The historical-biographical film: destinies and personalities

The history of national cinema shows that the evolution of non-fiction biographical film began with subjects dedicated to prominent personalities. These were included in the film magazine “Soviet Moldova” and in the almanac “Life in pictures”. In 1961, the first historical-biographical film “The Legendary Brigade Commander”- a eulogy to Grigore Kotovski (director A. Litvin) appeared at the “Moldova-film” studio, followed by other films dedicated to the heroes of the times: Pavel Tkacenko, Elena Sârbu, Tamara Cruciok, which were dominated by a pronounced propagandistic character. A new level of national historical-biographical film can be noticed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the filmmakers: Emil Loteanu (“Academician Tarasevici”), Andrei Buruiană (“Ştefan Neaga”), Vlad Druc (“Ion Creangă”) made their debut. Yet, the idea of biography especially predominates in the creation of Anatol Codru, who played a significant role in the affirmation stage of this kind of nonfiction film, bringing through his films, “Alexandru Plămădeală”, “Alexei Şciusev”, “Dimitrie Cantemir”,”Vasile Alecsandri” a new breath in the context of the films made before him. He imposed himself through a poetic-philosophical vision on the destinies and the creation of the personalities, who contributed to the spiritual prosperity of the nation.

Towards a Participatory Approach: Reversing the Gaze when (re)presenting Refugees in nonfiction film

Living in Germany during the peak of the “refugee crisis”, I was bombarded with constant reporting on the topic that clearly put forth a problematic representation of refugees, contributing to rendering them a ‘problem’ and the situation a ‘crisis’. This reflects in my own film practice in which I am frequently engaging with Syrian refugees as protagonists. Our shared language and culture made it easier for us to form a connection. However, as a young filmmaker, I felt challenged and conflicted by the complexities of the ethics of representation, especially when making a film with someone who’s going through a complex institutionalized process.

New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics, and Documentary Theory, Dara Waldron (2018 h/bk, 2020 p/bk)

Review of: New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics, and Documentary Theory, Dara Waldron (2018 h/bk, 2020 p/bk)New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 224 pp.,ISBN 978-1-50132-249-5, h/bk, £95.00ISBN 978-1-50132-250-1, p/bk, £28.99

Onstage/Onscreen

The link between alternative film production and rock culture continued in the subgenre of the music festival documentary, which came into being through the direct cinema documentary movement. The transition from the recording studio to the live stage was a defining one for rock culture at the end of the 1960s, and the aesthetics of presenting dynamic concert performances—communicated widely by audio and moving image representations of concerts—displayed ideals of rock authenticity. Exploring four feature documentary projects organized around the countercultural space of the rock festival, my third chapter demonstrates how emergent means of nonfiction film production shaped the onscreen spectacle of a rock musician performing live onstage. Through concert documentaries, a rock star no longer had to go to the studio lot to appear onscreen; instead, their stage labor could be preserved and extended through new camera and sound recording technologies. However, while the technologies (and filmmakers’ philosophies) that informed direct cinema seemed to offer a uniquely uncompromised means for representing rock culture onscreen, the production histories of concert documentaries also reveal how rock stars’ control over their own representation was not distributed equally, ranging from the option of refusing to be filmed to the power to determine whether a film project even saw the light of day. Produced in the absence of major film studios, arrangements of power between filmmakers, rock stars, and festival organizers existed on a case-by-case basis, and rock stars operated on a spectrum between observed subjects and controlling gatekeepers of moving image depictions of their performances.

Photographic Passages to the Past in Eastern European Non-Fiction Films

There is a tendency in recent nonfiction film to recontextualise archival photographs in creative ways. In films like Felvidék. Caught In-Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photographs are part of a collage work, while films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) use photographs in animated environments. At the other extreme is Radu Jude's Dead Nation (2017) presenting a series of photographs as a film that paradoxically demonstrates the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. These films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema the complex relationship between photography/the indexical trace and history. This chapter builds upon the phenomenological approach to images by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay in order to discuss intermedial relations of nonfiction films and to present what the photographic image means in the post-media age documentary.

Barbara Hammer's Jane Brakhage

This essay analyzes Barbara Hammer's 1974 experimental nonfiction film Jane Brakhage. Both an homage and a rebuttal to the many films of Jane Brakhage made by her husband, Stan Brakhage, Hammer's film gives Jane the voice she never had in Stan's work. The article contextualizes Jane Brakhage's production at a moment when competing strands of feminist thought took different approaches to the fraught topic of nature. Hammer's films were criticized as essentialist by feminists in the 1980s, but this essay argues that Jane Brakhage complicates that reading of Hammer's work. The film documents Jane's creative life in the mountains, but critiques the limitations of her role as a heterosexual wife and mother. By locating this short film within a larger genealogy of feminist and environmental thought, we can better appreciate the extent to which Hammer's films explore the feminist and queer potential of nature.

On Uncertain Ground: Place and Migration in El Mar La Mar

This essay discusses the experimental nonfiction film El Mar La Mar (Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, 2017), focusing on the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. El Mar La Mar is one of several recent films that use unconventional textual strategies to approach the subject of migration. Eschewing exposition altogether, it draws attention to the Sonoran Desert, a vast territory that in the last twenty-five years has become a deadly route for migrants trying to cross the border. Unlike what has often been argued about the film, though, El Mar La Mar does not produce an immersive viewing experience. Nor does it simply rely on observational strategies. Instead, it creates an uneasy sense of place out of unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image. Drawing on human geography and sound studies in documentary, this essay looks at how the film's textual strategies align place and politics in order to evoke the migrant crisis.