been in ascendency since the late nineteenth century. Both established academic disciplines such as anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy and emerging disciplines such as cultural studies and film studies have been profoundly affected by these critiques. The “cultural turn,” with its emphasis on the inherently artificial nature of scholarly narratives, has challenged traditional historians' unquestioning reliance on documentary evidence, scientific methodology, and empirical claims to truth. Numerous historians have debated these theoretical challenges to the discipline, but historians of education have been largely silent. The absence of this debate in the history of education is striking, given the engagement of other scholars with these concerns and the fact that these ideas appeared over three decades ago: both Hayden White's Metahistory and Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures were published in 1973, while Foucault's Discipline and Punish appeared in English translation in 1977.

scholarly journals The impact of drones in documentary filmmaking: Renaissance of aerial shot

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurtuluş Özgen
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Technological Environment ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Economical Alternative

Steen L. Christiansen writes his book Drone Age Cinema (2017), “Contemporary cinema is entering the drone age…What will cinema be in the drone age?”. A very economical alternative way of capturing aerial shots for (low budget) documentaries, prosumer drones became available in Turkey and globally in 2015 and were quickly integrated into documentary film production. Before the emergence of prosumer drones, aerial shots were a luxury unaffordable for all but a few high-budget documentary film productions. Drones created a threshold in Turkish documentaries: gaze (exploration of geography-nature-life-people) from above, a Renaissance of the aerial shot. In this presentation / paper I will discuss the response to this new way of seeing in Turkish documentary cinema, and the ways in which drone shots have changed the cultural and technological environment of Turkish documentary cinema.

Before Six Years After. Notes on the re-emergence of a film archive in Guinea-Bissau

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Hering
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Guinea Bissau ◽  
Ongoing Project

In 2011, the artist Filipa César was given access to the archive of the Instituto Nacional de Cinema e Audiovisual (INCA) in Bissau, which holds the remains of a precarious but dedicated documentary film production during the final phase of the liberation war and the first years of independence in Guinea-Bissau (roughly from 1972 to 1980). Together with two of the film-makers involved, Flora Gomes and Sana na N'Hada, and a group of researchers and film-makers from Bissau, Filipa César is since then engaged in an ongoing project experimenting with various forms of re-visualization and re-evaluation of this archive. Tobias Hering has participated in this process on several occasions and wrote about it in the essay "Before six years after," published for Filipa César's exhibition at Jeu de Paume (Paris) in October 2012. The text published here is a critically revised and annotated version of this earlier essay.

Race, Religion, and Documentary Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Weisenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Independent Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race And Religion

This chapter uses Ingagi and The Silent Enemy, both independent films released in 1930, to examine the intersections of race and religion in the context of American documentary film conventions. The filmmakers claimed documentary status for their films, despite the fact that both were largely scripted and contained staged representations. Many audience members and critics nevertheless took their representations of the religious practices of Africans and Native Americans to be truthful and invested in the films’ authenticity because their visual codes, narratives, and advertising confirmed accepted stereotypes about race, religion, and capacity for civilization. Examining these two films in the context of the broader history of documentary representations of race and religion—from travelogues, adventure, ethnographic, and expeditionary films through more recent productions—this chapter explores how the genre has helped to shape and communicate ideas about race and religion.

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

scholarly journals Sanctuary: documentary in virtual reality (VR)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shivani Mulekar
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Emerging Technology ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Mural Paintings ◽  
Nonlinear Form ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
Film Viewing ◽  
Viewing Experience

Sanctuary is a documentary film in virtual reality (VR). The film uses 360-camera technology to offer a sensory immersive viewing experience. The film attempts to transcend the borders of filmmaking by merging new 360-camera technology and a nonlinear form of storytelling. The film is an observational piece. 360-degree videos are an emerging technology, which offers the viewer a sensory, immersive experience in virtual reality. Influenced by the 360-panoramic mural paintings created in 1860s, the use of the 360-camera breaks away from the syntax of documentary filmmaking and gives the audience an active role in the film-viewing experience. It breaks the traditional semantics of filmmaking and sets new rules of viewing which are personal and unique to each viewer. Sanctuary documents the Juhasz family, which has been living in a church since November 2014. The film is an eight-minute experience that gives the audience a 360- degree glimpse into the Juhasz family’s life and their living conditions. The film is presented as an installation, using Samsung’s Gear VR as the exhibition technology.

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