Academic literature on the topic 'Observational documentary film'
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Journal articles on the topic "Observational documentary film"
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Wirawan, I. Komang Arba, and I. Gede Arya Sugiartha. "The Nyama (kinship) Documentary as an Intolerant Comparative Discourse in Pegayaman Village, Buleleng, Bali." Lekesan: Interdisciplinary Journal of Asia Pacific Arts 3, no. 2 (November 4, 2020): 71–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.31091/lekesan.v3i2.1172.
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The Nyama documentary is as a counter-discourse on intolerant attitudes in Indonesia. Nyama film was the result of research and creation of written and audio-visual data documentation of the acculturation of art and culture in the Muslim village of Pegayaman Buleleng, Bali. It was an observational/direct cinema-style documentary film acculturation of Hindu and Islamic arts and culture in Pegayaman Village, Buleleng, Bali. The Nyama film identified the perceptions and acculturation of art and culture in Pegayaman Village, Buleleng, Bali. It was a qualitative descriptive research method. Sources of data obtained through a purposive sampling method were done by accidental sampling technique. The location of the sampling was carried out in Pegayaman Village, Buleleng, Bali. The method used in achieving these goals was Representing reality. The documentary tells an event or reality (facts and data). Principally, documentary films are based on facts and are demanded to be loyal to those facts. Discussion of research and creation of this movie is the observational/direct cinema documentaries. This film tells the story of several people in Pegayaman Village. The subjects in this film are not in the same condition but are equally struggling to preserve the acculturation of Hindu and Islamic arts and culture in the Bali region. The information building in this film was a combination of interviews with selected subjects. The results of the research and creation were in the form of Nyama documentary films. The Nyama documentary is an acculturation campaign for arts and culture and a counter-discourse on the intolerant attitude of Indonesian society that is multicultural and has the character of Indonesian nationality.
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Carta, Silvio. "Documentary Film, Observational Style and Postmodern Anthropology in Sardinia." Visual Anthropology 28, no. 3 (March 31, 2015): 227–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2015.1014260.
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Odagiri, Takushi. "Mental (2008): Sōda Kazuhiro’s Observational Cinema." positions: asia critique 28, no. 2 (May 1, 2020): 277–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8112461.
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This article examines Sōda Kazuhiro’s observational documentary, especially his second observational film, Seishin (Mental), and specifically considers its participatory methods, sociohistorical circumstances, and philosophical anthropology. Influenced by North American direct cinema of the 1960s (especially Frederick Wiseman) as well as Bronisław Malinowski’s participant observation, Sōda’s observational style not only emphasizes the self-affective nature of documentary eyes but also rejects the preconceived reality of its object. Documentary is not conceived “in the head”: unexpected discoveries, which inevitably accompany his participatory methods, define his object from an ex ante facto (before the fact) perspective. Examples of this are the contingency of the mental-bodily complex (Seishin) and self-contradictory social situations (Senkyo and Senkyo 2). Because it’s an observationalparticipatory film, Seishin responds to the sociopolitical climates of the late 2000s, especially the Japanese government’s reforms of health and medical services. Specifically, two laws were enacted while the film was in production: the 2005 Support for Independence of Persons with Disability (SIPD) Act and the 2006 Suicide Prevention Act. Furthermore, Seishin represents an anthropological (techno-ontological) standpoint similar to that of Gilbert Simondon, Miki Kiyoshi, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This article investigates the film’s ontology, externalism, and political critique of neoliberalism in the late 2000s.
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Lofton, Kathryn. "Observational Secular: Religion and Documentary Film in the United States." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 5 (2021): 99–120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2021.0021.
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Corner, John. "Sounds real: music and documentary." Popular Music 21, no. 3 (October 2002): 357–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143002002234.
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This article examines the way in which music has featured in documentary films and programmes. The conventions of restrained use to cue mood and theme are explored, using examples and the recommendations of manuals. Across the varieties of documentary output, the article notes how the dominance of journalistic and observational formats has, for different reasons, tended to place music in the margins. Drawing on an example from the classic period of documentary film-making in Britain, it points towards a more expansive use of music in a complementary relationship with images. A number of general theoretical points about the specific properties of the documentary image and its relationship with music are raised and recent examples of successful innovation discussed. The article ends by suggesting that there is more scope for aesthetic development in music-image relations than has often been recognised and that some of the established inhibitions about mixing ‘fact’ with ‘emotion’ need to be reviewed.
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Kostina, Anastasia. "Hunting for Reality: An Interview with Marina Razbezhkina." Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2020): 21–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.73.3.21.
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Marina Razbezhkina is a well-known Russian documentary filmmaker, educator, and founder of the largest independent documentary school in the country. Her very original approach to documentary, which combines intimate proximity to the protagonist with raw observational aesthetics, revolutionized the Russian film landscape and became the trademark of her school. Her students most often work as a one-person crew with a lightweight hand-held camera shadowing their protagonists up close. This “hunt for reality,” as Razbezhkina terms the practice, usually results in deeply engaging observational documentaries that completely absorb the viewer into an unfamiliar reality. In this interview Razbezhkina talks about the beginnings of her career, explains the origins and the core of her filmmaking method, and discusses the changing role of documentary in the modern world.
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Raharjo, Catur Panggih. "PROSES KREATIF FILM DOKUMENTER BERSAMA LANSIA." IKONIK : Jurnal Seni dan Desain 3, no. 1 (February 1, 2021): 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.51804/ijsd.v3i1.861.
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Penciptaan ini bermula dari ketidakpuasan subjek dalam film dokumenter sebelumnya, sehingga memantik pencipta untuk membuat film dokumenter selanjutnya. Setelah proses yang cukup panjang akhirnya pencipta mengajak subjek untuk membuat film selanjutnya dengan konsep kolaboratif, artinya kami berdua bekerjasama untuk menghasilkan film selanjutnya. Film dokumenter kolaboratif ini menggunakan gaya observasional yang menekankan pada dialog antar subjek dan kenaturalan disetiap adegan dalam film. Secara garis besar proses kolaborasi antara kami berdua berhasil dengan baik, hanya ada beberapa kendala karena adanya pandemi covid 19 yang menyebabkan berkurangnya interaksi antara kami.This creation stems from the dissatisfaction of the subject in the previous documentary film, thus igniting the creator to make the next documentary. After a fairly long process the creator finally invited the subject to make the next film with a collaborative concept, meaning we both worked together to produce the next film. This collaborative documentary film uses an observational style that emphasizes dialogue between subjects and natural in every scene in the film. Broadly speaking, the collaboration process between the two of us succeeded well, there were only a few obstacles due to the covid pandemic 19 which led to reduced interaction between us.
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O‘Rawe, Des. "Ten Minutes For John Lennon." Film Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 64–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/fs.9.9.
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This essay interweaves an analysis of Raymond Depardons short documentary film, 10 minutes de silence pour John Lennon (1980), with some broader reflections on time, cultural history, and silence. Shot in a single take, the film records the expressions, movements, and reactions of some of 200,000 mourners who gathered in Central Park to commemorate Lennons life six days after his death in December, 1980. Despite its observational form and aesthetic reticence, 10 minutes de silence renders unexpected coincidences of colour, perspective, gesture, and noise, spontaneous formations and patterns that resonate beyond the films actual moment and journalistic raison dêtre.
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Dart, Jon, and Philip McDonald. "A Perfect Script? Manchester United’s Class of ’92." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 41, no. 2 (December 23, 2016): 118–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0193723516685272.
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The Class of ’92 is a documentary film featuring six Manchester United F.C. players who recount their time during a pivotal period for the club, English football and English society. The documentary claims to offer a commentary on Britain in the 1990s, but appears, without acknowledging the fact, to be a promotional vehicle to establish the six men as a brand labeled the Class of ’92 (CO92). Creating this brand necessarily involved presenting a selective account of their time and places with the film being little more than an advertisement, masquerading as an observational documentary. The film draws freely upon the symbolic capital held by the club and the city of Manchester and uses the Busby Babes/Munich chapter and the more recent “Madchester scene” to forge the Class of ’92 brand by editing out those elements that did not accord with this project. The article argues that a more complete representation of ’90s Britain, while disrupting the intended narrative, would acknowledge the significant structural and commercial changes experienced by the club, the sport, and the city in the last decade of the 20th century. We suggest that the Class of ’92 invites the viewer to consider how the documentary film genre can contribute to brand development and promotion.
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Keys, Wendy, and Barbara Pini. "Troubling representations of Black masculinity in the documentary film Raising Bertie." Cultural Studies Review 24, no. 2 (May 2, 2018): 97–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i2.6010.
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In this paper we undertake a critical reading of the documentary Raising Bertie (2016). Directed by Margaret Byrne, the film tells the story of three poor, young Black American males living in Bertie County. In the paratextual material associated with the film, Byrne demonstrates reflexivity about stereotyping, revealing she engaged authentically with participants over a period of six years. Further, she begins the film by signalling the critical importance of situating the boys’ lives in a long history of discrimination and disadvantage. However, this focus on context soon disappears, and an observational mode of filmmaking is engaged. As a result, the type of negative images of Black masculinity that have had considerable currency in popular culture are reproduced and overstated in the film. Raising Bertie’s images of Black males as violent and criminal, and as absent and passive, are not effectively embedded in any broader narratives of disadvantage. Despite the director’s intentions, the film risks positioning rural Black males as responsible for their own plight. Poverty is racialised and individualised. The problem the film presents becomes one of troublesome Black masculinity, rather than one of a racialised, economically and geographically unjust world.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Observational documentary film"
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Carta, Silvio. "Documentary film, observational style and postmodern anthopology in Sardinia : a visual anthropology." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3674/.
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This study explores issues of technique, methodology and style in ethnographic/documentary films, with a focus on Sardinia. How are cultural realities constructed in documentary and ethnographic films? In what ways do practical filmmaking strategies reflect wider epistemological questions and ethical concerns? The thesis examines the general stylistic principles that have guided the making of a substantial body of documentary films about Sardinia. Attention has been paid to a range of different methods used by a select number of documentary and ethnographic filmmakers, covering important theoretical points on the distinctive set of technical, aesthetic and ethical problems embodied in the epistemology of their filmmaking practice. The study concludes that scholars should look for a more balanced fusion between film as a multisensory medium of ideas and forms of ethnographic enquiry conducted through language. The nonverbal elements and visual imagery in ethnographic/documentary films suggest obliquely that a kind of knowledge expressed in the concrete case requires an acknowledgment of domains of experience that often elude written expression.
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Xu, Jiacheng 4159187. "Yi, Observational Documentary Aesthetics, and the Identity Politics of Transcultural Migrancy." VCU Scholars Compass, 2017. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4816.
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There is a moment in Edward Yang’s acclaimed film Yi Yi (2000) in which a young boy in a conversation with his father observes that he cannot see what his father sees and that his father cannot see what he sees, prompting two questions: “How can I know what you see?” and “Can we only know half of the truth?” Unable to provide adequate answers, his father instead offers his son a camera. Later in the film, the same boy presents his uncle with a picture he took of the back of his head. When asked why, the boy responds by saying, “You cannot see it yourself, so I’m helping you.” These two scenes in Yang’s film illustrate the spirit of the questions that guide the aesthetic approach I have taken in my own documentary project. My thesis is composed of two parts: a video project and a research paper, the former of which is a documentary entitled Yi. Named after its primary subject, the film explores the intersections of transnational migrancy and cultural identity through a series of interviews that are intercut with scenes of everyday life that are shot in an observational style. The research paper that follows will situate the project within a specific historical, conceptual, and aesthetic context, before delineating how the cinematic composition of my documentary engages with this framework.
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Lang, Ian William, and n/a. "Conditional Truths: Remapping Paths To Documentary 'Independence'." Griffith University. Queensland College of Art, 2003. http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/public/adt-QGU20031112.105737.
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(Synopsis to introductory statement): An introductory statement to five documentary films made by Ian Lang in Australia between 1981 and 1997 exemplifying a 'democratising' model of sustainable and ethical documentary film production. This document critically reflects on the production process of these films to accompany their submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Publication at Griffith University. It finds that a contemporary tendency towards 'post-industrial' conditions allows an observational film-maker to negotiate a critical inter-dependence rather than a romantically conceived 'independence' traditional to the genre. [Full thesis consists of introductory statement plus six DVD videodiscs.]
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Duiculescu, Beatrice Ioana. "Can resilient urban design support social resilience?" Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-22719.
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This research is a small part of a bigger field of research made before by other authorsregarding the humans in the urban public space. It has a small context compared to otherstudies, but a big impact inside the community. It aims at finding answers to questions thatother researchers asked before, but under different circumstances and they displayed them through different ways such as documentary films (The social life of small urban spaces 1980, How to live in a city 1964).After experiencing the city life of Malmö and some questions have been raised, the concept of resilience intersected with the interest of social public life in a neighbourhood. In order to have the theoretical framework to answer the research question, the thesis follows a literature review, where the concepts of resilience, urban resilience, resilient urban design and social resilience have been explored.Next, after exploring the city of Malmö, some case studies have been chosen and studiedthrough direct observation in different months starting with March and various times of theday. In the methodological approach section the methods are explained as well as a detailed presentation of the biggest tool used for this research: observational drawing. The tools used for the observation are field notes, observational drawings and photographs. The cases are spread throughout the city and are located in neighbourhoods with different urban tissues. The results reveal all the observational drawings made during the field visits and the field notes written. They show how people use the spaces in all three case studies depending on the weather or other external factors.The discussion reveals the complexity of the relation between concepts and the empiricaldata, following the initial aim of the research throughout the discussion. This thesiscontributes with important outcomes to the field of urban studies creating awareness about the urban context and its influence on people. The findings of this study show a diversity and creativity of users in using the public space.
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Baker, Jeremy Charles. "Observational Animation: An Exploration of Improvisation, Interactivity and Spontaneity in Animated Filmmaking." The Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1357315576.
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Teng, Eric Ju-chung. "First Encounter." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1993. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc501249/.
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The film is about a newly arrived Japanese student's initial period of adjustment at the University of North Texas. This observational documentary film follows the student and witnesses the student's first reactions to various social environments. The purpose of this creative thesis project was to depict the difficulties that international students encounter at the beginning of their stay in America. The initial goal of the video was to provide useful visual research material to people who are interested in the acculturation of foreign students. Because of its realistic character, the video can give its audiences a more immediate and vivid picture of foreign students than existing written literature. By giving an authentic portrait of the students' hardship and adjustments, the ultimate goal of this video was to increase the American people's appreciation of the difficulties encountered by foreign students who come to this country equipped with limited social assistance and resources. An accompanying production report describes the research process, the pre-production, production, and post-production stages.
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Ortlieb, Paulina Elizabeth. "The importance of counter-culture in art and life." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/5881.
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Punk rock provided not only a watershed of creativity, innovation and a do-it-yourself spirit to a culture saturated in the mainstream, it physically brought like-minded people together in a community, or rather extended family, which in today’s hyper-d.i.y. culture, is progressively declining. As early as the 1940s, theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer warned us about alienation in a society increasingly dependent on technology. By looking to punk, and other resilient and robust counter-cultures, perhaps we can find solutions to the pitfalls of the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1944).
My thesis, consisting of a feature-length documentary film and textual analysis, is a culmination of: ethnographic research into the punk scene in my own community; theoretical research into the sociology, ethnography and subculture theory; and my own subjectivity. My personal findings are presented to offer insight into punk philosophy and to spur discourse, rather than deliver an objective account or didactic reproach.Graduate
Books on the topic "Observational documentary film"
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Observations: Studies in New Zealand documentary. Wellington, N.Z: Victoria University Press, 2011.
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Pollacchi, Elena. Wang Bing's Filmmaking of the China Dream. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463721837.
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This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing's filmmaking across China’s marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned 'China Dream'. Wang Bing's cinema gives voice to the subaltern. Focusing on contemporary China, his work testifies to a set of issues dealing with inequality, labour, and migration. His internationally awarded documentaries are considered masterpieces with unique aesthetics that bear reference to global film masters. Therefore, this investigation goes beyond the divides between Western and non-Western film traditions and between fiction and documentary cinema. Each chapter takes a different articulation of space (spaces of labour, history, and memory) as its entry point, bringing together film and documentary studies, Chinese studies, and globalization studies. This volume benefits from the author's extensive conversations with Wang Bing and insider observations of film production and the film festival circuit.
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Kishore, Shweta. Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433068.001.0001.
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Independent documentary is enjoying a resurgence in post-reform India. But in contemporary cinema and media cultures, where ‘independent’ operates as an industry genre or critical category, how do we understand the significance of this mode of cultural production? Based on detailed onsite observation of documentary production, circulation practices and the analysis of film texts, this book identifies independence as a 'tactical practice’, contesting the normative definitions and functions assigned to culture, cultural production and producers in a neoliberal economic system. Focusing on selected filmmakers, the book establishes how they have reorganised the dominance of industrial media, technology and social relations to develop practices that build upon principles of de-economisation, artisanship and interdependence.
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Irving, Andrew, and Paul Henley. Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film. Manchester University Press, 2020.
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Irving, Andrew, and Paul Henley. Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film. Manchester University Press, 2020.
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Irving, Andrew, and Paul Henley. Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film. Manchester University Press, 2020.
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Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film. Manchester University Press, 2020.
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Krzych, Scott. Beyond Bias. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197551219.001.0001.
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“Bias” is a term that circulates frequently in the contemporary landscape of political media, a term intended to diagnose a failure when media outlets fail to maintain journalistic objectivity. Beyond Bias interrogates what would seem, at first glance, to be examples of utterly biased political media—contemporary conservative documentary films. However, rather than dismiss such cases of political representation as exemplars of ideological nonsense, reactionary propaganda, and so on, Beyond Bias locates in conservative media a mode of discourse central to contemporary democratic debate in the United States. Specifically, this book identifies conservative media as a mode of hysterical discourse. As the book makes clear, hysterical political discourse occurs when debate is simulated as a means to avoid a more substantive exchange. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories of hysteria and aesthetic politics, and likewise by placing conservative documentaries in the context of many concerns central to Documentary Studies (participation, observation, representation, the archive, etc.), Beyond Bias views conservative documentary, and conservative media and politics more generally, not as the biased excesses of the contemporary political landscape but rather as texts central to understanding the implicit, though sometimes affectively traumatic, antagonisms inevitable in democracy and constitutive of democratic debate.
Book chapters on the topic "Observational documentary film"
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Sharma, Aparna. "Constructing the Self, Constructing Others: David MacDougall’s Observational Films on Institutions for Children in India." In Documentary Films in India, 29–55. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137395443_2.
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Trencsényi, Klára, and Vlad Naumescu. "Migrant Cine-Eye: Storytelling in Documentary and Participatory Filmmaking." In IMISCOE Research Series, 117–40. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_7.
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AbstractThe so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ has bred a profusion of audiovisual accounts throughout the region, many of which aimed to give voice to hitherto voiceless, uprooted people. But as many of these ‘untold stories’ gain material expression as storylines, we are urged to consider the implications of yet another form of displacement: from the historical person to the film character, from personal stories to media representations. The growing interest into the migrant issue and visual representations of refugees have played an important role in the public construction of the ‘crisis’ but have also, paradoxically, obscured or silenced migrant voices. The authors of this paper, a documentary filmmaker (Trencsényi) and a social anthropologist (Naumescu) seek to explore narrative strategies and ethics of representation in European documentaries made after 2010 as well as their participatory filmmaking project developed in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis in Hungary. Having collaborated on several documentary films and filmmaking workshops, they approach this issue from the perspective of practitioners, offering a critical reflection as well as possible strategies for those aiming to produce audiovisual works in this field. The inclusion of refugees’ insight and their ways of constructing their own stories as well as their own observations on the receiving societies can open new possibilities for collaboration and creative engagement for social scientists and filmmakers preparing visual fieldnotes, ethnographic and documentary films as well as participatory projects.
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Baxendale, John, and Chris Pawling. "Representing the People: The Documentary Film Movement and Mass Observation in the Thirties." In Narrating the Thirties, 17–45. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1996. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230373235_2.
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Stuckey, G. Andrew. "Documentarization and Amplified Realism in Jia Zhangke’s Films." In Metacinema in Contemporary Chinese Film. Hong Kong University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888390816.003.0005.
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Documentary film in the PRC has become an important mode in the palate of Sixth Generation (or urban or independent) filmmaking. The recent prominence of documentary turns on the notion of indexicality and the capacity for film to present reality. Jia Zhangke, probably the most critically acclaimed of Sixth Generation filmmakers, in his film practice, though largely conforming to this long-take, observational documentary style, also brazenly deploys technologies such as nondiegetic music and CGI effects. On the face of it, these tactics may seem to undermine the indexical reality portrayed in Jia’s films, but on further consideration actually augment his historical project of capturing China’s contemporary moment.
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MacDougall, David. "Documentary and its doubles." In The looking machine, 157–89. Manchester University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526134097.003.0013.
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This chapter provides a critical overview of the history of documentary cinema, arguing that it gradually lost sight of its early inspiration in the cinema of the Lumière brothers, adopting many of the features of fiction film production and modelling itself increasingly on didactic texts and journalism. In the sound era, British documentary films made under the aegis of John Grierson, despite his celebration of the ‘actual’, turned towards mass education and an idealised vision of collective humanity, and away from recording actual events in human lives. Italian Neorealist fiction films and changes to camera technology in the post-war period inspired a return to these objectives, but this found little space in television, which remained firmly fixed on journalism, entertainment, and public issues. Reactions took many forms, including experimental documentaries, social advocacy, biography and autobiography, and films exploring the relationship of film to reality, as in the work of Jean Rouch and Errol Morris. The rise of observational films gave promise of a return to the more modest aim of giving audiences shared access to what the filmmaker had witnessed, despite the challenges of manipulative ‘reality’ television and designer-packaged documentaries. The essay refers to a host of influences and commentaries, including those of Edward Said, Bill Nichols, Dai Vaughan, Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, Colin Young, and Grierson himself.
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Lefèvre, Pascal. "From Contextualisation to Categorisation of Animated Documentaries." In Drawn from Life, 15–30. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694112.003.0002.
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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.
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MacDougall, David. "Observation in the cinema." In The looking machine, 119–28. Manchester University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526134097.003.0010.
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In this chapter the author notes that for some people ‘observation’ connotes an attitude of surveillance towards the subject. Despite this, the term is a useful summation of the original documentary idea, which was to show viewers as accurately as possible what the filmmaker had seen. ‘Observational cinema’ emerged as one of several closely related documentary approaches of the 1960s, with close ties to anthropology. Unlike other forms, it placed the filmmaker at the centre of the film as an investigator of on-going events, a position shared with the viewer. This approach was encouraged by the introduction of new, light-weight cameras and sound recorders and was inspired partly by Italian Neorealism and partly by live television. While often perceived as aspiring to detachment and scientific objectivity, it was in fact a highly authored form involving a close relationship between filmmaker and subject and representing the limited point of view of the individual observer. The author argues that while the long camera take is often regarded as the primary characteristic of observational cinema, its true marker is a commitment to the sustained witnessing of specific events. A further consequence of observational filmmaking is that it has stimulated reflection on what it means to observe.
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Tsika, Noah. "“Casualties of the Spirit”." In Traumatic Imprints, 169–213. University of California Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520297630.003.0006.
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Through its diverse documentary devices, John Huston’s Army Signal Corps film Let There Be Light (1946) helped both to crystalize and to catalyze representations of combat trauma in the military as well as in Hollywood, serving as a key (if somewhat occluded) mediator between the two institutions. But it was far from the only military-produced documentary of the period to grapple, in observational fashion, with the effects of combat trauma, recording various therapeutic methods and enjoying a broad nontheatrical exhibition. Its institutional and filmic contexts form the subject of this chapter.
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MacDonald, Scott. "Fred Wiseman at the Brattle Theater with Hospital, July 19, 2010." In The Sublimity of Document, 113–24. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190052126.003.0005.
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This interview is an edited version of a public discussion with filmmaker Fred Wiseman at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about his film, Hospital (1970). Wiseman discusses his filmmaking approach and his belief that shooting film footage is research, while the actual filmmaking is done in the editing. During the shooting of each of his features, Wiseman takes sound and directs his cinematographers. In his editing, he is more interested in presenting an experience of the places he films than in developing particular socio-political arguments. Wiseman has been remarkably prolific, making at least one feature film a year since Titicut Follies (1967). He is understood as the epitome of “fly-on-the-wall” observational cinema-verite documentary and has used his approach to explore a considerable panorama of American institutions—“institutions” in the broadest sense. Hospital remains among the most engaging of his films.
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Mandušić, Zdenko. "The Truth of Direct Observation: Andrei Rublev and the Documentary Style of Soviet Cinema in the 1960s." In ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, 85–101. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474437233.003.0006.
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This chapter discusses Tarkovsky’s appreciation of newsreel-documentary films in the context of the Soviet film discourse over new documentary style in the 1960s. As Mandušić demonstrates, the sixties’ cult of authenticity achieved through the documentary representation of reality was one of many ways for the Thaw cinema to counter late Stalinist movies notorious for their excessive mythologization. Against the backdrop of these debates, Tarkovsky devised his theory of documentary realism in his essay “Imprinted Time” (1967), which he practically implemented in Andrei Rublev (1966). Aimed to recreate the authentic experience of time and space rather accurately reconstruct the historical environment of medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev applied visual strategies – extended duration, stable or static frames, composition in depth – that constitutes his method of direct observation.