BiblioVault - Books about Renov, Michael

Cinema’s Alchemist

The Films of Péter Forgács

Bill Nichols

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Péter Forgács, based in Budapest, is best known for his award-winning films built on home movies from the 1930s to the 1960s that document ordinary lives soon to intersect with offscreen historical events. Cinema’s Alchemist offers a sustained exploration of the imagination and skill with which Forgács reshapes such film footage, originally intended for private and personal viewing, into extraordinary films dedicated to remembering the past in ways that matter for our future.

Contributors: Whitney Davis, U of California, Berkeley; László F. Földényi, U of Theatre, Film and Television, Budapest; Marsha Kinder, U of Southern California; Tamás Korányi; Scott MacDonald, Hamilton College; Tyrus Miller, U of California, Santa Cruz; Roger Odin, U of Paris III Sorbonne–Nouvelle; Catherine Portuges, U of Massachusetts Amherst; Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan U; Kaja Silverman, U of Pennsylvania; Ernst van Alphen, Leiden U, the Netherlands; Malin Wahlberg, Stockholm U.

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Collecting Visible Evidence

Jane Gaines

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

From Hanoi to Hollywood

The Vietnam War in American Film

Dittmar, Linda

Rutgers University Press, 1990

This volume is about power. It is about the power to make war and to destroy lives. It is also about another kind of power-the power to make images that may distort, displace, and destroy knowledge of the times in which those lives were lived. Many of the nineteen essays gathered in this volume are about the interrelationships between these two types of power. They demonstrate, as well, yet another type of power, the power of critical thinking to challenge dangerous myths and to confront prevailing ideologies.

The title of this anthology calls attention to the process whereby aspects of the Vietnam War have been appropriated by the American cultural industry. Probing the large body of emotion-laden, controversial films, From Hanoi to Hollywood is concerned with the retelling of history and the retrospection that such a process involves. In this anthology, an awareness of film as a cultural artifact that molds beliefs and guides action is emphasized, an awareness that the contributors bring to a variety of films. Their essays span over one hundred documentary and fiction films, and include in-depth analyses of major commercial films, ranging from Apocalypse Now to Platoon, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Full Metal Jacket, and documentaries from In the Year of the Pig to Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam.

The essays in this volume deal with representations of the Vietnam war in documentary film and television reporting, examining the ways the power of film is used to deliver political messages. There are surprises here, new readings, and important insights on the ways we as a society have attempted to come to terms with the experiences of the Vietnam era. The book also contains two appendixes-a detailed chronology charting the relationship between major historical events and the release of American war films from 1954 through 1988, and a filmography listing information on over four hundred American and foreign films about the Vietnam War.

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Resolutions

Contemporary Video Practices

Michael Renov

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Explores the state of the art, practice, and theory of video. Here is, by far, the best, boldest, and most thorough account to date of video art and activism, practice and theory. The long-awaited follow-up to a project conducted by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), this volume comprises original articles by many of the most interesting video artists, filmmakers, and critical theorists writing today. Their subjects, from video pedagogy to emerging technologies, are many and varied and together constitute a clear and complete picture of the state of the medium. Constructed like an inquiry into newly forming video practice, the collection at once interweaves and questions a series of relationships among politics, popular culture, artistic intervention, and social practices of the media. The often provocative essays, on topics ranging from video porn to Geraldo Rivera to lesbian representation to the politics of video memory, contribute significantly to a much-needed reconceptualization of the electronic medium. "Resolutions is a collection of 24 essays that span the broad realm of video today, considering practices both within and outside the territory of fine art." Guggenheim Magazine "This volume provides valuable insight into the innovative practices which are helping to shape video making. If you find yourself wondering about the art of video, the state of the medium, where it's all going, you'll find this collection of essays both informative and thought provoking." Journal of Educational Media "This work offers an up-to-date account of video art and activism, practice and theory. The work focuses on the technical political, social and esthetic dimension of the medium, interweaving description of past events and projects with state-of-the-art consideration of technologies and direction of change. This work is very likely to become the essential text to begin to understand this widely transitional art style. Highly recommended." The Reader's Review Contributors: Rosanna Albertini, Raymond Bellour, John Belton, Gregg Bordowitz, Ron Burnett, Jacques Derrida, Sara Diamond, Monica Frota, Bill Horrigan, David E. James, Laura Kipnis, Tetsuo Kogawa, Judith Mayne, James Moran, Michael Nash, Chon Noriega, BÃ©rÃ©nice Reynaud, Marlon Riggs; Marita Sturken, Christine Tamblyn, Maureen Turim, and Patricia Zimmermann. Michael Renov is professor of critical studies in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Hollywood's Wartime Woman: Representation and Ideology (1988), and the editor of Theorizing Documentary (1993). Erika Suderburg is a video artist and associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Riverside.

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Subject Of Documentary

Michael Renov

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

The documentary, a genre as old as cinema itself, has traditionally aspired to objectivity. Whether making ethnographic, propagandistic, or educational films, documentarians have pointed the camera outward, drawing as little attention to themselves as possible. In recent decades, however, a new kind of documentary has emerged in which the filmmaker has become the subject of the work. Whether chronicling family history, sexual identity, or a personal or social world, this new generation of nonfiction filmmakers has defiantly embraced autobiography. In The Subject of Documentary, Michael Renov focuses on how documentary filmmaking has become an important means for both examining and constructing selfhood. By looking at key figures in documentary filmmaking as well as noncanonical video art and avant-garde artists, Renov broadens the definition of what counts as documentary, and explores the intersection of the personal and political, considering how memory can create a way into asking troubling questions about identity, oppression, and resiliency. Offering historical context for the explosion of personal nonfiction filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, Renov analyzes films in which the subjectivity of the filmmaker is expressly defined in relation to political struggle or historical trauma, from Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool to Jonas Mekas's Lost, Lost, Lost. And, looking beyond the traditional documentary, Renov contemplates such nontraditional modes of autobiographical practice as the essay film, the video confession, and the personal Web page.Unique in its attention to diverse expressions of personal nonfiction filmmaking, The Subject of Documentary forges a new understanding of the heightened role and function of subjectivity in contemporary documentary practice.Michael Renov is professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He is the editor of Theorizing Documentary and the coeditor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (Minnesota, 1996) and Collecting Visible Evidence (Minnesota, 1999).

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