Books on the topic 'First person documentary'

Between the 11th and the 20th century, the monastery of San Miniato al Monte in Florence played a leading role in the religious and cultural life of the city. The volume analyses for the first time the historical and documentary evolution of this regular institute, famous almost only from the architectural and artistic points of view. The book focuses the period of the bishop’s patronage in the 11th century, when the monastery and some of its members emerged in the context of the ecclesiastical reform, and continues with the study of the the Olivetan monks community, during the 14th-16th centuries, to arrive at the important structural and functional, but also semantic, transformations of the monument between the 18th century and the contemporary times.

The thirteenth volume of Comunicazioni dell’Istituto Papirologico «G. Vitelli» is divided, as was the previous one, into three sections: 1. Editions and rieditions of texts; 2. Critical notes; 3. Chronique de lexicographie papyrologique de la vie matérielle. In the first section there are texts which are being published for the first time or which are subject to a revision and a new edition, both belonging to various collections. This section also includes the exhibition of an exceptional artefact from the Arab period, belonging to the Papyrological Institute «G. Vitelli»’s collection. The second section includes three contributions with careful palaeographic and linguistic observations on literary and documentary texts, and a fourth contribution offering an exhaustive summary of the publication state of an archive from the Institute's collection. Lastly, the third section, as consolidated by the previous volume of the Comunicazioni, collects several findings of the international research project on the lexicography of material culture (Lex.Pap.Mat.), documented in the language of papyri.

This book examines the vibrant field of documentary filmmaking in Brazil from the transition to democracy in 1985 to the present. Marked by significant efforts toward the democratization of Brazil’s highly unequal society, this period also witnessed the documentary’s rise to unprecedented vitality in quantity, quality, and diversity of production—including polished auteur films as well as rough-hewn collaborative works; films made in major metropolitan regions as well as in remote parts of the Amazon; intimate first-person documentaries as well as films that dive headfirst into struggles for social justice. The transformations of Brazilian society and of filmmaking coalesce and become entangled in this cinema’s preoccupation with archives. Historically linked to the exercise and maintenance of power, the concept of the archive is critical for the documentary as a cultural practice that preserves images from the present for the future, unearths and repurposes visual materials from the past, and is historically invested in filmic images as records of the real. Contemporary films incorporate, reflect on, and rework a variety of archives, such as documents produced by official institutions, ethnographic images, home movies, and photo albums—and engage not only with what is preserved but also with lacunas in the record and with alternate forms of remembering, retrieving, and transmitting the past. Through its interaction with archives, this book argues, the contemporary documentary reflects on and intervenes in the distribution of visibilities and invisibilities, centers and margins, silences and speech, living memory and its preservation in the record—thus locating the documentary on archival borders that concern Brazilian society and filmmaking alike.

This book takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As the book illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime. Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, the book examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, the book indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present — a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects — the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity. As a comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, the book offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.

Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not yet fully realized precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a ‘First’ Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of Early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland’s two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.

Since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on the plight of the orca, the most profitable and controversial display animal in history. Yet, until now, no historical account has explained how we came to care about killer whales in the first place. Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s--the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. But that all changed in 1965, when Seattle entrepreneur Ted Griffin became the first person to swim and perform with a captive killer whale. The show proved wildly popular, and he began capturing and selling others, including Sea World's first Shamu. Over the following decade, live display transformed views of Orcinus orca. The public embraced killer whales as charismatic and friendly, while scientists enjoyed their first access to live orcas. In the Pacific Northwest, these captive encounters reshaped regional values and helped drive environmental activism, including Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaigns. Yet even as Northwesterners taught the world to love whales, they came to oppose their captivity and to fight for the freedom of a marine predator that had become a regional icon. This is the definitive history of how the feared and despised "killer" became the beloved "orca"--and what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures.

This collective monograph is a comprehensive study of the causes, evolution and outcomes of complex processes in the contemporary history of the countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, and aims in particular to identify common and special characteristics in their socio-economic and political development. The authors base their work on documentary evidence; both published and unpublished archival materials reveal the specifics of the development of the political landscapes in these countries. They highlight models combining both European and nationally oriented (and even nationalist) components of the political spheres of particular countries; identify markers which allow the stage of completion (or incompletion) of the establishment of a new political system to be estimated; and present analyses of the processes of internal political struggle, which has often taken on ruthless forms. The analysis of regional and country-specific documentary materials illustrates that the gap in the development of the region with “old Europe” in general has not yet been overcome: in the post-Socialist period, the situation of the region being “ownerless” and “abandoned”, characteristic of the period between the two world wars, is reoccurring. The authors conclude that during the period from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, the region was quite clearly divided into two parts: Central (the Visegrad Four) and South-Eastern (the Balkans) Europe. The authors explore the prevailing trends in the political development of Hungary and Poland related to the leadership of nationally and religiously oriented parties; in the Czech Republic and Slovakia the pendulum-like change in power of the left and right-wing parties; and in Bulgaria and Romania the domestic political processes permanently in crisis. The authors pay special attention to the contradictory nature of the political evolution of the states that emerged in the space of the former Yugoslavia. For the first time, Greece and Turkey are included in the context of a regional-wide study. The contributors present optimal or resembling transformational models, which can serve as a prototype for shaping the political landscape of other countries in the world. The monograph substantiates the urgency of the new approach needed to study the history and current state of the region and its countries, taking into account the challenges of the time, which require strengthening national and state identity. The research also offered prognostic characteristics of transformational changes in the region, the Visegrad Four, and the Balkans.

This volume is the first to survey village institutions in Egypt during the first eight centuries AD, from the beginning of Roman rule to the early Arab period. Despite the many studies of society and administration in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, there are no general studies of village institutions or communities in any one period, let alone in a long-term perspective, or integrated investigation of their relationship to the wider state. This volume, which represents a first response to fill this gap in the current scholarship, aims to demonstrate that Egypt is a particularly productive place to develop study of this subject because the rich documentary evidence of the papyri, a large majority of which comes from village sites, permits us both to study specific topics in detail by place and time, as the eleven papers of this volume do, and also to make comparisons across a long chronological period. These comparisons across time are beneficial because they raise questions about changing patterns and perspectives of the surviving documents, which may skew interpretation, and enable us to outline what seem to emerge as recurrent issues in the power-relationships between central and regional authorities and the rural population, as well as some preliminary indications of the trends in those developments across our period.

John Dos Passos & Cinema, the first study to use the novelist’s little-known writing for the screen to assess the trajectory of his prolific career, explores both how film aesthetics shaped his revolutionary modernist narratives and how he later reshaped them directly into film form. The book features previously unpublished manuscripts and correspondence illustrating case studies of his screen writing during the 1930s for Hollywood feature films and in an innovative independent treatment; it examines the complexities of his role in the 1937 political documentary The Spanish Earth; and it explores the unproduced screen treatment of his attempts from the 1940s on to adapt his epic trilogy U.S.A. directly for the screen and to realign its leftist politics toward the anti-Communist conservatism reflected in his work and activism of that period. John Dos Passos & Cinema thus provides a new context for and reading of his modernist literary innovations and his conservative political reorientation in the 1930s that redefined his literary career.

Oxford Weather and Climate since 1767 provides a detailed description and analysis of the weather records made at the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, the longest continuous series of single-site weather records in Britain and one of the longest in the world. The earliest records date from 1767, and daily records are unbroken since November 1813. The records allow the reconstruction of 200-year temperature and rainfall series and places the Oxford records in the context of long-term climate change. In this, the first full publication of the entire dataset, the long Oxford record is both celebrated and described. Detailed commentaries on weather by month and by season are provided, including numerous contemporary documentary and photographic evidence of past weather events. Drought and flood feature prominently, but so too do fog, frost, ice and snow. Some long-term changes are obvious, such as the increase in air temperature over the period of the instrumental record, but the impact on the growing season and the ability to grow grapes commercially near Oxford are less well known.

Within the domain of film studies, the recent surge in films depicting graphic and high-impact sex and sexualized violence has been variously classified under the terms transgressive, brutal, provocative, real sex, and extreme cinema. These classifications, however, tend to underplay the films’ sociohistorical contexts and reflexive struggle for meaning. We argue that the similarities and differences between these real or simulated sex films are determined and mediated within geographical space and historical time. But every film book has its own personal historical starting point: in our case, this is the coming together as intertexts of the real sex film Intimacy with a major academic text, The Transformation of Intimacy, and as authorial agents of a television and documentary film producer and a media academic. This book argues that the meanings we attach to “real sex” cinema are discursively constructed not only by academic experts but by filmmakers, performers, audiences, and film reviewers. Debates about the meaning of real sex cinema are best understood in dialogue, and for the first time in interdisciplinary studies, we foster “mutual understanding” and “critical extension” among new risk sociology, feminist mapping theory, feminist film studies, and film reviewers, while also embracing film/media studies concepts of production, social audiences and spectators, genre, narrative, authorship, and stars. Above all, this is an interdisciplinary book, which engages with, supports, critiques, and extends each of these professional fields of discourse, each with its own schema of filmic understanding.

This study investigates determinants of socio-environmental practices, (mandatory and voluntary), as evidenced in southern Brazil’s electric energy distribution companies. It seeks to understand this phenomenon with interdisciplinary protection through theoretical constructs of Social Responsibility, Environmental Management, Evidence, Legitimacy, Reputation, and Institutional. This integration contributes to understanding the reasons why companies undertake and evidence their socio- -environmental practices to external audiences. The literature suggests that socio-environmental practices are explained by various reasons, such as: enforced by legal impositions and/or voluntariness, to strengthen legitimacy, maintain and develop a reputation, and by isomorphism of the competitive operating environment. Given the above, the objective of this work is to investigate factors that determine the disclosure of socio-environmental practices in electricity distribution companies in the south of Brazil. In the methodological aspects, a qualitative approach was used, with descriptive and exploratory objectives. As a research strategy, a multichannel study was applied through two electricity distribution companies in the south of the country, CELESC Distribuição S.A. (Centrais Elétricas de Santa Catarina) and COPEL Distribuição S.A. (Companhia Paranaense de Energia). Data collection took place in two stages, the first one with a search on documentary, physical and virtual basis, and the second stage using a semi-structured interview with professionals from the Social and Environmental Responsibility area of each of the companies surveyed. The information collected was related to the period of 2014, 2015, and 2016. The results showed that the Annual Reports, service stations, and participation in external events constitute the primary means and channels of evidence of socio-environmental practices. There was a greater tendency to develop social practices. However, there are programs focused on climate change, conscious consumption and electricity saving, social inclusion, recovery of citizenship, and people’s quality of life. The COPEL company presented a tendency to evidence voluntary practices with more intensity, also showing consistency and maintenance of the programs during the studied period. Regarding corporate and sustainability policies, it was noted that companies adopt very similar strategies. It is concluded that the age, size, and corporate reputation of companies are the main determinants of socio-environmental practices, highlighting the presence of mimetic isomorphism characterized by the use of the same types of means and channels of evidence and by the symmetry of practices and policies developed by companies CELESC and COPEL.