A Brief History of the Documentary Film Genre

2016 ◽  
pp. 23-30
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
History Of

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 FROM ʽNEWSREELʼ TO ʽTV NEWSʼ IN SERBIA

2020 ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Marija Vujović ◽  
Anka Mihajlov Prokopović
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Television News ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Development Path ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Moment

Prior to becoming the most dominant cultural product of the modern age, the film began its history as a journalistic concept. The first films made by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century were documentaries. The first film made at the beginning of the 20th century in Serbia was also a type of a newsreel, a documentary. Some of the first cinema owners and cinematographers were journalists. This paper explains the development of documentary film in Serbia, which, in addition to being a film genre, also became a television genre in the second half of the 20th century. The goal of this paper is to show the development path starting from the first feature film and newsreel, to television news - one of the most frequent TV programs of the moment – by using the example of Serbia.

scholarly journals Beyond The Historiography: Film Dokumenter Sejarah Sebagai Alternatif Historiografi di Indonesia

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 405
Author(s):  
Aan Ratmanto
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The University ◽  
Quality Of Research

The Department of History, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, the University of Gadjah Mada in 2015 made a milestone in the development of historiography in Indonesia. They made a bold move to produce a scholar with a documentary film work instead of a thesis. In the future, it is not impossible that this step will soon be followed by other universities in Indonesia. This paper was written in response to these developments. In this digital era-and in the midst of still low interest in reading in Indonesia-emerged the discourse to seek new media for historiography in Indonesia. The film, especially documentary films are seen as new media that match the characteristics of history because of they both present real-life reality. Moreover, Indonesia with the diversity of tribes and culture and history, of course, save a variety of themes that will not run out to be appointed a documentary. Based on that, this paper will discuss the types, forms, and format of the documentary that is suitable and possible to be produced by history students as a substitute for thesis-considering the cost of film production tends to be higher than thesis research. Thus, the film of a documentary a college student, especially a history produces the quality of research and aestheticsKata 

scholarly journals Życie jak scenariusz. Na marginesie książki (Nie)zapomniani dokumentaliści

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (38) ◽  
pp. 255-264
Author(s):  
Jadwiga Hučková
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Collective Work ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Significant Achievement

The book (Un)forgotten documentalists, edited by Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska and Jolanta Lemann-Zajiček (2020) is a significant achievement in research on Polish documentary film. The review of the collective work, consisting of ten texts preceded by an introduction, becomes the starting point for discussions with selected authors and reflection on the problem of the absence of significant documentary filmmakers in the history of the film. Entire currents are also forgotten, such as a film about art, represented by four out of nine documentary filmmakers discussed in the book. The meanders of life and creativity can be instructive for contemporary documentary filmmakers.

African American Queer Cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Hiv Epidemic ◽  
The Color Purple ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Color Purple

African American queer cinema was born as a reaction to the AIDS/HIV epidemic as well as the blatant homophobia that existed within the Black community in the 1980s. It began with the pioneering works of queer directors Isaac Julien and Marlon Riggs and continued during the new queer cinema movement in the 1990s, particularly including the works of lesbian queer director Cheryl Dunye. However, these works were infinitesimal compared to the queer works featuring primarily White lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) protagonists during that time. That trend continues today as evidenced by looking at the highest-grossing LGBTQ films of all times: very few included any African American characters in significant roles. However, from the 1980s to the 2020s, there have been a few Black queer films that have penetrated the mainstream market and received critical acclaim, such as The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1982), Set It Off (Gary, 1996), and Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016), which won the 2018 Academy Award for Best Picture. The documentary film genre has been the most influential in exposing audiences to the experiences and voices within the African American queer communities. Since many of these films are not available for viewing at mainstream theaters, Black queer cinema is primarily accessed via various cable, video streaming, and on-demand services, like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO.

Serengeti Shall Not Die

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-144
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Lekan
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Cattle Grazing ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
History Of ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
International Conventions

This chapter explores the politics of scientific knowledge and visual representation of savanna environments in Bernhard and Michael Grzimek’s bestselling book and Academy Award–winning documentary film, Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959). It shows how the Grzimeks used their iconic airplane, nicknamed the “Flying Zebra,” to conduct ecological reconnaissance and employ aerial filmography. They depicted the Serengeti as an untouched ecosystem and a global heritage of mankind, despite its history of pastoralist land use and as a battleground between contending German and British imperial forces. Following international conventions established in London in 1933, the Grzimeks insisted that the Serengeti should encompass the entire habitat of migrating wildebeest—and not, as some officials in the Tanganyika Territory insisted, be divided to accommodate the local Maasai people’s customary cattle grazing. The Grzimeks failed to stop the redrawing of the park’s boundaries, partly because the airborne camera never expunged the Serengeti’s “ghosts of land use past.”

Hospital and Asylum

Cinema, MD ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Eelco F.M. Wijdicks
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Psychiatric Institutions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hospital Wards

The history of medicine can never be understood without its buildings and its interior. A physical venue is needed to create a healing place for the injured and sick and for medicine to advance. In cinema, hospitals resemble block-like structures loaded with technology. To obtain a better perspective of how hospitals are portrayed in film, this chapter reviews the historical development of the hospital and the history of asylums as places of confinement for patients with mental illness. More than a few films paint hospitals and psychiatric institutions as understaffed with disrespect from top to bottom in the professional hierarchy. This chapter reviews the depiction of hospital wards and psychiatry wards in fictional and documentary film.

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