Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media

by Jim Leach, Bill Nichols (Foreword), William Rothman (Contributor)

Documenting the Documentary features essays by 27 film scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay focuses on one or two important documentaries, engaging in questions surrounding ethics, ideology, politics, power, race, gender, and representation-but always in terms of how they arise out of or are involved in the reading of specific documentaries as particular textual constructions.

By closely reading documentaries as rich visual works, this anthology fills a void in the critical writing on documentaries, which tends to privilege production over aesthetic pleasure.

As we increasingly perceive and comprehend the world through visual media, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

About the author

Jim Leach is professor emeritus in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University. He is the author of books on filmmakers Alain Tanner and Claude Jutra, as well as the author of British Film and Film in Canada. He has also published a monograph on Doctor Who (Wayne State University Press, 2009), co-edited a volume on Canadian documentary films, and developed a Canadian edition of an introductory film studies textbook.

Reviews

[Sarah Brienza · Rating 4 out of 5]

had to read for class. some part were more interesting than others.

[faerynde · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Charlie Keil's American Documentary Finds Its Voice: Persuasion and Expression in The Plow
That Broke the Plains and The City in this book. Unfortunately this is the only part I could read. Hopefully I'll get around to reading the whole book one day.

Second Review

I read “It Was an Atrocious Film” from this book and it was an atrocious film (Blood of the Beasts by Franju) and I likes this article too. I hope to read more from this book.

[LSC-University Park SLRC]

Read it through Lone Star College's EBSCO Ebook Collection.