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In der Zeit des wirtschaftlichen Aufschwungs Deutschlands nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg waren die Wochenschauen im Vorprogramm jeder Kinovorstellung eine bedeutende Informationsquelle. Mit eindrucksvollen Bildern auf einer großen Leinwand – begleitet von gesprochenem Kommentar, Musik und Geräusch – gaben sie Orientierung und prägten die Erinnerung. In zahlreichen dokumentarischen Film- und Fernsehformaten werden bis heute einzelne Bilder oder kurze Sequenzen aus der Kino-Wochenschau als historische Belege, als Illustrationen oder zur Dramatisierung verwendet. Die außergewöhnlichen Prinzipien der Informationsvermittlung kommen dabei jedoch nicht mehr zur Geltung. Um das Publikum zu erreichen, war damals eine Mischung aus informativen Berichten und unterhaltenden Beiträgen unerlässlich. Die in diesem Buch vorgenommenen Fallanalysen spiegeln elementare Themenbereiche der Zeit des wirtschaftlichen Aufschwungs beider deutscher Staaten (1950-1965) wider. Neben den Prinzipien der audiovisuellenGestaltung wird auch die zentrale Vermittlungsstrategie herausgearbeitet. Transmediale und transnationale Aspekte, die hierbei eine Rolle spielen, weisen die Wochenschau als Teil eines (internationalen) Mediensystems aus.

Animating Truth examines the rise of animated documentary in the 21st century, and addresses how non-photorealistic animation is increasingly used to depict and shape reality.

Das Bild, das sich Lesende privat und professionell von Schriftsteller•innen und deren Poesie und Poetik machen, wird seit dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert ganz erheblich von Filmen geprägt. Dokumentationen und halb-fiktionale Biopics schreiben an der Literaturgeschichte mit - von der literaturwissenschaftlichen Forschung werden sie bisher jedoch nicht zur Kenntnis genommen. Die Beiträger•innen richten daher erstmals den Fokus auf die Theorie und Geschichte dieses intermedialen Genres. Diskutiert werden die Inszenierungstechniken und Narrative verfilmter Autorschaft an zahlreichen Beispielen: vom Stummfilm bis in die Gegenwart, von Friedrich Schiller bis Felicitas Hoppe.

In the wake of the explosion in the production of essay films over the last twenty-five years and its subsequent theorization in scholarly literature, this volume seeks to historicize these intertwined developments within the'long duree'of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Beyond the Essay Film seeks to not only acknowledge the influential predecessors of this - in the view of many critics - most interesting type of contemporary filmmaking - but also to speculate about its possible transformation as we move forward into the uncharted waters of the twenty-first - digital -century. Focusing on three specific axes that underpin and shape the articulation of the essay film as a specific cultural form - subjectivity, textuality and technology - this book explores how changes along and across these dimensions affect historical shifts within essay film practice and its relation to other types of cinema and neighbouring art forms.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove—over 220 hours—of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-à-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Since publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

Open Space New Media Documentary examines an emerging and significant area of documentary practice in the twenty-first century: community-based new media documentary projects that move across platforms and utilize participatory modalities. The book offers an innovative theorization of these collaborative and collective new media practices, which the authors term'open space,'gesturing towards a more contextual critical nexus of technology, form, histories, community, convenings, collaborations, and mobilities. It looks at a variety of low cost, sustainable and scalable documentary projects from across the globe, where new technologies meet places and people in Argentina, Canada, India, Indonesia, Peru, South Africa, Ukraine, and the USA.

Endangered life is often used to justify humanitarian media intervention, but what if suffering humanity is both the fuel and outcome of such media representations? Pooja Rangan argues that this vicious circle is the result of immediation, a prevailing documentary ethos that seeks to render human suffering urgent and immediate at all costs. Rangan interrogates this ethos in films seeking to “give a voice to the voiceless,” an established method of validating the humanity of marginalized subjects, including children, refugees, autistics, and animals. She focuses on multiple examples of documentary subjects being invited to demonstrate their humanity: photography workshops for the children of sex workers in Calcutta; live eyewitness reporting by Hurricane Katrina survivors; attempts to facilitate speech in nonverbal autistics; and painting lessons for elephants. These subjects are obliged to represent themselves using immediations—tropes that reinforce their status as the “other” and reproduce definitions of the human that exclude non-normative modes of thinking, being, and doing. To counter these effects, Rangan calls for an approach to media that aims not to humanize but to realize the full, radical potential of giving the camera to the other.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.Filming the End of the Holocaust considers how the US Government commissioned the US Signal Corps and other filmmakers to document the horrors of the concentration camps during the April-May 1945 liberation. The evidence of the Nazis'genocidal actions amassed in these films, some of them made by Hollywood luminaries such as John Ford and Billy Wilder, would go on to have a major impact at the Nuremberg Trials; they helped to indict Nazi officials as the judges witnessed scenes of torture, human experimentation and extermination of Jews and non-Jews in the gas chambers and crematoria. These films, some produced by the Soviets, were integral to the war crime trials that followed the Holocaust and the Second World War, and this book provides a thorough, close analysis of the footage in these films and their historical significance.Using research carried out at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the US National Archives and the film collection at the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, this book explores the rationale for filming the atrocities and their use in the subsequent trials of Nazi officials in greater detail than anything previously published. Including an extensive bibliography and filmography, Filming the End of the Holocaust is an important text for scholars and students of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Providing a unique collection of perspectives on the persistence of documentary as a vital and dynamic media form within a digital world, New Documentary Ecologies traces this form through new opportunities of creating media, new platforms of distribution and new ways for audiences to engage with the real.

David MacDougall is a pivotal figure in the development of ethnographic cinema and visual anthropology. As a filmmaker, he has directed in Africa, Australia, India, and Europe. His prize-winning films (many made jointly with his wife, Judith MacDougall) include The Wedding Camels, Lorang's Way, To Live with Herds, A Wife among Wives, Takeover, PhotoWallahs, and Tempus de Baristas. As a theorist, he articulates central issues in the relation of film to anthropology, and is one of the few documentary filmmakers who writes extensively on these concerns. The essays collected here address, for instance, the difference between films and written texts and between the position of the filmmaker and that of the anthropological writer.In fact, these works provide an overview of the history of visual anthropology, as well as commentaries on specific subjects, such as point-of-view and subjectivity, reflexivity, the use of subtitles, and the role of the cinema subject. Refreshingly free of jargon, each piece belongs very much to the tradition of the essay in its personal engagement with exploring difficult issues. The author ultimately disputes the view that ethnographic filmmaking is merely a visual form of anthropology, maintaining instead that it is a radical anthropological practice, which challenges many of the basic assumptions of the discipline of anthropology itself. Although influential among filmmakers and critics, some of these essays were published in small journals and have been until now difficult to find. The three longest pieces, including the title essay, are new.