Documenting Cityscapes

While film studies has traditionally treated the presence of the city in film as an urban text operating inside of a cinematic one, this approach has recently evolved into the study of cinema as a technology of place. From this perspective, Documenting Cityscapes explores the way the city has been depicted by nonfiction filmmakers since the late 1970s, paying particular attention to three aesthetic tendencies: documentary landscaping, urban self-portraits, and metafilmic strategies. Through the formal analysis of fifteen works from six different countries, this volume investigates how the rise of subjectivity has helped to develop a kind of gaze that is closer to citizens than to the institutions and corporations responsible for recent major transformations. Documenting Cityscapes therefore reveals the extent to which cinema has become an agent of urban change, in which certain films not only challenge the most controversial policies of late capitalism but also are able to produce spatiality themselves.

"The Handbook of Field Recording" is the essential book by author Frank Dorritie on the topic. Coming complete with an audio CD, this book will teach you how to make good field recordings in any situation. Getting a good recording in the field is still one of the most challenging tasks in the recording industry. From environmental factors and room acoustics to equipment problems, field recording can be filled with potential roadblocks. "The Handbook of Field Recording" provides you with the knowledge you need to solve these problems and excel at making the best recording possible of any subject at any location. In clear terms, the book explains how to record documentary audio, film sound, underwater sounds, and much more. Veteran music and recording educator Frank Dorritie, author of the popular MixBooks title "Essentials of Music for Audio Professionals," brings his formidable recording experience to light in "The Handbook of Field Recording." This is an exciting, authoritative title that will demystify the challenging process of recording subjects outside of the studio.

Images have become an integral part of the political regulation of migration: they help produce categories of legality versus illegality, foster stereotypes, and mobilize political convictions. Yet how are we to understand the relationship between these images and the political in the discourse surrounding migration? How can we, as anthropologists, migration scholars, or documentary filmmakers visually represent people who are excluded from political representation? And how can such visual representations gain political momentum? This volume not only considers the images that circulate with reference to migrants or draw attention to those that accompany, show, or conceal them. The book explores the phenomena of migration with the help of images. It offers an in-depth analysis of the documentary approaches of Ursula Biemann, Renzo Martens, Bouchra Khalili, Silvain George, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Iorio, Alex Rivera, and Rania Stepha, which evoke the particularities of migrant lifeworlds and examine urgent questions regarding the interrelations between politics and poetics, mobility and mediation, and the ethics of probability and possibility. The author also discusses his own cinematic practice in the making of Tell Me When (2011), A Tale of Two Islands (2012), and Intimate Distance (2015), a trilogy of films that explore the potential to communicate the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the experience of migration.

This book explores the unique phenomenon of pictorialism and its connection with other arts in film and media studies. Pictorialism is motivated by the commitment to develop and increase the function and effectiveness of images, sounds, and performances that aesthetically formulate, translate, and change the effects of contemporary cinema to higher dimensions and qualities of art. The book’s main focus is when pictorialism as such is the major aesthetic convention used in filmmaking practice, and when pictorialism itself forms the key element of the narrative, considering a number of theoretical and practical issues of filmic narration, including: What are the main challenges of pictorial communication? How is pictorialism used in films? How far is the “pictorial image” a combination of the bodily performance of the characters, the surrounding landscape, and the evocative use of the soundscape? More generally, what is the state of image studies today? The first part of this book deals with the conventions of pictorialist connections in architecture, painting and photography, and their influences on cinematic representations and on film studies and film theory. The films analysed here combine various styles, but the focus is tracking down pictorialism’s influences through a large spectre of matters. The next section explores pictorialism’s development in Hollywood cinema, in European Cinema, in avant-garde film, and in documentary. Finally, the book concludes with three large sections devoted to the developers of modern pictorialist cinema, namely Theo Angelopoulos, Aki Kaurismäki and Béla Tarr. As such, this study offers a way to understand the main ideas, subjects and stylisation of pictorialism in cinema, to explore the main ingredients of this phenomenon, and to focus on narratives that are in the service of pictorial matters.

This book is an introduction to the art and craft of documentary filmmaking with a focus on ethics and impact from development through distribution. Author Shannon Walsh explores point-of-view storytelling, writing for nonfiction, and the art of social change documentary. Offering an overview of the documentary filmmaking process – from idea to pitch to a final film and impact campaign – this book provides nonfiction filmmakers with the methods required to find a voice, style, and cinematic approach to documentary filmmaking. Key areas covered include definition of styles and genres of documentary film; project development and proposal writing; basic elements of documentary storytelling such as interview techniques, vérité filming, use of archives, stills, and point of view; the process of preparing and delivering a project pitch; pre-production; and finding the necessary elements to tell a story cinematically. With a specific focus on ethics and character-driven storytelling, Walsh shares her own personal insights on talking to strangers and the importance of empathetic listening skills and intuition and provides useful worksheets that filmmakers can use for their own projects. This book is ideal for both students of documentary filmmaking and aspiring documentary filmmakers who are interested in creating ethical and impactful films.

Now more than ever, the idea of Europe as grounded in a shared cultural heritage cannot be taken for granted. For all its diversity, complexity and internal tensions, Europe remains a powerful economic and political superstate. But it is one in crisis, where the postwar social democratic consensus has collapsed, the failings of neoliberalism have led to widespread austerity, and extremism, xenophobia and racism are on the rise. This collection of original essays considers filmmakers' engagements with pressing issues of the moment. Taking a long view of the crisis and considering geopolitical changes that took place towards the end of the 20th century, this book examines European cinema's response to the economic, political and social crises that afflict Europe in the present.

Frederick Wiseman is America’s foremost chronicler of public institutions. His films have focused on city, state, and local governments; hospitals; asylums; creative organizations and museums; schools; libraries; and more. In recent years, Wiseman’s work has reached a new level of popularity, with films such as In Jackson Heights (2015), Monrovia, Indiana (2018), and City Hall (2020) all earning widespread acclaim. Voyages of Discovery is the definitive account of Wiseman’s career, offering a comprehensive analysis of the work of the leading documentary filmmaker in the United States. In this updated edition, Barry Keith Grant adds new material exploring the documentarian’s works since the 1990s, discussing every film in Wiseman’s remarkable sixty-year career. He examines the core concerns running across Wiseman’s work from the early films, which focus on documenting institutional failure, through an expanding interest in cultural institutions and ideology, to a blossoming embrace of democracy in later films. He pays particular attention to Wiseman’s strategies for involving and implicating the spectator in the institutional processes the films document. Grant also places Wiseman within the history of the documentary and other traditions of American art and considers the relationship between documentary film and authorship. Voyages of Discovery is an important book for anyone interested in Wiseman’s work or how documentary film can reveal the fabric of our shared civic life.