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.

Cottonopolis: Experimenting With the Cinematographic, The Ethnographic and the Essayistic

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Greenhalgh
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Film Production ◽  
World Cinema

Cathy Greenhalgh considers the making of her essay film Cottonopolis(90’, 2020). The film combines memories of three different yet interconnected ‘Manchesters’, that is historical mega-textile cities Manchester (England), Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) and Łódź (Poland), with observations of contemporary handloom and power loom cotton manufacture. In her anticipated film Greenhalgh employs documentary techniques, reflexive essay and meditation, sensory and material culture ethnography, as well as oral historiography and experimental visual immersion. She sets out to discuss film production concerns related to questions of the cinematographic, ethnographic and essayistic. Her analysis is underpinned by a practice point-of-view, conversations with Indian film colleagues and various theories of essay, ethnographic and documentary film practice, eco-criticism, world cinema and diaspora aesthetics.

The Grierson Testament, 1969–71

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Evans
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Developing World ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Mcgill University ◽  
Television Film ◽  
The Subject

From 1969 to 1971, documentary film movement pioneer and founder John Grierson spent his sunset years at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. During that time, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission invited him to Ottawa to advise on the state of television policy and Canadian communications in general. Typically, Grierson cut a wide swathe through the subject, and provided a stimulating analysis of the state of Canada’s public institutions of television, film production, and realist filmmaking. Three volumes of transcripts of his audiotaped sessions stand as his final testament. Using this source, this chapter develops an overview of his position on the industry, on government-sponsored film, and on prospects for expanding realist images in what he acerbically called a developing world of consumerism and inane television. Typically, Grierson’s comments were filled with intelligence, experience, and acumen, while he also seemed to be wrestling with various contradictions and ideas derived from 19th century idealist philosophy. Perhaps Grierson was, as some have said, a curious combination of irreconcilable opposites. These transcripts reveal a visionary who had made things happen, whether as a bull in a china shop or as a fencer whose rapier intelligence demolished or convinced those with whom he engaged. With his death in 1972, this material stands as his last testament.

scholarly journals Filmowa franczyza. Od tematu do widowiska telewizyjnego (na podstawie cyklu „Prawdziwe Historie”)

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (35) ◽  
pp. 159-170
Author(s):  
Wojciech Otto
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Commercial Product ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Know How ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Film Style

The TV series True Stories (Prawdziwe Historie) is an example of contemporary commercial cinema. It is located on the border of documentary film and an attractive version of fictional cinema. In specific circumstances, it can be treated as a commercial product, but not only in the sense of film production and distribution, but more broadly, as a recognisable brand on the domestic cinema market, containing all the elements of industry know-how, as well as significant and commonly seen features of a film style that guarantees both turnout and financial success. In a sense, therefore, this phenomenon can be considered in terms of a film franchise which offers creators, most often beginners, a proven business patent in the form of a coherent television series, but also giving the possibility of a safe feature debut and the space for creative exploration.

scholarly journals ‘To Be a Woman’: Female Labour and Memory in Documentary Film Production, 1929–50

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 584-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Fox
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Film Production ◽  
World War ◽  
Female Labour ◽  
Professional Recognition ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

Despite extensive scholarship on British documentary in the period from 1929 to 1950, the role of female documentary film-makers has received relatively little attention, partly due to their fragmented and partial ‘archival trace’. Combining neglected materials in the BECTU oral history project, the personnel records of the GPO Film Unit, and the personal papers of leading female documentarists, this article challenges the standard narrative of wartime opportunity and postwar decline that tends to characterise the examination of women's employment more broadly in this period. It uses women's experience in documentary film production to offer a more complex explanation of the effect of war within a wider chronological framework and within the context of workflow, labour patterns, training and networks within the industry itself. It examines female documentarists’ own accounts, through oral histories, to suggest that such sources should be ‘read against the light’ to offer insights into the memory of the Second World War, contending that the place of gender in defining individual careers both during and after the conflict remains contested, a site of the continued struggle for professional recognition, achievement and identity.

Emotions, Activism and Documentary Storytelling: A Biographical Production-Based Case Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-123
Author(s):  
Tom Murray
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Narrative Structures

Abstract The biography of Douglas Grant (c.1885–1951) has been publicly and popularly told in media since 1916. Interestingly, Grant’s unusual life-story has consistently been deployed to serve various political agendas. This essay examines the role of popular-media biographies of Douglas Grant and the emotions embedded in them, and utilises a documentary-film production as a case study to examine relations between these emotions, activist agendas and documentary-film storytelling. Additionally, given the consistent use of tragedy as a formal narrative structure employed in tellings of Douglas Grant’s story, this essay also describes how narrative structures are not culturally neutral, but are themselves emotionally suggestive cultural productions. Analysing a century of tellings of the Douglas Grant biography, this essay also offers insights into how conquest-colonial ideology is manifest in these often ‘tragic’ tales. As an attempt at decolonising scholarship, this essay also responds to insights by Indigenous commentators within the case-study text to reflect on Indigenous ontologies and the role of Country and Indigenous futurism as places/sites/histories of hope.

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.

Euesperides (Benghazi): preliminary report on the spring 2004 season

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 149-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wilson ◽  
Paul Bennett ◽  
Ahmed Buzaian ◽  
Vanessa Fell ◽  
Ben Found ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Wave Crest ◽  
Faunal Remains ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
South Italy ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Production Techniques ◽  
The City ◽  
Initial Results ◽  
Ongoing Project

AbstractThis article reports on the sixth season of the ongoing project at Euesperides (Benghazi). Excavation in Area P established the date of construction of the penultimate phase (and therefore of the plain pebble mosaic with inscription published last year) as 300-282 BC, following the abandonment and demolition of the antepenultimate phase beneath it. An area used for the preparation and cutting of the materials employed in the final-phase mosaics has been identified. In Area Q the dismantling of the street sequence was completed, and the W building fronting the street found to date from the fifth century BC. In Area R the crushed deposits of Murex shell were removed and working surfaces associated with purple dye production defined. Geological investigations to the west of the city revealed a possible location for the ancient harbour, and showed that the waterlogged deposits of the former sebkha are a good source for further palaeoenvironmental research.Study of the finds also continued. Further work on reconstructing the design of the final phase mosaic in Area P suggests a central motif probably of two dolphins set within a wave-crest surround. The initial results of the analysis of the mosaic samples taken from the final-phase Building A are presented. The study of the wall plaster fragments was begun, enabling some preliminary observations on the decoration. New forms of local black glaze pots have been recovered this year along with fineware imports from Attica, Corinth, East Greece, south Italy and the Punic world throwing light on the interrelations between Euesperides and the Mediterranean world from the fifth to third centuries BC. Full quantification of the coarse pottery assemblages continued this season, doubling the dataset of fully recorded pottery, whilst detailed analysis of vessel forms and their variations identified production techniques and chronological developments of vessel shapes within the local and imported wares. The study of the amphorae identified more Punic amphorae and an unusual basket-handled amphora which may be of Cypriot origin. Initial assessments of environmental and faunal remains were conducted.

scholarly journals PARTISIPATORY DIRECTING IN THE FILM NOISE IN SILENCE

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-53
Author(s):  
Reskyana Syam ◽  
Abas Fauzi ◽  
Titus Soepono Adji
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Approach ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Emotional Level ◽  
High Influence

Deaf people are social groups that are protected by the Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 8 of 2016 concerning Persons with Disabilities, but they still feel injustice or unfair in the world of education and in society environment. The above problems are the basis for the creation of the documentary film Noise In Silence. The type of research used is artistic research which produces a documentary film work. Documentary film production is carried out using a participatory directing style, while the analysis uses a visual approach. The resulting documentary film shows the participatory style can support the discovery of answers to the director's doubts, and can reveal the subject's experience in depth so that it can be captured by the audience. In addition, the dramatization of the presentation was successfully realized, so that this film has a high influence on the emotional level of the audience.

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