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A Companion to Documentary Film History

(book in English)

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Edited by Joshua Malitsky

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Keywords: documentary, history of cinema
Publishing Date: 2021
Publisher: Wiley Blackwell
Collection: (no collection)
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 544 pages • 174.63 €
7 ¼ x 11 inches (18.5 x 28 cm)
Also available as an eBook.

ISBN

978-1-119-11624-0

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Book Presentation:
This volume offers a new and expanded history of the documentary form across a range of times and contexts, featuring original essays by leading historians in the field

In a contemporary media culture suffused with competing truth claims, documentary media have become one of the most significant means through which we think in depth about the past. The most rigorous collection of essays on nonfiction film and media history and historiography currently available, A Companion to Documentary Film History offers an in-depth, global examination of central historical issues and approaches in documentary, and of documentary's engagement with historical and contemporary topics, debates, and themes.

The Companion's twenty original essays by prominent nonfiction film and media historians challenge prevalent conceptions of what documentary is and was, and explore its growth, development, and function over time. The authors provide fresh insights on the mode's reception, geographies, authorship, multimedia contexts, and movements, and address documentary's many aesthetic, industrial, historiographical, and social dimensions. This authoritative volume:

Offers both historical specificity and conceptual flexibility in approaching nonfiction and documentary media
Explores documentary's multiple, complex geographic and geopolitical frameworks
Covers a diversity of national and historical contexts, including Revolution-era Soviet Union, post-World War Two Canada and Europe, and contemporary China
Establishes new connections and interpretive contexts for key individual films and film movements, using new primary sources
Interrogates established assumptions about documentary authorship, audiences, and documentary's historical connection to other media practices.
A Companion to Documentary Film History is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses covering documentary or nonfiction film and media, an excellent supplement for courses on national or regional media histories, and an important new resource for all film and media studies scholars, particularly those in nonfiction media.

Book Presentation:
A Companion to Documentary Film History asks us to reflect on the ways we write histories of and through documentary. Consisting of 20 original essays by the field’s leading scholars, the volume is critically reflexive and highly informative. Attending to both established approaches and theoretically-informed methodological shifts, this fabulous book is sure to become a touchstone for the field. --Charles Musser, Yale University

The book’s rather dry title could well read, “Generative Perspectives on Documentary Film History.” That is, anyone interested in non-fiction media, especially scholars in related areas, will find exciting new ways to think about the media they use, write about, and perhaps make. One of the book’s major delights is its precise summary of so much scholarship about documentary, and in a broader sense about facticity itself. An epistemological treat. --Julia Lesage, University of Oregon

Joshua Malitsky’s A Companion to Documentary Film History is a remarkable achievement. Together with his four section editors, Malitsky has compiled a book which covers all key aspects of documentary history, from early cinema to the Arab spring and from Europe to the Americas, Africa and Asia. The result is an introduction which is comprehensive in scope and penetrating in depth. At the same time, it is an anthology of the best work currently available on the subject – a real pleasure to read. -- Vinzenz Hediger, professor of cinema studies, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main

“An utterly dynamic approach to the most necessary, engaged, and impactful form of cinema we have. These essays cast documentary history as aesthetically charged, politically crucial, and culturally vivid, showing us that so-called non-fiction films have persistently reshaped everyday, institutional, and exceptional spaces. They have animated local and global networks, crosspollinated with art movements and new technologies, charging film makers and film viewers alike with the imperatives to see, listen, think, feel, and act. This book captures these energies and presents them here in lucid, compelling prose.” --Haidee Wasson, Concordia University

About the Author:
Joshua Malitsky is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Director of the Center for Documentary Research and Practice at Indiana University. He works on a range of topics related to documentary and other nonfiction media genres and has published a number of articles on documentary history and theory including topics such as the relationship between documentary and nation-building, documentary and science, documentary studies and linguistic anthropology, and the sports documentary. He is the author of Post-Revolution Non-Fiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations.

See the publisher website: Wiley Blackwell

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