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This paper centres on Bogdan Žižić’s documentary films, aiming at providing arguments, on the basis of the number and quality of Žižić’s documentaries, for the claim that Žižić was primarily a documentary film author and only secondarily a feature-length film author. Reviewing films, the author of the paper establishes a thematic diversity of Žižić’s documentaries, ranging from intimist films about artists and people with health problems, emphasising the intimate even when tackling social topics, to strongly socially engaged films. Furthermore, stylistic diversity of his documentary films is described, from a more direct approach to reality inspired by cinéma vérité and direct cinema to the more indirect relationship to the reality through narrator’s speech, preparedness, symbolism, subjective frames, stylizations and philosophical discourse and a frequently present leitmotif pro- cedure. Žižić’s documentary films Jasenovac (1966), Praise to the Hand (1968), Foreign Worker (1977), One Life (1985) and Damnatio memoriae (2000) are analysed in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centres on Bogdan Žižić’s documentary films, aiming at providing arguments, on the basis of the number and quality of Žižić’s documentaries, for the claim that Žižić was primarily a documentary film author and only secondarily a feature-length film author. Reviewing films, the author of the paper establishes a thematic diversity of Žižić’s documentaries, ranging from intimist films about artists and people with health problems, emphasising the intimate even when tackling social topics, to strongly socially enaged films. Furthermore, stylistic diversity of his documentary films is described, from a more direct approach to reality inspired by cinéma vérité and direct cinema to the more indirect relationship to the reality through narrator’s speech, preparedness, symbolism, subjective frames, stylizations and philosophical discourse and a frequently present leitmotif pro- cedure. Žižić’s documentary films Jasenovac (1966), Praise to the Hand (1968), Foreign Worker (1977), One Life (1985) and Damnatio memoriae (2000) are ana- lysed in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we are going to discuss documentary films from the period of the Slovak New Wave. We are going to present documentary films by the representatives of the "first wave", a generation of Slovak filmmakers who graduated from the Prague FAMU in the first decade of its existence and who later participated in the formation of the Slovak new wave - Ján Kadár and Štefan Uher. Afterwards, we are going to discuss the representatives of the later generation who brought the entire Czechoslovak New Wave to its peak and who eventually even surpassed it - Dušan Hanák and Juraj Jakubisko. We are going to try to follow the formation and the development of the Slovak New Wave from the first indications of its beginnings, placing an emphasis on the most important documentary films by aforementioned filmmakers in this period. However, in order to get a full picture of the new wave documentary films, it is going to be necessary to partially discuss the period prior to its emergence as well as the period of its repercussions in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tackles new tendencies in contemporary documentary film, particularly reflexive and performative documentary film. Recent documentary films deconstruct the myth of documentary film authenticity and credibility, at the same time inviting the spectator to become aware of the practices and conventions by way of which the myth came to life. Contemporary documentary films are self-referential, metacinematic and transparent and they clearly show the relationship between the filmmaker and the filmed subjects as well as the mere process of creating film text. Performative documentary films do not rule out some of the traditional postulates on which this type of film is based: they do not present the existing reality, which is one of the fundamental documentary film postulates, but they deconstruct the myth of objective presentation, making room for subjectivity and polyphony and revealing reality manipulation mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]